As is tradition on April 1st, many tech companies are releasing gags and other sorts of pranks online, with Google (or Alphabet) releasing an updated Google Maps that will let you play the classic game Snake.
Bring up either the iOS or Android Google Maps app and you’ll be greeted with a changed menu icon that will have a notification for “Play Snake” as part of the menu bar. For those without mobile app devices you can also play on a custom url: snake.googlemaps.com.
Pick from Cairo, Sao Paulo, London, Sydney, San Francisco, Tokyo, or World and you will advised to pick up as many passengers as you can.
Be careful! Running off the map or into your own vehicle will end the game.
You’re train will start moving on a pixelated grid of whatever city you have chosen and you swipe, or use keyboard arrows, to move and extend your train by picking up passengers. If you pick the World map you will also get bonus points for touching landmarks that will appear in between some passengers. It’s Snake, a game everyone has been playing since 1997 on their Nokia phones. It’s a nice distraction from the general day-to-day things of life, such as writing articles, making sure your puppy isn’t eating their poop, and resisting buying a Garrus body pillow.
This isn’t the first time Google Maps has been modified to fit a video game-centric theme. In 2016, in collaboration with Nintendo for the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD, Google changed the generic peg man into Link. A year earlier, also for April Fool’s Day, Google changed Maps to allow people to play Pac-Man using roads as the maze. In 2012 a 8-bit version of the game, created for the NES, was released, with Dragon Quest style visuals. In 2014 a video for an ARG Pokemon game was released for April’s Fools, years before Niantic would release Pokemon Go.
Whether this game will appear on Google’s upcoming gaming streaming platform Stadia remains to be seen, though I’m not holding my breath to see this classic alongside the likes of Doom Eternal and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
The post Google Maps Lets You Play Snake for the Next Week as Part of April’s Fools Day by Steven Santana appeared first on DualShockers.