In case you missed it, as part of Geek Week, YouTube added a fun Easter egg that lets you play the classic “Missile Command” Atari video game. To trigger it, play any video, click on white space, type in “1980”, and your game will load.
Once you click to continue, the countdown (with bonus “Zero Wing” reference) is on and the game begins.
You must defend your video from an onslaught of missiles coming to destroy your the video you’re trying to watch. Which in this case, fittingly, features a video of “Missile Command” on the old Atari 2600.
The gameplay is what you’d expect if you’re familiar with the classic “Missile Command.” Use your mouse to line up your shot and click to launch your counter-missiles.
Miss, and things start getting destroyed.
When you fail and your video is destroyed, which is inevitable because this is “Missile Command”, you will see a “game over” message and your video will stop playing.
Here are some other geeky Easter eggs to check out on YouTube:
- Search “/ geek week” (without quotes) to turn YouTube into ASCII.
- Search “beam me up scotty” to see your search results “beamed” to you.
- Search “use the force luke” to gain power over the YouTube results on this page.
- Search “fibonacci” to see the results appear via the golden spiral.
- While watching a video, click on white space, then type “1337” to transform the comments into hacker “leet speak”.
This isn’t Google’s first tribute to classic arcade games. Previously, Pac-Man got a Doodle, and most recently “Breakout” became a game on Google Images.