Do a Barrel Roll 100 Times
The button on this page spins the whole page through a full 360 degree roll, and the count box repeats it as many times as you set: 100, 1,000, 10,000 or more. It runs here, with no plugin and no redirect.
What the button does
It rotates the page one full turn, then does it again until the count runs out. Set 100 and it turns a hundred times. The same button stops it. Nothing is downloaded and nothing leaves the page.
Where the phrase comes from
“Do a barrel roll” is a line from Star Fox 64, the Nintendo 64 game released in 1997, where Peppy Hare tells you to perform an evasive spin. The in-game command is to tap Z or R twice, which is why z or r twice is searched almost as often as the phrase itself. It became an internet catchphrase years later when Google made it a search easter egg: type it into Google and the results page turns once.
Google’s version rolls once. It does not read a number out of your query, which is exactly why people go looking for a page that does.
It is not really a barrel roll
Pilots would call the maneuver in the game, and the spin on this page, an aileron roll: the aircraft rotates around its own long axis and stays on the same line of flight. A true barrel roll carries the aircraft around a corkscrew path, tracing a helix through the air, so it ends up somewhere else. The game used the wrong name and the wrong name stuck.
How long each count actually takes
At roughly one second per turn:
| Count | Time at one second per roll |
|---|---|
| 100 | about 1 minute 40 seconds |
| 1,000 | about 17 minutes |
| 10,000 | about 2 hours 45 minutes |
| 100,000 | about 28 hours |
Those are the counts people actually search for, which is why they are offered. Nobody watches the last two.
Motion, and when not to use it
The effect is a CSS transform rotating the page wrapper through a full turn, driven by a keyframe animation. Two honest warnings come with it. First, if your system is set to reduce motion, this page respects that and will not spin, because full-screen rotation makes some people ill and can be genuinely dangerous for a small number of others. Second, a long run of rolls keeps the browser repainting the whole page, so an older phone will heat up and the battery will drain faster than it should. Stop it when the joke has landed.
Other one-button pages
The same idea, minus the motion: press the button 100 times counts your clicks against a target, and flip a coin 100 times gives you a hundred results you can copy. Everything built around a count of a hundred is indexed on copy and paste 100 times.