Google made another great logo that can be seen today on several local homepages of the search engine like Google Taiwan and Google Thailand. Because tomorrow the Chinese New Year is celebrated and 2013 is the year of the snake Google decided to use the classic game Snake and put it on the homepage for users to play with.
Chinese New Year is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. In China, it is also known as the Spring Festival, the literal translation of the modern Chinese name. Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally ran from Chinese New Year’s Day itself, the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month, making the festival the longest in the Chinese calendar. You can read more about the celebration of the holiday here on Wikipedia. Snake is a classic video game, the first PC version of Snake was introduced in 1978. Soon after versions for the Commodore PET and Apple II computers followed.
In the doodle, you need to gather as many points as you possibly can in 60 seconds. After the time has passed you can share your score on Google+ although it seems this is only working for local users, I couldn’t share my own score. Just like other recent interactive doodles like the Frank Zamboni doodle last month this logo doesn’t work either in Internet Explorer 7 and 8. If you use these versions of Internet Explorer a static version of the doodle which you can see above is shown. Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 10, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are supported.
Below you can view a video of the game, you can play it yourself on the Taiwanese homepage www.google.com.tw. You can see the other doodles Google made to celebrate Chinese New Year since 2001 including a working copy of today’s doodle on this page.
It is not the first time Google does something with Snake, a few years ago the game was hidden as an Easter Egg on YouTube. For some time you could play the game within videos.
