Google Stadia is officially shutting down on January 18, and the team behind the video game streaming service has gifted the world Worm Game, the final title that will be released for the platform and one that was used to test many of Stadia’s features before it launched.
Worm Game can be played now by anyone with a Google Chrome browser, and it is very much inspired by the classic game Snake. It’s not the most advanced game graphically, but it does have multiple levels, the ability to change the color of your worm, and four modes – Campaign, Arcade, Multiplayer, and Build.
It’s also important to note that, if you’d like to try Worm Game, you need to do so by January 18 as it will become unplayable when Google Stadia is officially shut down.
It’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain of game development, and it is a fascinating look at how the team helped bring Stadia to life.
“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” The Stadia Platform Content team wrote. “‘Worm Game’ is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”
Alongside Worm Game, the Stadia team has one other surprise in store for those who invested in the failed platform, as it will be releasing a “self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller” next week. We don’t have the exact details as to how it will work as of yet, but those will come “on release.”
Google Stadia launched in 2019 and is a cloud gaming service that allows users to stream video games, including such AAA titles as Cyberpunk 2022 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, to devices that have Google Chrome. It doesn’t matter how powerful the device is either, as everything is run on Google’s cloud service.
Google announced in September 2022 that Stadia would be shutting down in January 2023, but it made the generous gesture of refunding “all Stadia hardware purchases made though the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.”
While Stadia may not live to see another month, the tech behind it will live on as Google has already began offering it as a white-label product. This means other companies can use the technology without saying, “hey, this is run by Google Stadia!” AT&T has already taken advantage of this when it offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its users for free.
To learn much more about the rise and fall of Google Stadia, be sure to check out our in-depth look at what happened to a platform that Google promised would be the “future of gaming.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.