Halloween 2012 Google Doodle: Treat or Treat
Halloween 2012 Google Doodle
Click to Walk the Spooky Streets!
Team Google have long demonstrated a fun loving attitude towards seasonal and public holidays. Due to this it is no surprise that the Doodle team at Google have showcased novelty doodles to celebrate Halloween, many users will remember the Giant Pumpkin Video the team produced for Halloween 2011. Many Doodle fans waited in eager anticipation for the Halloween 2012 Google Doodle, wondering what tricks or treats the doodle team would showcase to acknowledge and celebrate the day. Some sceptics questioned whether the team would be able to top the previous year’s efforts.
However true to form Google vanquished any doubt in their ability to consistently outdo their previous efforts. To many the key theme of Halloween is children dressing up in scary or garish costumes, carving pumpkins and getting free sweets or “treats”. The Doodle team decided to incorporate the “Trick or Treat” element of Halloween into their Halloween 2012 Google Doodle. According to the Google blog for the event, the team’s hope was to “capture a bit of that excitement you feel knocking on a neighbour’s door to see what they’re dressed as and wondering if you’re going to hit the jackpot with the king size candy bar.”
The Halloween 2012 Google Doodle consisted of a fully interactive spooky street, initially full of closed doors, and was available to users of the search engine in both the U.S.A. and U.K. but not universally. When users click on each of the doors a friendly monster appears complete with spooky audio, the monsters are shaped specifically to spell Google. The interactive Google Doodle component did not end there. The second door on the street revealed a pair of spooky eyes, which comprised the double OO of the trademark; the eyes ominously followed the cursor around the homepage. All of the monsters which comprised the Google logo were fully interactive with the purple monster forming the “E” biting the cursor when clicked, the “L” fazed in and out, and the ghost who signified the second “G” disappeared when clicked, later rising from the staircase.
Incorporated within the doodle was a wide array of interactive components included: a cawing crow which hopped along the top of a door frame, a spooky spider which bounced on its web when clicked, and a cat sat on top of the bins in the far left which when clicked screeched then ran from the Doodle. The underrated star of the Doodle was no doubt the humorous Skeleton which performed a wide range of functions when clicked, including: playing air guitar, running on the spot and a complex dance, all of which accompanied to comic bone noises.