Google Doodle Games: Popular Games, Coding Games & Interactive Games

Google doodle is a product of Google which appears as a user-interactive icon at the place of the company’s homepage. The icon may denote some special occasion, an important ongoing event, a famous personality’s birthday, a festival or a mark to the seasonal transitions etc. The icon usually has a ‘Play’ symbol which takes the user to an interactive game arena. These games are either simple command based or interactive.

The idea of doodle originated back in 1998, even before the company was incorporated. At that time, it was intended to convey messages like ‘The founders are out of the office’ or as an indication of their attendance at the Burning Man festival to the users. Although the first doodle was simple, it was the birth of the idea of doodles. Later in 2000, the founders asked Dennis Hwang (current webmaster), an intern at that time, to devise a doodle for Bastille Day. This time it caught the eyes of the users pretty well and was much appreciated by them. Later on, more and more doodles started to appear frequently on Google’s homepage.

Popular Google Doodle Games

Google doodle games gained popularity due to several reasons. The main reason is these games are mostly connected to some popular festival, event, culture, holiday or some famous personality’s birth anniversary. Secondly, they are easily accessible just by clicking on the interactive play button on Google's animated icon. Recently, the third reason became the COVID-19 pandemic situation in which people were restricted to their homes for a long time.

Some of the most popular Google doodle play games are as follows:

• Doodle Champion Island Games: Tokyo Olympic 2020

• PAC MAN 

• Cricket Doodle

• Fischinger

• Quick, Draw!

• Loteria

• Scoville

• Hip Hop

• Coding for Carrots

• Halloween

• Play with Bees

• Basketball

• Soccer

• Rubik’s Cube

• Rockmore

• Garden Gnomes

Google Doodle Team

As the popularity of Google doodle, like its other products, kept growing, so did the need for a team of qualified engineers to meet this demand of the users. A team consisting of talented illustrators (commonly called doodlers) and professionals was established as the demand for doodles increased in the United States.

A team of Googlers have the responsibility to decide which events or holidays are to be selected for celebrating with doodles and which are not. The selection of the occasions depends to a large extent on Googlers and users of Google. The aim of their content is to connect to more and more people by celebrating popular events throughout the world and bringing a smile to their faces. This way, they also reflect the personality of Google and its appreciation for innovation.

Google Doodle Interactive Games

Google doodle interactive games are those which allow the user (player) to control his/her actions in the game by a set of meaningful gestures, clicks, or simply by pressing keys specified for certain actions. At the very beginning, the game itself introduces the player to what actions he or she has to perform within the game and how those actions can be invoked. Doodle Champion Island, The Scoville Game, Basketball, Soccer, Rubik’s Cube, etc. are some examples of interactive Google doodle games online.

Google Doodle Coding Game

Google had launched a Google doodle coding game, named ‘Coding for Carrots’,  in 2017 while celebrating 50 years of the development of the first-ever programming language made for kids back in the 1960s, i.e., ‘Logo’. The logo was developed by Seymour Papert and researchers at MIT. Coding for Carrots is a simple interactive coding game based on a kid’s programming language; ‘Scratch’. Scratch was also developed by MIT. The aim behind the development of such a programming language was to allow the kids to express their ideas and stories by interacting with computers through a less intimidating and almost equally expressive and powerful programming language. In the game; Coding for Carrots, one has to help an animated character, ‘bunny’ (a rabbit), gather food for himself by writing simple code blocks.

Google Doodle Games to Play now

Google doodle games play online gives you numerous options of interactive simple games. Some popular Google doodle games are mentioned below:

1. Champion Island Games

This game was launched to highlight the beginning of the famous games and sports event; the Tokyo Olympics. There is a character in the game named ‘Lucky’, an athlete. She explores an island with seven small games, mighty opponents, a number of side quests or tasks. The ultimate aim of the player is to control the actions of the character in each game she participates in, defeat the champions and try to score more. Also, there would be some extra hidden challenges throughout the island, which the player has to explore and pass to save points.         

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2. Cricket

This doodle game was introduced in 2017 to celebrate the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy. The game’s name is self-explanatory. ‘Cricket’, as it sounds, is a game in which the characters such as snails, duckling, beetles, etc are the players in a cricket playground playing their roles in batting, bowling, fielding, etc. Provided with the equipment for the match such as the helmet, bat, gloves, and pads, the characters look quite amusing. The game is fairly small in file size, hence, can run fluently over pocket devices and slower networks too.

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3. Fischinger

Fischinger is another interesting Google doodle game you can play. It was launched in 2017 on the 117th birthday of the famous filmmaker and visual artist Oskar Fischinger. He was known for his exceptional work in producing visuals and music compositions in that early time. The game starts with a quote saying, ‘Music is not limited to the world of sound. There exists a music of the visual world’. Then the game tells you the different symbols related to a specific sound. You have to draw a musical composition pattern using these symbols. The game also allows you to modify or discard your compositions to create a new one. 

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4. Rockmore

Clara Rockmore's 105th Birthday was celebrated by this doodle. The game is a tribute to the artist and her important role in music and especially her contribution to the further development of the gesture-controlled musical instrument called ‘Theremin’, named after its inventor; Léon Theremin. The game is based on the same instrument which allows the user to control the pitch and volume of the musical sounds coming out of a virtual module through different gestures. The game is well-engineered by the major contributions made by artist Robinson Wood, interaction designer Kevin Burke, and engineers Will Knowles and Kris Hom along with the support of the huge Google doodle team.

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5. Quick, Draw

Another interactive and simple yet interesting game launched by Google uses Google's Neural Networking technology to guess the object drawn by a user. The game challenges the user to draw a picture of any known object and let the AI (artificial intelligence) recognize it. All you need to do is try to draw anything you want belonging to the real world within the given space by simply clicking and dragging action through the mouse, touchpad, or any other pointing device connected to your device within 20 seconds you have started drawing. This game was a great success for google both as a Google doodle game and as an AI experiment. Google has recorded over 15 million pictures drawn by people worldwide.

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6. The Scoville Game

Google reminded the users of Wilbur Scoville's 151st Birthday by launching this interesting doodle on 22nd January 2016. Wilbur Scoville was an award-winning researcher, chemist, and professor of pharmacology. He also became the 2nd chairman of the American Pharmaceutical Association. He is known for his huge contributions in measuring the ‘Heat’ of the peppers and mentioned milk as an antidote to pepper’s heat in his book. ‘The Art of Compounding’. He became famous for his organoleptic test also. Based on Wilburs work, doodler Olivia, in collaboration with other members of the Google doodle team, designed the game with a character representing Wilbur’s personality and targeted to shoot different types of animated pepper characters.

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7. Basketball

Basketball is a Google doodle game launched on 8 August 2012. The game provides a virtual basketball court to the users with a player character whose actions one has to control in a basketball match to earn points.

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8. Halloween

This game is an animated horror adventure launched for the first time on 31st October 2016. Its extended version was launched on 31st October 2020. The game starts with some scenario (maybe a room or underwater marine life) with different objects or creatures randomly turning into ghosts whom the player has to react fast and target with the provided weapon to survive and make points in the game.

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9. Baseball

This Google doodle game was launched on 4th July 2019 celebrating the occasion of United States Independence day with this popular game of the land. The game has interesting animated snack characters such as the hot dog, burger, pizza, popcorn, sauce, and melon, etc. who play baseball.

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10. Garden Gnome

Garden Gnome is a simple yet interesting game that was launched to celebrate 10 June 2018 as Germany's Garden Day. The game is somewhat based on the history of the day. Users have to use a virtual catapult or trebuchet to plant flowers to as long a range as they could by minding the proper timing to release the catapult from its handle. The game also provides the option to choose from six different colored gnomes with different shapes.

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Did you know?

• Google has opened the doors for suggesting a doodle idea for all its users. All one has to do is email his or her idea at doodleproposals@google.com. Unfortunately, the Google team is unable to reply to all of the hundreds of emails they receive each day, yet they make sure that they read each of them.

• Many Google doodle games provide a global scoreboard which one could participate in and check his or her rank or position among the people worldwide.