Goo Turns Nine

Scott Hardie | February 23, 2007
Sometimes the goo game can be as hard for me to keep up with each day as it is for you, but generally I'm as happy with it now as I've ever been. It's a pleasure to keep running it after all this time and have so many dedicated players. You all have kept me going through a lot, and I hope to give you the best game I can.

Recently, I've been using unexpected pockets of free time to enhance the game a little:

Hall of Fame - Mike Eberhart is 2007's deserving inductee, which shouldn't be a surprise. I notice that Mike joins the Hall on the verge of becoming Goo Master (which would have been a nice accomplishment to mention), just as Denise was once inducted to the Hall on the verge of becoming Goo Master herself. I appreciate Mike's contributions to this site more and more each year, and my essay about him is my way of thanking him for everything he's done for the game. He's been a great participant and an excellent player. Congrats on the honor, Mike.

Request a Goo - This has been live for a few weeks now, but I didn't make a big deal out of it because this is something like the fourth time I've built the damn thing. Unlike before, you can now create your own goos using Photoshop and other tools and submit them as part of the request from the beginning. Anyway, go nuts with it. Every request helps and nearly every request will be granted sooner or later.

Goos in the News - I'm especially proud to bring back this dusty relic from the 1999-2000 version of the site. Back then, the game was weekly and I created every html page myself, so it wasn't much trouble to fill in a sidebar with some links to news headlines about previous goos. Now everything is a script, and I pushed the limits of my coding expertise to A) get headline data from Google News, B) do it in a way that won't slow down the site (1 second per connection), and C) write some artificial intelligence to discern who's really newsworthy at the moment and rank them. For instance, George W. Bush makes many more headlines than other goos every day, so the program has to recognize what is a surge in Bush news versus a typical ho-hum day. The program will gradually get smarter and smarter about recognizing these surges, but so far (as I write this) it's already wise to identify Smith, Spears, McCain, and Giuliani as among the most newsworthy today of all 950 goos. This page isn't meant to be anything more than a mildly fun gimmick, but for me it was a programming feat over several weekends and I'm proud of it. (News headlines have also been added to all expired goos.)

Amy Austin | February 23, 2007
Oh... I just noticed a typo in your banner for Mike, Scott -- unless you've changed the name of the game to "Celegrity Goo Game"? ;-)

Kerry Odell | February 24, 2007
I thought it was a pun...using the g to reference goo. Hmmmm....

Scott Hardie | February 24, 2007
Fixed, thanks. Consequences of trying to do all this at midnight.