Google gets in on the Star Wars fun with clutch of interactive easter eggs

Google has continued to roll out easter eggs inspired by Star Wars: The Force Awakens, including a way to fight stormtroopers on your computer, as fans prepare to head to movie theaters for midnight showings.

There’s also the Google Search text crawl – search for the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” (no quotes) to check it out. Lightsaber Escape, which debuted on Wednesday, is an old-fashioned “rail shooter”-style app you can play through Google’s Chrome browser, provided you have a fast enough internet connection. Modern media companies have suitable internet connections for this purpose, the Guardian has found.

Google also has a large Cardboard VR module for Star Wars; using it, it’s possible to interact with droids, watch spaceships crash, and receive messages “on” alien worlds, including the new film’s desert planet Jakku (for further information about Jakku, please consult Wookieepedia).

Clay Bavor, vice-president of product management for Google, said that the marketing partnership during the run-up to the movie posed minimal hardship to his staff. “You can regularly spot Darth Vaders, dogs dressed like Yoda and even the occasional stormtrooper roaming the halls of our data centers,” he wrote.

Some of the changes are part of a new overall experience within Google’s apps; in Google Maps, for example, the little figure you drop on the street to open Street View can turn into a stormtrooper. Gmail and YouTube’s loading bars are lightsaber-ish, and Google Translate now works with Aurabesh. Even Waze is droid-themed.

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Disney executives are on record saying that the marketing push for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been frugal by blockbuster standards, which routinely stretch into eight, sometimes even nine figures (Paramount’s Iron Man 2 clocked in at over $100m just in marketing dollars).

But Disney is famous for using its own platforms to cross-promote (the Star Wars promo and every Marvel trailer have debuted on TV on the company’s own network, ABC – usually during Jimmy Kimmel Live).

And, since the company is under shareholder pressure to make its $4bn acquisition pay out, its advertising integrations have been strategic. The partnership with Google is longstanding – the company’s early smartphone, the Droid, was a branding partnership between Google, Lucasfilm and hardware manufacturers HTC and Motorola (Lucasfilm holds the trademark on the word).

Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, said in May that recruiting new fans alongside stalwarts was part of the delicate advertising strategy for the film. “We’re mindful of the fact that there’s a whole generation of people out there that were not as steeped in the Star Wars lore and not as, in effect, in love with the franchise as an older generation,” he said on Disney’s second-quarter earnings call.

“And there are markets around the world that weren’t as developed 10 years ago and beyond that,” Iger continued. “China is probably the best example; it’s now the No 2 movie market in the world. Obviously, when the last Star Wars film was released, it was barely a market from a movie perspective.”

The film opens across the country on Friday after limited screenings beginning Monday. Its 4,100-theater release is the widest ever recorded.