The Story of Google Doodles
H.G. Wells: Sept. 5 -21, 2009
"This three-part series to celebrate H.G. Wells' birthday was pretty special for us, says Lopez. "We're all big fans of all things science, and H.G. Wells is one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. So while we wanted to honor him, we thought, 'why not take it a step further?' Orson Welles did a radio play version of The War of the Worlds that gave listeners the mistaken impression that aliens were invading. We wanted to create a similar stir on the internet.
"So the first doodle we posted was a flying saucer, and we tweeted 'All your O are belong to us,' because the craft was taking away the O. If you're a geek on the internet you know it's a reference to a poorly translated Japanese game.
"Then the second we did these crop circles. And we tweeted the coordinates of the longitude and latitude of where Wells' aliens landed. By this time there were all these theories floating around on the internet—everything from 'Google's donated an O to a non-profit organization,' to 'Google's discovered that there actually were aliens.'
"The last doodle, posted on Wells' birthday, lets everyone in on the joke—we were just celebrating H.G. Wells."