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ABC News on Google's "Do a Barrel Roll" Easter egg - The stupid hurts so bad
Brandon Davenport
So a few days ago, the internet caught fire due to the fact Google had planted some really fun Easter eggs in their search page, but more realistically, they were meant to be technical demos for CSS3 and HTML5. If you type “tilt” into the search box, the entire webpage tilts a few degrees, but that wasn’t what started the excitement. If you type “do a barrel roll” in the Google search box, Google’s entire webpage does a complete barrel roll and sends surges of Star Fox 64 nostalgia up your spine. That’s essentially where the story ends, but ABC news took the leftovers and decided to bake them into an abomination of an article also involving Apple for some reason…
Google Channels Apple and Nintendo says ABC News
So as you can see from the video above, the “do a barrel roll” easter egg was clearly a reference to Star Fox 64, but unfortunately ABC tech news editor, Ned Potter, doesn’t quite understand what he was writing about. It’s not his fault for being unable catching the Star Fox 64 reference, or knowing what CSS3 does, but if he had looked at the search box in-front of him and did a bit of research, he could have written an article that was informative and wasn’t held together by verbal diarrhea.
“Did the Earth move for you? The image in your browser should — well, it should have done a barrel roll. Is it a takeoff on Apple’s iPhones and iPads with their built-in accelerometers — those little gizmos that tell a device when it’s been moved, turned on its side, propped up with one end on top? One blogger suggested Google is invoking Nintendo’s ‘Star Fox.’”
That was the meat of Ned’s article, which is part of the aforementioned journalistic leftover-abomination, but it wasn’t the best part. When ABC (we presume Ned himself) questioned Google if this easter egg was inspired by Star Fox 64, Google did the only thing they could they majestically trolled their pants off. Ned said Google’s reply stated there were “No such notions”, which of course (sarcasm) in turn debunked the notion of Star Fox 64 having any influence on the easter egg.
It’s been said many times that if highly trusted sources for news (like ABC) are going to report on story’s like this, they need people who understand what they’re talking about. This is pure link-bait, and the fact that Ned has little to no clue about the information in his article makes us all the more upset. It’s articles like these that give the average joe a broken perspective on the landscape of technology.
Read - ABC’s article about Googles search easter eggs
Some gems we found in the comments
“As a journalist, maybe you should at least take the effort to search where the reference originates from. Embarrassing.” - EPZ
“Not an Apple reference. Get over thine self.” - DAVE
“really, so… you think apple even invented the screen rotation! your a idiot the screen rotation comes from basic pc settings that they set to be changed via the acceleration, and goggles graphic inst even that, its a PowerPoint effect also by MS,
your world apparently revolves around a idea that apple invented everything and the rest of the world is catching up to apples outdated pieces of junk.
apple only sells there overpriced pieces of outdated hardware because they had the ipod which was a cool item before that they only sold macs to people who do non professional animations (because they have a good animation program included and those cost 2.5k for a better one on the pc) that was there entire business, give people a expensive program to sell $300 of parts for $2000+.now, they will give out macs to company’s, in some cases, to make idiots thank there computer must be better because they saw some corporate guy using one. despite the fact that a $500 PC even with viruses will outrun the best mac.” - C1C2C3C4C
“What do you mean people don’t care? You are obviously very deprived, for Starfox is one of the first video games created. I hope you know what Super Smash Bros or SSBM or SSBB are.” - HIGHQUALITY
