The UK is getting ready to bid farewell to the Wimbledon tournament for the year. Google has made a habit of celebrating momentous public events with little easter eggs and references on their site. In honor of Wimbledon, you can play a mini tennis game on the search engine’s results page by following a simple series of steps.
Steps to playing the game
1. Open Google Chrome and go to the main Google search page. Alternatively, you can type in the required command in the address bar if you have Google as your default search engine.
2. Using either of the previous options, search for the term “Wimbledon scores.” This will take you to the main results page covering all the information relating to Wimbledon, including a purple header located at the top of the screen carrying the latest scores of the top players in the tournament.
3. Keep scrolling to the left of the purple header, past the Men’s Singles Score, Women’s Singles Score and so on until you reach the end. You will see a small green tennis ball icon. Hover your cursor over the icon, and you will see that it is not just there for decoration and can be clicked on.
4. Click on the icon to expand the purple header, and remove the player scores. Instead, the main area of the header now functions as a gaming screen featuring a green tennis field with a net in the middle and with a large play button near the top.
5. Click on the Play button to start the game. Your player will quickly move downwards to take his place at the lower half of the screen, while an AI opponent will walk on to the upper half of the screen. The appearance of the cutesy player characters changes each time you start the game.
6. If you are using a laptop, you can move your player left and right by using the left and right arrows on your typing pad. But you can move your player more smoothly if you are playing the game on your mobile screen by swiping the player rapidly to the left or right.
Ping Pong Tennis
Since you are playing against an AI program that is apparently set to maximum difficulty, the match only ends with your defeat. The game is basically a throwback to the 8-bit ping pong video games of yesteryear, with the superficial appearance of a tennis match where the players can only move from side to side. As you keep playing the game, the speed of the ball increases, so the longer you play, the greater your chances of missing the ball and losing the match.
Conclusion
It’s not the most engrossing game, with much better tennis video game alternatives available on the Google Play store. But if you’re looking to pass an idle few minutes before your next Google search, or if you just happen to prefer old-school video games, then you might enjoy this novelty take on Wimbledon.
