This Doodle’s Key Themes
Play the Great Ghoul Duel to celebrate Halloween.
Celebrating Halloween 2018
About the Doodle
Happy Halloween! The 2018 Halloween Doodle marks a wickedly exciting milestone: our first-ever multiplayer interactive game Doodle, powered by Google Cloud!
Players around the world join forces on one of two teams of four in the Great Ghoul Duel. Exploring one of several spooky maps, players must collect as many wandering spirit flames as they can in two minutes and return them to their homebase. After time’s up, the team that has collected the most spirit flames wins. But beware! - opponents can intercept spirits from one another as they bring them back to homebase.
As an added BOOOOnus, ghosts who collect the most spirit flames will unlock special powers such as speed boosts, night vision, and much more! Players can also share personal superlatives awarded to them at the end of the match based on their scary good - or just plain scary - performances.
In a Doodle first, players can choose to host a game with up to seven friends and family via a custom invitation link OR just play with randomized players around the globe. The team built several systems to enable this multiplayer gaming, all running on the Google Cloud Platform, including integrating Open Match, a highly-scalable, open source matchmaking framework cofounded by Google Cloud and Unity.
Thanks for stopping by! We hope your journey to achieve #SquadGhouls is terrifyingly spooktacular.
Ready, set, GHOUL!
About the Halloween 2018 Doodle
Join in as ghosts around the world gather to play their own version of Trick-or-Treat: The Great Ghoul Duel! Ghosts team up and compete to see who can collect the most wandering spirit flames before the moon is gone....but not without some unexpected twists along the way.
Meet the Characters
Team Purple
Team Green
Early ghost designs above
Team Great Ghoul Duel Doodle
Google Doodle Team
Art Lead | Nate Swinehart
UX Design | Diana Tran
Producer | Colin Duffy
Engineering | Tom Tabanao, Jonathan Shneier, Mark Ivey, Brian Murray, Ben McMahan, Jacob Howcroft
Doodle Team Leads | Jessica Yu, Brian Kaas, Ryan Germick
Marketing | Perla Campos, Carlos Diaz
Music/Sound | aivi & surasshu, Stemage
Production Support | My-Linh Le
Volunteer Engineer Support | Brandon DeRosier, Monica Rodriguez, Katlyn Edwards
Google Cloud Team
Product Manager | Micah Baker
Solutions Architect | Joseph Holley
Marketing | Laith Massarweh, Shana Matthews
Professional Services | Nita Meng
Where this Doodle appeared
Discover more Doodles by color
What’s your Birthday Doodle?
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The very first Doodle launched as an “out of office” message of sorts when company founders Larry and Sergey went on vacation.
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The first Doodle launched in 1998, before Google was officially incorporated.
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The first same day Doodle was created in 2009 when water was discovered on the moon.
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Doodle for Google student contest winners have gone on to become professional artists
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The time it takes from sketch to launch for a Doodle varies widely: some have taken years and others just a few hours!
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Hundreds of Doodles launch around the world every year. Often, several different ones are live in different places at the same time!
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Our most frequently recurring Doodle character is Momo the Cat - named after a real-life team pet!
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