So it's the second week of Google doing Big Announcements (first Stadia at GDC a couple weeks back, all that "the future of gaming is a URL" business), and then yesterday, April Fools' Day, they slipped something into an app that already lives on everybody's home screen. Google Maps has a playable game of Snake in it now. Not a link to a game. Not a "check out this cute video." An actual, controllable, eat-the-dots-and-grow Snake, sitting inside the same app I use to find the nearest Chipotle.
I found out about it because a coworker slid his phone across the desk at me around 11am and said "try not to lose the rest of your day." I lost the rest of my day.
Here's how it works, if you haven't poked around yet: open Maps, tap the hamburger menu on the top left, and there's a new controller icon sitting where you'd normally expect settings or your timeline. Tap it and you get a little menu of cities to play on: the board is styled like a transit map for wherever you pick, so you're steering your snake-slash-car around something that looks like it's channeling the Tokyo subway map or the Cairo one. Swipe to turn, eat the little dots, the snake (car, whatever) gets longer, don't run into yourself. It's Nokia 3310 Snake, basically, except it's rendered over real city geography and it's got Google's cutesy little car icon instead of a green pixel block.
I want to be annoying about this for a second: corporate April Fools jokes are almost always bad. Every year some company announces a fake product (smell-o-vision for Gmail, a keyboard for pets, whatever) and it's dead by 2pm and nobody talks about it again. I've complained about this on here before, I'm sure, because it happens every single year and it's exhausting. This is the first one in a while that's actually just... fun? It's not pretending to be a real product. It's not a press release dressed up as a joke. It's a genuinely playable minigame that somebody's engineering team clearly spent real hours building, hidden inside an app 2 billion people already have installed. That's a much better use of an April 1st than another fake gadget nobody asked for.
Small gripe though: you can't play it landscape, and on my Pixel the swipe controls are a little too sensitive near the edges of the screen, so I kept clipping myself on turns I didn't mean to make. Not a huge deal. I'm not asking Google to patch a joke feature. Just noting it because I spent about twenty-five minutes with it at lunch today and that was my honest experience.
From what I've read this is only supposed to stick around for about a week, so if you want to poke at it, do it soon. I wouldn't be shocked if it's gone by next weekend. Which, fine, I get it, it's a novelty and not a permanent Maps feature. But it does make me wonder a little about how much unused surface area there is inside an app like Maps. It's one of the most-opened apps on the planet and most of what it does, for most people, most of the time, is "how do I get from A to B." There's clearly a team over there with the bandwidth to build a whole tile-based game engine and ship it to production for a novelty feature that expires in seven days. I don't know what to do with that information except find it a little funny.
Anyway. Between this and Stadia, it's been a strange couple weeks to be a person who cares about Google specifically, as opposed to Google the search box. One week they're talking about controller latency over the internet and Assassin's Creed Odyssey running through your browser, and the next they're putting a Snake clone behind the hamburger menu of a navigation app. Different teams, obviously, completely different scale of ambition, but it's a good reminder that a company this size is really just a few hundred smaller companies wearing the same jacket.
I tried the Cairo board and the Tokyo one. Tokyo's better, the streets give you more room to maneuver before you're stuck boxing yourself into a corner. If anyone finds a board that's actually good for getting a high score, not just fun to look at, let me know — I've got a 47 I'm annoyed I couldn't beat before I made myself put the phone down and finish this post.