14 DAY TRIAL // Google's latest series of doodles left many wondering what exactly it was trying to say. The mystery was pretty much solved last week with the second doodle, but it wasn't until today that Google finally laid out all the details. As suspected, the series was in honor of the British science-fiction writer H.G. Wells's birthday on September 21, 143 years ago.
“Now, we're finally acknowledging the reason for the doodles with an official nod to Herbert George, who would be 143 years old today,” Micheal Lopez, web design lead, revealed on the Google blog. “Inspiration for innovation in technology and design can come from lots of places; we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond. And maybe have some fun while we were doing it.”
The final doodle in the series is now up in certain parts of the world, Google.jp is sporting it and so are the local sites for several countries in Europe and it should roll out across the world during the day. The image is very much inspired by the author's War of the Worlds, but “Google” can still be spelled out if you look attentively enough.
The series started two weeks ago with a mysterious doodle of a flying saucer 'abducting' the 'o' in Google, which led to a search for the unexplained phenomenon. It came with an accompanying tweet that was eventually decoded to reveal it was in celebration of the 20th birthday of Japanese video game Zero Wing on September 5.
A little over a week later came the second doodle that led to a search for crop circles. However, the tweet that came with it was much more revealing, as it was the location of Horsell Commons, the initial landing spot of the alien invasion in War of the Worlds, indicating that the series had something to do with H.G. Wells, which Google finally acknowledged today.
