Programmer Marcin Wichary, who wrote Google Pac-Man with graphics artist Ryan Germick, said he kept nearly all of the original's gameplay parameters such as ghost movement, player/ghost speeds and energizer timing. Help came from others familiar with the coin-op's source code.

"We had a lot of help from (manufacturer) Namco Bandai, we did a lot of 'research' using a Pac-Man machine we actually have at Google, and we looked at (The Pac-Man Dossier)," wrote Wichary in an e-mail interview, the latter referring to a Web document by Jamey Pittman widely considered the definitive analysis of the original's inner workings. "Hard to tell exactly what goes where, but all three sources were crucial."