Google has been celebrating the London 2012 Olympics every day with a unique Olympic-themed Doodle. However, today’s interactive Google Doodle is easily the best and most fun so far, letting everyone compete for their own virtual gold medal.
Google has been celebrating the London 2012 Olympics every day with a unique Olympic-themed Doodle. However, today’s interactive Google Doodle is easily the best and most fun so far, letting everyone compete for their own virtual gold medal.
Work productively? Not so much.
Visit Google’s home page today and you’ll see a runner trot into position at the starting line. Push the red button and you’re ready to race. One more push, and he’s off and running.
To excel on Google’s tribute to hurdling, you’ll have to quickly and repeatedly hit the left and right arrow buttons, which controls your hurdler’s legs. Once you get close to a hurdle, hit the up button to make him jump – but don’t forget to keep hitting the left and right arrows after he hits the ground to keep his speed up.
Hit one hurdle, and your dreams of a gold medal are definitely over.
Alternatively, if all that tapping is too much effort, you can hit the right arrow once and let your hurdler jog the entire way, smashing into every hurdle in his path. It should take him about 50 seconds to finish running the track, and he’ll hunch over in defeat at the end.
Once the race is done, you can try again, go to search results for “London 2012 hurdles”, or share your score on Google+. Unlike other interactive Doodles, there is no option to skip the race and go straight to the search results.
The SEW team has been trying to tap its way to a gold medal, or three stars, this morning. As of this writing, I’m in the lead with a time of 13.1 seconds, while Jonathan Allen claims a score of 13.8, and Miranda Miller with a score of 14.7.
The best score we could find on Twitter was by Jamie Alderson, who earned gold with a time of 10.7 seconds.
@holrev get in 🙂 twitter.com/Jamie_Alderson…— Jamie Alderson (@Jamie_Alderson) August 7, 2012
Google discusses the technology behind the game here.
Share your best hurdling time in the comments (we heavily encourage screenshots for proof), or share it with us on Twitter (@sewatch).
In the spirit of NBC delaying its coverage of the Olympics, we have also delayed our coverage of Google’s Doodles until today. So here’s a wrap-up of Google’s various tributes to Olympic sports.
