For the past few days I have been updating the daily Olympic Google Doodles. While all of them were simple images representing each sport today we saw a completely different picture. Today’s Doodle theme is the most famous Athletics segment and Google did a full blown hurdles game right on their homepage. The game starts by showing a brief animation of an athlete entering the scene. You are now presented with a red play button and once your click it the hurdles game begins automatically. Don’t mistake this Doodle as some sort of a full blown 3D experience. All you get is a 2D interface where you control the speed of your athlete by tapping the left and right directional keys of the keyboard. The faster you press them the more speed it achieves. You also need to time every jump by pressing the spacebar.

This Doodle is fantastic and I played the small game for at least 7-8 times, improving my timing with every attempt. If you mistime a jump you will be knocked out by a hurdle that dramatically reduces the speed. Once you clear all the hurdles and successfully finish the race you can then see your timings. Every performance is graded on a scale of 3 starts. Below your timings you also have the ability to restart a race, share your score on Google+ and a search query button for the original London 2012 Athletic Hurdles query. This is truly a very creative Google Doodle that emphasizes the importance of track and field events for the Games. Recently we saw how Usain Bolt smashed the Olympic Records yesterday and this Doodle simply echoes the success of his victory.

You can visit the Google Homepage to check this new Doodle.

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