Google offer "humble thanks" to Stadia players with free prototype game

Google Stadia will close its doors on January 18th. As a parting gift, Google have released the game they built to test the streaming service before the streaming service launched. "Worm Game" is a version of Snake with plenty of levels and modes to try and, of course, it's playable within your browser.

The Stadia team referred to the release as a "humble thanks" to players of the service:

"Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world," says the description on its Stadia page. "'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."

You can give Worm Game a try without a Stadia subscription for 180 minutes using your free trial, if you're curious. For me, it was an illustrative demonstration of Stadia's challenges: I have mega-quick fibre optic internet, but I still experienced input lag that made playing Worm Game difficult.

Google's other efforts to wrap up Stadia are already underway, including hardware and software refunds for anyone who spent money on Stadia during its lifetime. Most of these refunds are expected to be complete by January 18th. They also tweeted that they're releasing a "self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller."

While Stadia is closing down for players, Google have said that its streaming technology may live on by being made "available to our industry partners." That would place it alongside several other game streaming services that have turned into middleware, including Gaikai and OnLive.