What makes the whole thing especially cool is how little bits of Japanese culture and mythology are sprinkled throughout the whole thing. ▼ The team captains are a crow, a fox, a kappa, and a bull.

You also get to join one of four teams, each represented by a color and a creature, with your minigame results added to the team’s tally on a leaderboard based on players’ performance worldwide. At various locations you’ll find sporting events, all of which are also part of the real-world Tokyo Olympics, and hitting the action button starts mini games for climbing, table tennis, rugby, marathon running, skateboarding, synchronized swimming, and archery, all with their own backstory and opening animation. Using the arrow keys and space bar, or on-screen icons if you’re playing on a smartphone, you can walk Lucky around the island and talk to its inhabitants. He’s here to compete in the Champion Island Games, a gathering of the world’s best athletes that occurs every four years! As the animated sequence comes to a close, the reason for the Doodle’s pixel art becomes clear, as the visual style changes and you’re dropped into an RPG-style overworld!

Lucky’s steely gaze quickly dissolves into a wide smile of wonder as he arrives on Champion Island, a version of Japan that mixes traditional and modern architecture and has a population made up of people, anthropomorphized animals, and creatures from Japanese mythos.īut Lucky isn’t here just to take in the sights. Click on the button, and you’re rewarded with an adorable animation sequence where we meet Lucky the ninja cat. It was a given that Google was going to celebrate the start of the Tokyo Olympics with a Google Doodle, and sure enough, if you go the search engine’s top page right now you’ll see a picture of a cat dressed in a ninja outfit standing on top of a torii gate.īut two things are especially worth noting here: the “play” button, indicating this Google Doodle has an animated portion, and the pixel-art aesthetic reminiscent of 2-D video games. The Google Doodle for the Tokyo Olympics’ start offers retro fun, insight into Japanese culture, and a skateboarding tanuki.

Google cat game