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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Keith Stuart

London 2012 hurdles celebrated with Google doodle game

Google hurdles
Google doodle does hurdles. Bash the buttons and smash the space bar!

For the past ten days, Google has been celebrating the Olympics with a range of doodles depicting key events. Well, today's is something special – a functioning hurdles sim.

On visiting the Google homepage and pressing the little play button, you have to quickly tap the left and right arrow keys to get your athlete sprinting along the track, then smash the space bar to tackle the hurdles. At the end of the race you get a time that you can share with friends via Google+; you can even clock on the little search icon to check out the best times during the actual Olympics.

The mini-game is, of course, a tribute to Konami's classic arcade games Hypersports and Track & Field, which both presented a range of sports for players to compete in by frantically bashing alternate buttons or waggling joysticks to build up speed. The titles spawned a whole genre, which quickly moved onto the home computers of the era, via legendary titles like Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Epyx Summer Games.

Anyway, have a go this morning, and let us know your score in the comments section.

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