April Fools’ is here and Google Maps added the Snakes game to its app for both Android and iOS to bring back that dose of 90’s nostalgia. Looks like Google’s product team continue with their tradition of coming up with April Fools’ day features. The game will be rolling out globally and remain temporarily available this week. You can even play it on the desktop via the standalone site.
Here’s how to play it?
The app got a new S-themed overflow menu that has a red dot to highlight the experience in the navigation drawer. You select a city you want to play the snakes game in. Cities included are Cairo, London, Tokyo, San Francisco and Sao Paulo or the entire world.
To play, you just swipe the four cardinal directions to stimulate the D-pad to move your train/bus/subway/streetcar/double-decker around the map to pick passengers up and to control its growth.
Previous Years
The new snake game joins other pranks it had done in previous years such as 2018’s Where’s Waldo? in its maps app where Waldo kept popping up from the side of the screen and users played a game to find him and other characters. Users were then taken to a crowded illustration to spot them. Others include Gboard swiping on physical keys(there’s handwriting mode on the new Gboard app), bad joke detector on its Files Go app, Googz Australia among other pranks.
In 2017, we had a Ms. Pac-Man, in 2016, Funky Town Pegman and in 2015 included Pac-Man in its Google Maps. Look forward to more pranks as tech companies continue launching April Fool’s day pranks.
