A couple of days ago Google decided to show its quirky side. On 6th September 2009 Google changed its symbol on its search engine showing an Alien Spaceship abducting on of the ‘O’ in the word GOOGLE. The link to the image showed up as ‘unexplained phenomenon’
Google’s Doodle..
The internet went abuzz with many commenting about what Google was trying to convey with its image. Some thought it was a promotion for the film ‘District 9’ but that theory was trashed as the film had already been released a day before.
Another theory was that Google had made contact with Aliens 😉 or that someone on earth had made contact and Google was letting in on the information to people. Some comments which were firmly tongue in cheek asked if Google was trying to tell us that Google was run by aliens! 😛
The buzz died down a little as the mystery was later solved.
If you have been following Google on Twitter you might have seen the coded message it sent out. The tweet message read as “1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19” If you replace numbers with its corresponding alphabet; example A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on you will get the message “ALL YOUR O ARE BELONG TO US.”
This sounded very similar to a video game in the late 80s called Zero Wing. It was a Japanese Arcade Game which had a rushed release in Europe in 1989. The rushed release left many translation of dialogues between characters to be in incorrect English. One such line ‘ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US’ was very famous amongst Gamers back then. Later it was realised that the video game ‘Zero Wing’ was released on 6th September 1989 exactly twenty years before the day Google put up the strange ‘doodle‘ of its symbol and the coded tweet to every one who was following.
So now the mystery was solved. The spaceship abducting ‘O’ was a way for Google show homage to ‘Zero Wing’ on its 20th Anniversary. But what about the Alien Ship beaming up one of the ‘O’ really signify. In ‘Zero Wing’ one way to kill a enemy was to beam up a enemy and drop it on another. I found this at the article on ‘Zero Wing’ on Wikipedia.
Google surely has a strange sense of humour and a quirky way of letting in on what has inspired them over the years!
Links: Image on Twitpix | Zero Wing
8 Comments
Very nice effort to search the information.. Kepp it up..
was brainstorming with that tweet..got it now 😀
Excellent! maybe if I post some code, that would create some stir on DW!!
@pramodh: Thanks will try my best.
@vivek: Yeah even I was stumped by it at first.
@bhavkam: if you post some code it might not be published thats why we have editors. But then if we ourselves got quirky and wrote some code might cause some stir 🙂
Nice information indeed, though I saw it, I did not bother about at that time when I could not find right details 😛
Hey Aditya how do you earn by working with DW camp.
DW is a part of rtBlogs which will be a network of blog networks. Currently we have 4 websites in our network, DW being the most visited and active. I was hired full time as a Editor in Chief across the network at rtCamp.
for more info you might want to visit :
http://www.rtcamp.com
http://www.rtblogs.com
@Dinesh
Aditya is full time editor.
He gets 5-digit salary, some n% revenue share and all other benefits available to rtCampers! 😉