This easter egg is referring to the game StarCraft 2 by Blizzard. There are three fractions in StarCraft 2: Protoss, Terran and Zerg. Imagine the Zerg like aliens. Zergs have a unit called "the Zergling" which is a small creature that usually attacks buildings and enemy units in groups. If you have a lot of Zerglings and run to your opponents fast this can be called "a Zergling rush". There are also custom maps that you can play that are called Zerg Rush: You are in the middle of the map and Zerlings are streaming to your bade from all sides. You have to defend it like in the easter egg.

Well, I would say that it refers to the Starcraft series. I'm so old that I remember the first Starcraft game – and I'm quite sure it had Zerg. ;)

Yeah, the 'zerg' meme originates from Starcraft. It's been commonly used (often pejoratively) in gaming circles to describe situations in which superior numbers dictated the outcome of an encounter.

On an unrelated note, it's rather depressing to think of the original StarCraft game as being something 'old people' remember. I'm 29.

Edit : I was kind of surprised to see this meme explicitly explained. I've always thought of it as being one of the most ubiquitous out there.

> On an unrelated note, it's rather depressing to think of the original StarCraft game as being something 'old people' remember. I'm 29.

Do you remember a time before Google? Google was started the same year as Starcraft was released - 1998.

(Weirdly Armageddon and Deep Impact were released in 1998)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_film)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998)

I remember Lycos, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek and Yahoo as being the search engines I used throughout middle school. I don't think I began using Google until 99 or so.

However, I also remember using BBS systems. TradeWars 2002, anyone?

Didn't play TradeWars 2002 but spent a fair amount of time with Legend of the Red Dragon.

Metacrawler was awesome at this time.

I think Lycos is the earliest search engine I remember using

Altavista.digital.com, not to be confused with the poor sod who had altivista.com.

But then, for some reason, I thought it was a Toy Story joke.

The term "Zerg Rush" is based on the term "Grunt Rush" from Warcraft II. A Grunt Rush is when you build your Barracks first before your Town Hall to start churning out Grunts as fast as possible. It's a degenerate strategy that's pretty much indefensible. The term was coined by a player named Tou in 1996. The Zerg race in StarCraft were particularly good at attacking with many units early in the game, so this term was coopted by StarCraft players and it became "Zerg Rush."

Consider that there are kids out there who are 10 years old, but weren't alive to experience 9/11.

just blew my mind

scary!

"I'm so old that I remember the first Starcraft game"

I remember when Dune 2 came out - the father of all RTS games.

What about Herzog Zwei, you young whippersnapper ;-)

Dune II was definitely influenced by Herzog Zwei, but not everyone had a Genesis, and I don't think Herzog Zwei really had a concept of base management or resource gathering, which have obviously become integral to the RTS games today.

You're right, it wasn't like most RTS games we know today. Herzog Zwei had little bases scattered through the map that could be thought of as territories, and you'd have to capture them with troops(both the player and AI would compete for these as it allowed further expansion, healing, etc.). You could order up defensive / offensive units as "credits" trickled in over time at a fixed rate(I don't think there was any way to speed it up), and the ultimate goal was to send your assisting units to attack the enemy's single fortress.

I absolutely loved that game, though!

I don't really recall it having any story, though.

That sounds very much like the more modern DOS game Z: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(video_game). It eschewed the Dune 2 RTS mechanics that had already become dogma by then and I distinctly remember finding it refreshing. (I grew up on DOS so I didn't know anything about the Genesis).

I might have to try it out - it looks more refined than Herzog was :)

Why did I not hear about this Herzog Zwei when I had Genesis?! Feel like soon I'll install gens and try it out.

What a great game on the Genesis.

That I remembered - the major upgrade and concept it was over the previous dune 1.

Then the warcraft series, followed by Command and conquer and then Starcraft, which set the gold standard. AoE came next - after that it just becomes a blur of different RTS types which were competing for top billing.

For some reason the one that I enjoyed the most is always forgotten: Total Annihilation!

It had significantly more depth than StarCraft/WarCraft (and better graphics to boot), but the higher complexity apparently made it less accessible and hence less popular.

For anyone curious: The latest refresh is called "Supreme Commander", and last time I checked there was still an active community/player-base around the OpenSource port "TA Spring".

Cryo's Dune was a completely different type of game (adventure), and was more or less developed and released in parallel to Westwood's Dune. Westwood's Dune is not a sequel at all, it was intended to replace Cryo's about-to-be-canceled game that never ended up being canceled, forcing them to name it Dune II: Battle for Arrakis to distinguish itself from Cryo's game.

You learn something new every day! Thanks - when I played them I was too far out of range for me to get info on game development at the time, iirc I even played them out of order.

Dune really was a brilliant game, and really its balance was pretty good, especially considering it was a time when the word balance itself hadn't been coined.

If I recall Dune 2 has no connection to the slightly earlier Dune other than both were produced by studios owned by the same parent, and neither realized that the other team was working on the license. The Dune team finished first, and to 'simplify' things, they just named the RTS version of the game Dune 2.

learned something new!

I loved both the games.

You forgot Myth :)

All the games mentioned previously are RTS games, which doesn't include Myth (which is a great game on its own, though).

Ah Dune 2 and Command and Conquer. I remember there was a easter egg in the first expansion of Command and Conquer that allowed you to do a series of missions agains giant ants.

I don't have my Sega Genesis any more, but I still play Dune on my pc with an emulator.

Oh yes, this brings back memories. Killing the sandworm with Atreides' sonic cannon.

remember Starcraft? I play it all the time. What's to remember?

My home machine isn't set up for games and I own SC2 but it doesn't run well - and I enjoy the original more anyway.

Yes, I find original Starcraft more enjoying too, as there is no implicit or explicit time limit in most missions as in SC2, so player doesn't have to rush through all the game and has time to explore the map, try various units and strategies without load/save loop, enjoy the humour, music, look&feel of the units/buildings etc.

This "war against the time" approach was my deal breaker for SC2. The general idea may be fine for training people to fight online, but for single player mode/campaign it's just inappropriate.

Typical SC1 mission is "destroy all enemy bases when you like it and how you like it", typical SC2 mission is "disarm the ticking bomb in time". It's OK to have 1-2 such missions in the campaign, but when entire campaign is made of time-bomb missions, there is no satisfaction from the game.

I thought the SC2 missions were great and had a lot of variety. The missions were very original compared the usual you get from RTS campaigns.

On the other hand, and I can't explain why, the atmosphere of the SC1 was a lot better. I don't know if it's the music or the graphics but it really had a great feeling of "you are alone in space and everything is hostile".

Same with Diablo II compared to more modern RPGs. It's just like low-resolution (yet masterful!) graphics and absence of effects for effects' sake make you think up the details of the game universe.

Exactly. That was my feeling when I played also. I think it may be part of differentiating single player from pvp - but the problem is I don't have the time and energy to be competitive in pvp either. So I still play SC, single player a lot.

Also IIRC they dropped LAN play in the second one; another reason to prefer the original.

Finally the secret identity of "StarcraftJokeExplainer" is revealed!

I always thought StarcraftJokeExplainer is actually Day9. at least that's what I've heard...

He said himself that it wasn't the case.

How convenient.

As to APM: "Actions per minute is the number of actions (such as selecting units or issuing an order) completed within a minute of gameplay in real time strategy games, most notably in Starcraft. High APM is often associated with skill, as it can indicate that a player both knows what to do in the game and has the manual dexterity to carry it out. Software has been developed to analyze players' APM in these games. Beginners often have low APM counts, typically below 50. Professional e-athletes in South Korea usually have average APM scores around 300, but often exceed the 400 mark during intense battle sequences. Notable gamers with over 400 average APM include Lee Young-Ho and Lee Jae-Dong. Park Sung-Joon is noted for the record APM of 818." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actions_per_minute

APM trivia: there was a brief moment in-between two patches in Heroes of Newerth - a popular DoTA clone - in where moving your "hero" to a new location on the map counted as an action. Players simply stepping around rapidly right where they were standing would increase their APM indefinitely.

I believe technically this would be considered APM in all games. In starcraft 1+2 even selecting a control group is considered an action, so simply hiting 1 2 3 4 5 in succession without building units or changing rallies or really doing anything would count as 5 actions.

eAPM, or effective APM is a more advanced attempt to filter out spammy actions (as you describe) and was made up a bit after APM first came out as a statistic and people started gaming the APM stat to try and inflate their egos.

In SC2 there is a bug on the live patch where the APM tab in replays or live games shows the eAPM stat, and the eAPM tab shows the APM stat due to some silly mixup that made it past QA.

> hackermom 3 hours ago

Best mom ever??

"factions"

I think it's also referring to the phenomenon as it exists today in every single online multi-player game that features open PVP as well as closed battleground type PVP, not just StarCraft.

The "zerg", as it was commonly known to all players, presented itself to me in the beginning of 2002 in a well-known and still active MMORPG called Dark Age of Camelot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_age_of_camelot). DAoC-players refer to a mass of ungrouped, uncoordinated players joining in on the large battles between the realms of the game as a "zerg", and to individual players making up the "zerg" as "randoms" (random players; ungrouped) and sometimes as "zergers". The term certainly sprung from the first StarCraft game, but the phenomenon is today embodied not just by NPC units in this or that game, but by actual groups of players, and is seen in practically every MMORPG with PVP.

It is a nice touch how originally there are 6 zerglings coming out and others came in pair.

For anyone who never played Starcraft: zerglings are created in pair, two per egg and the maximum number of eggs are 3. A player who attempts to do a zergling rush wait for the first 3 eggs to be available, hatch them and subsequently make a new pair of zerglings as soon as a new egg is available.

I would have liked Google's implementation more if instead of clicking the little O's to kill them, you get to instead make buildings that produce G's or something to defend. Clicking the O's isn't really starcrafty.

I guess you've never tried to focus fire/snipe banelings that are part of a zerg army moving towards your marine bio force. Accurate clicking is very Starcrafty.

Opera logos attacking page elements? Is there a backstory for this or is it just a coincidence?

That's what I thought at first too. Once I saw the yellow ones it made more sense :).

It's the O:s in the google-logo

Ah, that makes more sense. Opera doesn't exactly represent the Zerg of browsers ;)

It doesn't, but that didn't refrain from me laughing about the search results getting trounced by what really looks like Opera logos.

That's funny. That's exactly what I thought when I first saw it. I figured that's because I opened the page in Opera (my default browser) but then I later realized it was open in Chrome. The O in Google explanation makes more sense, but it really does look a lot like the Opera icon.

I wonder how Google deal with all these little easter eggs from a code perspective. It's pretty impressive that they can add so much extra to a particular search term without it affecting the overall code quality.

I would imagine each search term being something like a key in a database, and each key has an associated field which can link to anything they want. That linker probably then gets attached to a "hook" on their site.

It's just a matter of adding in the hooked code into the associated field in the DB.

I know I over simplified this, but I would assume that's the gist.

Also, the infrastructure already exists for serious reasons, eg Googling for "suicide" will give you a hotline number to call.

So it's not like they added the extra complexity for a laugh!

That's a great idea but I tried and it gave me nothing.

Oh well, time to leave.

It looks like http://i.minus.com/ibbwHvK38EiDQB.PNG for me. Are you in the US?

Breaking News:

"Google's Zerg Rush drives thousands to contemplate suicide"

That's why proper root cause analysis is hard.

Seems to be a US only feature, got nothing in Sweden. The first hit (there are no ads) for "självmord" (suicide in Swedish) is a site offering a guide "for those who have tired of life...and want knowledge about how to end your life in a good way". So no quite the same...

No I'm not but I tried google.com and google.fr. It's really U.S specific then.

It's not US only. These work for me: [selbstmord] on google.de [suicidio] on google.es [zelfmoord] on google.nl

Even longer queries like [como suicidarse sin sentir dolor] on google.es worked. I tried a bunch of things on google.fr and couldn't get it to work.

I figured this would be easy to hack, and I was right:

1) Insert jQuery into the search results page by using this bookmarklet: javascript:void(function(){if(!document.getElementById('jQscript')){var%20jQscript=document.createElement('script');jQscript.id='jQscript';jQscript.src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.mi...);

2) use the console to execute the following, moving all zerglings to 250x250: setInterval(function() { $('.zr_zergling_container').css('left', '250px').css('top', '250px'); }, 50);

3) click away. #winning

When we were code-reviewing it, we had a bunch of fun trying to hack it programmatically and sharing ridiculously high scores (things like 12,000 zerglings killed). It's not even as hard as you mention: you can simulate a mouseclick on all zergling divs programmatically, and instantly clear the screen of every wave.

Then I went and just entered the code to pop up a ShareBox programmatically on the JS console, letting me edit the share message to whatever I wanted it to be. "I took down 1,853,642.93 zerglings with 3.14 * 10^42 APM." And I didn't even need to play the game!

Yeah, you had the fortunate ability to view the non-minified version. ;)

My first approach was the mouseclick (using $('.zr_zergling_container').click()) but for whatever reason that wouldn't work. I got fed up and just decided to try moving the zerglings to a clickable location. Ha!

Ha, I spent a bit trying the same method, and it didn't work for me either. Didn't have the insight to move them though.

I was able to rack up a score of 1032 actual zerg kills (https://plus.google.com/u/0/105804947146425070365/posts/LKju...) using simulated mouse clicks on the zerglings. It's not that hard: https://gist.github.com/2514407 . There are relatively simple guards one could engineer into the zerg rush program to prevent simple hacks like this though, if one cared to. Fun stuff!

I showed my good friend my approach, he came up with this: https://gist.github.com/2513841

Nice :D

The GG at the end was a very nice touch.

gg'ing when you win is so bad manner

I thought the same thing, haha

APM counter is a nice touch as well :).

(APM stands for Actions Per Minute, where Actions in StarCraft are input events that do something, like selecting an unit or ordering it to attack. Professional players tend to have >200 APM).

200 is on the low side? I'm amateur and hit that commonly during games. I think JulyZerg was on record to hit 800 at one point. Lord only knows how that was physically possible. I would credit the source to TeamLiquid's Wiki (I believe) but I cannot search it while at work.

To avoid confusion, blizzard recently added something called EPM (effective actions per minute). Those are the one who counts. APM can be spammed or increased a lot by, for example, selecting all the larva in all your hatcheries and making units pressing one key. Pro players have a constant ~200 APM, not only for those moments.

July might have spiked at 800 at some point, but average is around 300 for progamers (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute).

I was searching for information about Zerg Rushes, you insensitive clod!

I realise you're joking, but for anyone looking for advice regarding how to play SC or SC2, I recommend http://wiki.teamliquid.net/

I need https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/multitask.html now!

For some reason my brain read the last part of that url as "Mutalisk" ;p

Well, if this was an attempt to get me to share stuff on Google+, it succeeded.

If someone shares a link to a public Facebook post, do you consider it an attempt to get you to share stuff on Facebook? I find it odd that you assume someone sharing something on Google+ is an attempt to get you to use Google+ rather than an attempt to share the content with you.

I believe he's talking about the fact that, at the end of the Zerg Rush game, Google prompts you to share your score on Google+.

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't play until the end of the game.

It even comes in waves of 6-es, brilliant :)

6 'ling rush FTW!

Is it Opera Browser logos you're supposed to shoot?

Half of them looks like that. It's actually the two "o"s from Google logo. But funny coincidence nevertheless, Opera even tweeted it: https://twitter.com/#!/opera/status/195796939709743105

Works on iPad too! High score of 74 :) http://imgur.com/Q52P9

Interestingly, I saw this comment on reddit yesterday that was a "leak" about this new easter egg. (http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/stek5/what_little... )

Nice share! This is the first time that my clicking skills were needed to 'defend' a search result page. :)

Unimpressed Flash: "I just killed all the little O's, were they supposed to do something?"

It's coincidental this post is popular because less than a week ago I decided to relive the past and install StarCraft: Brood War to play over LAN. It's still just as fun, but I forgot how easily the game consumes your time.

You click on them to kill them? That's not how Starcraft works...

Actually, in Starcraft: Brood Wars you could explode a critter with a "nuke" animation by clicking repeatedly on it. :)

I would have done much better if I could type 1a2a3a to send groups of marines. :)

gg!

It almost seems like some Freudian reaction to the recent accusations that Goggle search is broken.

Well, shit.

This is all I'm going to be doing today...

Why today? Do they know something about, say, the HOTS release that I don't?

No speedlings? what is it, bronze league?

I can't get it to work. What gives?

I had the same problem on my Chrome browser, odd right? I searched in IE and it worked.

I tried in Opera, Firefox, IE. Nothing.

Having a nice big monitor helps.

Spawn more Overlords!

kekekek

Googlers have too much time on their hands.

Not too much time but fun spending their time on things like that.

"X has too much time on their hands" is just a smug way of saying "I don't know what it's like to be creative."

Yeah, good to see they are spending their 20% time solving real problems.

Curing boredom and bringing joy to the user are solutions to real problems!

More like helping to perpetuate the image that the corporation where I work is a "fun" place to be, helping to improve our image and attract the right recruits. Big G are masters at this, just look at how much positive press they receive around their logo doodles.

That's rather cynical. The project was actually just implemented by a couple of employees who are Starcraft fans, not a mandate from management. The reality is Google actually really is a "fun" place to be.

Hence my original point that it was probably done on 20% time (not mandated by management). I disagree that I am being cynical for pointing out the self-evident facts that:

1. Google spends a lot of quality dev hours programming "fun" easter eggs/doodles/April fools sections into their products.

2. These efforts gain a lot of positive spin in the media.

3. This positive spin helps to improve the image of the corporation as a fun place to work/do business with etc.

Now given how many hours that go into some of these efforts, I find it difficult to believe that at least some of them must be mandated by management, but to me that's irrelevant: I'd much rather see all of this dev time being spent on:

1. Making Google's products better.

2. Contributing to an OSS project.

Humans are not robots. Squishy human elements like motivation, attitude, camaraderie, and "fun" have material productivity consequences, especially in cognition-driven fields like software.

"Quality dev hours" are not a fungible resource. In fact, they're so un-fungible that we commonly accept that beyond a certain point the value of a dev hour is negative. Maybe time spent on these projects invigorates engineers to do better work in the rest of their work hours? Maybe not. But the issue is more subtle than you're giving it credit for.

Plus... well... THIS particular simple throwaway Easter egg is what bothers you? You know there are several multi-billion-dollar industries that employ smart people in creating "fun" ways for people to unproductively spend their time, right?

> Plus... well... THIS particular simple throwaway Easter egg is what bothers you? You know there are several multi-billion-dollar industries that employ smart people in creating "fun" ways for people to unproductively spend their time, right?

Yes, and they are called games companies, and I love their products and they really are fun. Is Google a games/entertainment company, or a company that sells advertising?

And no, it is not this particular Google Easter egg that bothers me, all of them do. I made that clear in my last comment. The fact that almost every one of them ends up on a thread on HN like this one is distracting (for the record this is the first one I have commented negatively on, but they're all as bad).

qq

gg

Google keeps repeating the same trick over and over again. I don't find it funny/interesting any more. How about something new Google?

They've done this before?

Search: "tilt" for example. I have seen this about 2 years ago and it was really cool. This effect is just iteration on the same idea ...

Yes, Google should be ashamed for implementing more than one easter egg. It being something completely different is no excuse!

Right, almost as though they had fun implementing the first one and they felt like doing another.

Also, google 'do a barrel roll'. Not sure if you've seen that one.

In what sense are these the same?