Google hid an old-school text adventure within a search results page
Play as 'Big G' to find the o's, 'little g,' l, and e
By Cal Jeffrey,
Why it matters: Press Ctrl+Shift+J in the developer console while on the
Google search results page for "text game" or "text adventure, and you
will be transformed into the capital "G" in the company logo looking for
the rest of the letters. It is a short text adventure that someone
recently discovered.
Google has always enjoyed leaving users little Easter eggs to find. To
celebrate 20 years, it had some simple surprises that pointed back to
the early days of the company. There are also not quite hidden games to
find like Pacman, Atari Breakout, Solitaire, and “Zerg Rush” (merely
type the name into search). However, there are others a little more
hidden like Chrome’s T-Rex Run that can be accessed whenever the browser
receives a connection error.
One Reddit user recently found another hidden game that can be played in
the browser’s developer console. It is an old school text adventure in
the vein of Zork or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
To access the game, do a Google search for either “text adventure” or
“text game.” Then open the developer console by right-clicking the
search results page and selecting Inspect. When the tools page opens, be
sure you are on the console tab and press Ctrl+Shift+J (Cmd+Option+J on
Mac). The game will start up asking if you want to play a game. Type
"yes."
A strange tingle trickles across your skin. You feel lightheaded and
sit down. Feeling better you stand up again and notice your reflection
in a window. You are still the same big blue G you've always been and
you can't help but smile.
But wait! Where are your friends red o, yellow o, blue g, green l, and the always quirky red e?
You see a statue of a metal man peeking out of a building. A park is just across the street.
Possible exits: north.
If you have never played a text adventure before you might get a little
lost on how to play, but the rules are simple. Just type commands like
“grab,” “use,” “inventory,” and so forth. If the command is valid, the
game will describe what happens. Otherwise, it will tell you that you
can’t do that. It will usually list directions that you can go, and you
move in those directions by simply typing “north,” “south,” "up," etc.
The story is rather silly involving the player assuming the role of the
big, blue capital “G” in the word “Google” looking for the rest of his
“friends: o-o-g-l-e” around the Mountain View headquarters.
The game works on Chrome or any other Chromium-based browser of course,
but it also works on Firefox and Edge as well. I tried it in Safari but
just got a loading error on the console screen.
The game is not as epic as the old text adventures of yore, but it’s a
neat, little, hidden gem to play around with. It is rather short though,
only taking about an hour or less to complete.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/41289
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