If you have a few minutes to kill, might we suggest typing “Atari Breakout” into Google Image Search? It will return images of the classic game, but after a few seconds those images will change into blocks, and your computer will beep and boop at you as the screen is transformed into the Atari classic Breakout. Google doesn’t want anyone getting any work done today.
The Breakout Easter egg celebrates the game’s 37th anniversary, because as we all know 37 is the “Easter egg anniversary.” Breakout debuted in 1976, and is one of the most addictive games of all time, so don’t be surprised when you look up and realize hours have gone by, and all you’ve accomplished with your day was smashing bricks.
While playing Google’s Breakout, I experienced a weird anomaly. My system froze, and when I restarted and restored my session in Firefox the game came back up, but with the words “Boston Terrier” in the search box, and photos of dogs as the blocks. I couldn’t get this to reproduce, and haven’t found a way to change the blocks into photos of terriers or any other dogs.
Dogs or no dogs, this is still a lot of fun.
Update: Thanks to reader “hungerfan” for pointing out that Google changes the images to a randomly selected search term after each completed screen. I must not have noticed that the blocks switched over to terriers before my system crashed, but after playing again and beating one screen Google switched the blocks to image results for “football.” I think that proves the randomness of the terms, because I don’t think I’ve ever googled “football” in my life.
- Bioshock Infinite has some audio easter eggs of its own
- Make actual Easter eggs that look like Angry Birds
- Google’s Pixel Chromebook has a familiar easter egg
