Doctor Who Google doodle: the story behind the Whodle

Doctor Who Google doodle: the story behind the Whodle

As Google unveils its largest ever doodle to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, we meet the designer Matthew Cruickshank who created it. Guardian.com
 This summer, engineers at Google London added the Tardis to Google Street View, but that wasn't enough for Doctor Who fans, 4,000 of whom have signed a petition asking Google to do a doodle for the show's 50th Anniversary.

Today, those wishes were granted: not only did Google make the doodle, but the game gracing every Google homepage in the world today is one of the biggest the company has ever produced. But despite appearances, the "Whodle" – as it's known internally – is the work of just five people, led by Matthew Cruickshank, a Brit who has been working at the company as a full-time doodler for just over a year. . . . 

. . . . With a mammoth task ahead, the first job was to boil the entirety of Doctor Who down into something manageable. "I wrote the great things about Doctor Who, the things that fans would want to see. It came down to celebrating – obviously – all of the Doctors; I love the idea of regeneration. And then Daleks, and Tardises. Those are basically the three key points.

"The thing is that he's a Time Lord, a time traveller, so I really wanted to get the feeling across that you could travel to different eras. I definitely didn't want you to just play one level and that is it, I love the idea of the Doctor being able zoom around the universe."

Working with a character still very much in production can pose its own set of problems, but the BBC leapt at the idea. "I think they were maybe expecting a static doodle, or perhaps something that moved or animated, and we actually said well, we'd really like to try a multi-level platform game. They just said 'absolutely fantastic, go for it.' And they were also able to give us sound effects from the actual show." Read the whole article.
Today’s search engine’s homepage Doodle is on a whole other level for fandom love. Doctor Who fanatics can now play a five-level game all about the Doctor. First you pick which of the eleven Doctors suits you best as your avatar. Then it’s time to solve a mystery: The Daleks have stolen the letters of ‘Google’ and it’s up to users to work their way through various settings to retrieve them all. Then go ahead brag about your finishing time on social — users can post results on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ with a push of a button . Entertainment Weekly 
More about the Doctor Who Google Doodle