To kick off the Halloween festivities early this year, the Google Doodle for Thursday is an interactive trick-or-treating game.
The doodle is a “choose your own” type of interactive Halloween adventure, featuring animals associated with the holiday, like tarantulas, bats, owls, and wolves. The Halloween Google Doodle is in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
You get to choose which of the seven doors to enter and choose either trick or treat for the animal that is inside of the door. If you choose trick, the animal will show off some type of hidden talent, but choosing treat gives a fact or two about the animal.
“Ding dong! Who’s that behind the door? Trick or Treat? The choice is yours,” Google said in its blog post.
For instance, you can either have a black jaguar shred on a keyboard, or learn that, unlike other cats, they love to swim.
Google has had an annual Halloween Google Doodle since the search engine’s early days in 1999. They’ve increasingly become more interactive over the years, like last year’s multiplayer Great Ghoul Duel which allowed players from all over the world to play each other one on one.
Other companies are getting in on the Halloween themes. Snapchat’s map feature within the app has gone dark for the holiday. The map is purple and spooky at night with pumpkins, cats, and candy corns littered around the map.
Pokémon Go kicked off its annual Halloween event earlier this month with rewards, seasonal items, and costumes for players to enjoy. Any Pokémon you transfer, catch, or hatch will reward you with double candy. This year’s Halloween event also features several iconic Pokémon dressing up as other Pokémon (yes, for real).
Even NASA got in on the spooky celebrations with the release of “Galaxy of Horrors,” a retro-inspired movie trailer and vintage posters meant to be informative about different exoplanets. The posters showcase that there’s more to exoplanets than finding planets similar to Earth. The exoplanets that harbor treacherous conditions are still equally important discoveries.
