Do a Barrel Roll! In Google’s Search, and Enjoy

As a mid-late 20’s something, I’m blessed with remembering the glory days of video games with both the SNES and Nintendo 64. One of the games which everyone had to play at the time was Star Fox, and the sequel Star Fox 64. While both games are renowned as classics, Star Fox 64 had one element which transcended gaming and entered the internet meme world – “DO A BARREL ROLL!“.

Now, Google is in on it, by letting their entire front page do a barrel roll if you search for either “do a barrel roll” (of course), or searching for “z or r twice“.

The simplicity of the meme is key. Venturing over to YouTube, here’s the original portion of the game that asked players to tap Z or R twice. The meme has gotten so huge that I had to search for “do a barrel roll original” to find it.

That has lead to this College Humor video, with Star Fox accepting you can’t barrel roll away from who you are:

There are plenty of other barrel roll videos to look for, with one of my favorites being the 10 hour loop of the quote. People are so taken with the fact that they can do a barrel roll in Google, it has become one of the trending topics for the day on Twitter. Here’s what some have had to say:

I absolutely love stories like this; proving that there’s the kid in all of us who would rather play with the box than the toy. All of the things we could be discussing on Twitter, and instead we just want to DO A BARREL ROLL! Love it, have fun and don’t hurt yourself. Just wish I could find the Google engineer with a nerd like sense of humor, so I could shake his hand.