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Alien Monster

A friendly-looking, tentacled space creature with two eyes. Most major platforms style their design after aliens in classic arcade games like Space Invaders, rendering it purple and pixellated, as if in 8-bit graphics.

Samsung’s design resembles an octopus and previously featured a big-brained alien, à la Star Trek. Earlier designs from Google and Microsoft depicted more cartoon-like alien monsters.

May be used of topics concerning extraterrestrial life, outer space, gaming, and computing, but also enjoys a range of idiosyncratic applications, such as conveying a sense of weirdness, wackiness, or excitement, given that the emoji looks like it is raising its arms shouting Yay! on many platforms.

Alien Monster was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.