Real time strategy (RTS) gamers the world over had a joy-gasm today with Google’s newest Easter egg. In homage to the highly popular RTS game StarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment, Google cheesed out with a Zerg rush.
For those of you not familiar with the game, Zerg is a race of insect-like creatures whose basic attacking unit is a zergling (left).
A “zerg rush” is a strategy wherein the zerg player rushes all his units in a sudden attack (think blitzkrieg) in the hope of overwhelming and overrunning the opposition.
The onslaught of “zerglings” begin as soon as you enter in “zerg rush” as a search query and hit enter. The letters in Google’s name immediately begin attacking the search results in a coordinated effort to destroy everything in their path. It is the user’s job to hold the front lines and save the page from complete destruction. “Go go go!”
A green health bar will appear on the targets the letters are attacking and unless the user rapidly clicks on the attackers, this bar will turn red, and eventually the target search result will disappear (die). The faster one clicks, the less damage the search results take. There’s even an APM (actions per minute) and kill counter at the top right!
And once finished you can post your score to Google+.
But Google may have inadvertently advertised a rival browser in creating this easter egg. Even though we know that the attacking “O” comes from Google’s logo, it does bear a close resemblance to the Opera browser’s logo. A fact which was not lost on Opera who’s twitter handle tweeted:
But even so, Google’s Chrome remains as one of the most popular (and I’d argue best) browsers on the internet. The current stats in the browser war show that while Google’s Chrome browser has left FireFox in the dust, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still ahead. But Microsoft’s edge seems to be waning, so much so that Chrome may even surpass the dreaded IE later this year. On the mobile front Google has dealt some massive damage to the Opera browser (still popular, but trailing behind) with its in-built browser for Android.
zerg rush