Gobble. Gobble. Gobble. Maybe that was the sound of dollars flowing out of the economy last Friday.

Google's Pac-Man stunt -- in which the search giant replaced its traditional search box logo with one featuring the classic arcade game -- may have cost tens of millions of dollars. That's the word from RescueTime, the Seattle startup which says the Pac-Man game led users to spend an additional 36 seconds on Google.com last Friday. And, as they say, time equals money.

Those additional seconds on Google's home page led to 4.8 million hours of wasted time and an estimated lost wage tally of $120 million, according to a detailed analysis by RescueTime's Tony Wright.

The Seattle entrepreneur's blog post is starting to get some attention, including prominent links on Hacker News and The New York Times.

The economic costs of such a stunt are really kind of staggering when you think about it.

"For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time," Wright noted in his post. "Imagine what you could build with that army of man power."

The Christian Science Monitor picked up on the lost productivity issue last week in a story titled: "Google's Pac-Man 30th Anniversary: Insert Coin to Destroy Office Productivity."

As we reported last week, Wright is stepping down from CEO duties at RescueTime to pursue other opportunities. No word yet on whether he plans to spend his free time mastering Pac-Man.