In what may be Google's most ambitious Doodle to date, the Internet company turned the front-page of its search engine into a point-and-click adventure game to commemorate the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident.
For those of you that didn't watch as much of "The X-Files" back in the day, the Roswell UFO Incident occurred on July 7, 1947 when an unidentified flying object (see what I did there?) crashed into a ranch in New Mexico, launching many a paranoid conspiracy about the government and its relationship to little green men in the process.
In the new Google Doodle, you step into the shoes (or whatever extraterrestrials wear on their feet) of one of these little green men — though to be totally fair he seems more like a dark gray in Google's imagination. The game, which runs between one and two minutes if players are adept puzzle-solvers, has the alien searching around a twilight ranch for the different pieces of his crashed flying saucer. After recovering all three pieces, Google redirects players to other, possibly more legitimate, information about the UFO incident. But we all know what we should really believe.
This past May, Google turned its front page into a version of the classic arcade game "Atari Breakout" — though in that case users had to actually search for the game's name to make the Easter Egg appear.
Yannick LeJacq is a contributing writer for NBC News who has also covered technology and games for Kill Screen, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. You can follow him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq and reach him by email at: [email protected].
