Final Google Stadia Game, Released Today, Is A Piece Of History

Image: Google

If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is shutting down and shutting down next week. But before the death of the never-quite-successful game-streaming service, it provided a neat (and free) little freebie that you can only play days before it’s all gone offline.

Launched in 2019, Google Stadia was an expensive and massive investment by Google in the world of video games. Powered by the cloud, meaning a collection of offsite servers and computers, Stadia’s big promise was instant play on the go. No more costly updates or consoles. And while it did work at times, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library, and internet costs eventually doomed the service. Sure, some superfans put thousands of hours into it, but for the most part, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game rig.

So it was no surprise that in September last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so close, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Still, Google has released one last game. But don’t expect a great RPG or open-world remake. Instead, the latest Stadia game is Worm Game, an in-house developed title used to test Stadia long before it became a public service.

We were probably never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game as it sports pretty sketchy graphics and somewhat ugly menus. But in Stadia’s final days, it looks like the developers working on the project may have given its community one last treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game because it’s free. (Which makes sense given that the Stadia store has already stopped working.)

The game’s store page has this nice and touching description of the game and how to use it:

Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came into the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title that we used to test many Stadia features, long before our public launch in 2019, through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team has spent a LOT of time playing it. , and we thought we’d share it with you. Thank you for playing and for everything.

Is Worm Game an incredibly important or amazing thing? Not really. However, it’s still really cool to peek behind the scenes, and thanks to the Worm Game videos, this little piece of testing software will be preserved somewhat for people to look back on years from now.

In other exciting news from End Of Stadia, Google has confirmed that starting next week, it will begin allowing players to functionally unlock Bluetooth from its Stadia controller.

It’s a neat way to make the controller – which houses one of my favorite modern D-pads – more useful and easier to connect to more devices. I doubt the developers who have worked on Stadia for years were planning on the controller being the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.