Remember Pacman and Space Invaders? Now imagine playing them inside Microsoft Excel! I stumbled upon these two gems called Pacelman (or ExcelPacman) and Cellvader (or ExcelInvader). They’re not new games, just clever recreations using Excel’s cells and macros.
They reportedly work on Excel 97 and 2000, but I tested them on Excel 2000 with macros enabled and they worked fine. The downloads were on the author’s page, but the links are now inactive. Still, it’s amazing to see how someone turned a spreadsheet into a retro arcade!
If you have an old copy of Excel, give it a shot. Just remember to enable macros. Let me know if you get them running!
lol, that’s weird but cool! How do you even do that? I can’t even make a graph in Excel, let alone a whole game. Must be some crazy scripting. I’d love to see it in action.
I tried them in Excel 2003 and they worked perfectly. If you zoom in, you can see they colored individual cells to make the graphics, and used scripts to move the colors around.
It must have taken ages to get everything lined up right. Pretty impressive for a spreadsheet!
Waste of time if you ask me. I mean, it’s cool that it’s possible, but I’d never have the patience to do something that meticulous. Just seems like a lot of work for a simple game.
I actually tried building a simple Pong clone in Excel a while back, and it’s a great way to learn VBA event handling and cell manipulation. The key trick is using the Worksheet_SelectionChange event to update the game state and repaint cells. For anyone curious, I’d recommend starting with a basic snake game—it’s simpler than Pacman but teaches the same principles. Has anyone here attempted to port these to newer Excel versions or add features like sound effects via the Beep function?
