Back in 2011 Google introduced what they called iGoogle – The personalized google page. The idea was that you could build your own “start-page” around google by adding so-called gadgets to the page.

Gadgets was basically small  web-programs that ran in a limited box on the page. They could be note-areas, link collections, and much much more – even games.

I was one of the early adopters and figured that I wanted to create a few gadgets of my own. I initially did one to show your links from the service del.icio.us. It was pretty simple but did fetch fav-icons etc for the links (a pretty new thing at that time).

I soon realized that I wanted to add some games as well. I am by far no games developer but I know how to integrate things and so I asked Paul Neave if I could integrate his flash based Pacman game in my iGoogle gadget. He said yes and soon after I had created one of the first games on iGoogle. After some time the game became so popular that even Google contacted me. They wanted to show it off in one of their IO events – a pretty big deal for a developer like me. The popularity reached a point where the game for a long times had between 50 million and 175 million visitors each month – thats way more than most of the popular sites in Denmark where I live and generated so much traffic that my webhost at that time decided to shut down my website and I had to move to my own servers with much more traffic included.

More games came after that but none of them ever got as popular as Pacman.

I have added sites for most of the games as iGoogle was shut down in 2014.