Jul 19, 2011 12:46 GMT  ·  By

The World’s Biggest PAC-MAN Gobbling Ghosts contest will undoubtedly add to the momentum of the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN, an innovative gaming experience built specifically for Internet Explorer 9. With well in excess of 1 billion dots already eaten by players in the game, the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN is on its way to the next billion, and on the way there, Microsoft is inviting Pac-Man fans to enter the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN Gobbling Ghosts challenge.

Official rules for the contest are yet to be revealed, by the company pointed to the BeautyOfTheWeb.com site for the location where the terms and conditions will be posted.

“Of course, the only thing cooler than one billion Pac-Dots eaten is… two billion! In order to reward the die-hard WBPM players and introduce the game to millions more, we are kicking-off the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN Gobbling Ghosts contest. Grand Prize is a PAC-MAN Arcade Party machine pic with runner-ups winning limited-edition World’s Biggest PAC-MAN t-shirts!” noted Microsoft’s Carter Rabasa.

In order to participate in the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN Gobbling Ghosts contest users will need Internet Explorer 9. The software giant launched IE9 ahead of MIX11 where it presented the WorldsBiggestPacMan.com, a game developed by NAMCO BANDAI Games America.

Rabasa explained that after installing IE9, users also have to “pin WorldsBiggestPacMan.com to [the] Windows 7 taskbar. Gobble as many ghosts as [they] can! Right-click on the WBPM icon on [their] taskbar and take a screen-shot of “Ghosts Eaten” score. Enter the screen-shot in the contest by sending it to @IE on Twitter with the hashtag #worldsbiggestpacman.”

According to Microsoft, users running IE9 spend on average some 37% more time on the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN game site compared to customers running other browsers.

The company stressed on numerous occasions that pinning websites to the Windows 7 Taskbar is equivalent with a boost in user loyalty, including an increase in the amount of time they spend on the site.

Although it was created for IE9, the World’s Biggest PAC-MAN is an example of HTML5 at work, and as such it also works in other browsers that support the standard, although users can enjoy the incredible taskbar pinning feature only with Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7.

“It was an instant, viral phenomenon and in its first week over 242 million PAC-DOTS were eaten, 2.2 million mazes were played and over 10 thousand new mazes were created. WBPM caught the imagination of PAC-MAN fans all over the world and soon a massive and sprawling universe of interlocking mazes had been built,” Rabasa added.

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Platform Preview 1 (PP1) is available for download here.

Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.