A major event, a festival, an anniversary, or a major milestone in pop-culture – there’s nothing that escapes Google Doodles when it comes to paying a worthy tribute. And the digital audience, who are always on the lookout for a procrastination respite, hit the jackpot when Google launches an interactive doodle game. We wouldn’t shy away from the fact that we have our moments (read: hours) that we spend scoring hoops or swiping spells on Google doodle games. While the globe is battling the pandemic and in self-isolation, the kind souls at Google are reprising their famous interactive Google doodles like “Coding with Carrot” and “Pest Cricket” and have given us all the more reasons to keep ourselves busy on the boring zoom meetings. Read on as we list the Top 10 Google Doodle Games of all time.
As a part of the Computer Science Education week in December 2017, Google celebrated 50 years of kids programming languages by creating the first-ever coding Google doodle that was primarily focussed on kids. The interactive google doodle play features a furry bunny and the objective of the game is to program the coding blocks together to carve a path for the bunny to reach the carrot. The Google Doodle team, the Google Blockly team, and the researchers from MIT Scratch developed this interactive doodle in partnership.
While the world was enjoying summers, Google took a rather literal route with this interactive doodle to celebrate the 2017 ICC women’s world cup. The doodle features a team of “crickets sans tickets” playing against their archenemies, a team of snails. All you have to do is to time your tap/click when the snail bowls a ball and let the reliable crickets so the rest. This is Google’s smallest interactive doodle ever to ensure that it runs smoothly on the slowest of networks.
On 21st May 2010, Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of the coolest arcade game of all time – PAC-MAN. Tōru Iwatani’s cute pizza-shaped character was recreated, along with the original game logic, graphics, and sound, and the players can control the PAC-MAN using their arrow keys. The doodle spread like a raging fire and is considered as one of the most popular Google doodle games.
About 40 years after the iconic 3-D combination puzzle was invented by Hungarian professor of architecture Ernő Rubik, Google introduced one of their mind-racking Google doodle games of all time in May 2014. The magic cube can be manoeuvred using the keyboard shortcuts guide given by Google.
Dr. Robert Moog changed the American music scene in the 60s with his electronic analog Moog Synthesizer, the influence of which was seen in music produced by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, and many others. To celebrate Bob Moog’s 78th birthday, Google introduced an interactive, playable doodle in May 2012. This doodle has a Moog-styled instrument, which could be controlled by the mouse or the computer keyboard, and it was attached to a 4-track tape recorder which saved the tunes for you to save or share among friends.
While the 2012 London Summer games were in its full glory, Google launched a 4-day interactive doodle run with button smashing games that included Basketball, Hurdles, Slalom Canoe, and Soccer/Football. The game gives you a total of 24 seconds and you have to score as many points as you can by shooting basketballs down the hoop with the spacebar. The 2012 doodle run is one of the best Google doodle games with about one billion games being played on Google homepages worldwide.
In 2013, one of the most popular doodle games by Google based on the BBC sci-fi show, Doctor Who, was actually a request from a “Whovian” at Google who wanted to celebrate 50 years of science fiction adventures, 11 Doctors, countless enemies, and TIME TRAVEL! The interactive multi-level doodle has the doctor crossing various obstacles and dodging their worst enemies, the Daleks, to collect the letters “GOOGLE” and return to their TARDIS (conveniently adapted as Time And Relative Doodle In Space).
Google Engineer/Crossword enthusiast Tom Tabanao along with Merl Reagle, one of the finest brains in crossword construction in the world, designed the interactive doodle to celebrate the centennial of the famous word puzzle. The puzzle, launched in December 2013, has 78 clues for words arranged vertically and horizontally like “Little” Dickens girl and Spot on a domino or playing card.
For Halloween 2016, Google launched a Harry Potter-esque google doodle play that featured freshman feline Momo as she used spells and potions to defeat a ghost and save her friends and her school of magic. The doodle game consists of five levels set in a school environment with different enemies at every level with symbols hovering above them which the player has to replicate using the cursor. The muse for this project was Google Doodler Juliana Chen’s black cat with the same name.
The last in the list of top 10 Google doodle games is the interactive doodle that was launched to celebrate the 117th birthday of the influential filmmaker and visual artist in 2017. A master of motion and colour, Fischinger has been considered a towering figure in the areas of motion graphics and animation in times when computers didn’t exist. This Google doodle is one of our favourite Google doodle games because of its audio-visual beauty. Choose from the four instrument options and create audio-visual compositions that play on a loop. You can record the tunes and flaunt your talent among your friends and family.
So many options, so much time – All thanks to the quarantine. Don’t forget to tell us which are your favourite Google doodle games from the ones listed above.
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