Google Doodles typically have a short shelf life. They show up on the homepage of Google for special holidays or to commemorate something and then are forgotten by most web users. But last year for Halloween, Google released “The Great Ghoul Dual,” their first-ever multiplayer, interactive Google Doodle, which appears to still be going strong nearly six months later.
For those unfamiliar with it, “The Great Ghoul Dual,” is a multiplayer game where you take on the role of one of seven different ghosts with the goal of collecting as many “spirit flames” as you can before time runs out. The game allows you to play with up to seven friends through a custom link or against randomized players from around the world and according to Slate writer Marissa Martinelli, there are still quite a few people playing the game via the Doodle’s page.
I decided to check it out again for myself, and sure enough, within just a couple of minutes, there were enough people from around the world still playing the game to fire up a match. In fact, as Martinelli points out in her article for Slate, the game is not only still being played, but there is still an active subreddit and Discord server dedicated to it.
And while Martinelli’s research unearthed that for most people the game is just a fun way for some players to escape, I poked around the subreddit and Discord server and found that the game has actually developed a fairly hardcore cult following. Players have discussed holding game tournaments, created fan art and memes, and even share their own invite links to make finding additional players easier. One Redditor has even suggested that Google make the game downloadable via the Play Store.
Exactly how many people are still playing the game is still a bit of a mystery. The subreddit only has 89 members, while the Discord Server has 269. I reached out to Google’s press team to see if I could get an idea of how many people were still playing the 2018 Halloween Doodle, but as of the time of publishing they had not responded. At its peak, Google boasted that the game successfully hosted over 100 million players across 62 countries.
Regardless of player size, there definitely appears to be a dedicated base of fans still enjoying this game and hopefully, Google is taking note. Maybe it will result in some more ghoulish fun for Halloween 2019.
