Google Batman

You are the light, not the man

Gotham is modelled rather than drawn here, rooftops pressed out of dark violet clay inside a white frame. There is no character to steer. Your cursor is the beam, and everything the beam touches decides it has somewhere else to be. Sweep it slowly along a rooftop and figures peel off one by one, dropping out of frame with the counter climbing behind them.

The falloff is deliberately harsh. Outside the cone the city is almost black, so you are always working with a small circle of information, which is the entire mood the batman easter egg google crowd is looking for.

The signal changes the room

Light it and a pale violet disc appears against the cloud layer with a bat cut out of the middle, plus a beam angling up from behind the skyline. It does nothing mechanically. It is pure atmosphere, and turning it off afterwards genuinely makes the scene feel colder.

Batarangs

Click anywhere and one flies in from the left, spinning, riding a shallow sine wave at whatever height your cursor was last at. It clears anyone it passes close to. Aim it by parking your cursor at the right height first, then clicking.

Night vision

Widens the cone and softens the darkness so you can clear a rooftop in one pass. It makes the scene easier and slightly less interesting, which feels about right for a gadget.

How this one gets found

Usually by accident, while someone is going through a list of google easter eggs and picking whichever name they recognise. It sits at the moody end of the collection, closer to google matrix and black hole google than to the bright silly ones.

For contrast, let it snow google is the exact opposite in tone, and google fan is about as far from Gotham as this collection gets. If you want something with an actual fail state, google space invaders is next door.

Notes

The counter tracks how many figures you have cleared, not how many you hit with a batarang, so sweeping the beam is by far the more efficient method. Send more trouble adds five at a time and can be pressed as often as you like.