Protect your cat videos for great justice. A new YouTube easter egg lets you play Missile Command — that artifact of early '80s Cold War consciousness and Golden Age game mechanics — above whatever video you’re watching. Just load up the Flash player and type "1980" anywhere outside a text field to start shooting down a never-ending barrage of incoming ICBMs.
The easter egg is part of YouTube’s "Geek Week" celebration alongside other secrets like a "leetspeak" comments mode and an homage to the Fibonacci number sequence, among others. Check out the list below for all of the tricks that have been uncovered so far, via Google Operating System:
- Telling YouTube’s search to "use the force luke" or "beam me up scotty" causes it to behave accordingly.
- Typing "fibonacci" into the search bar gets you a series of videos that represent the famous number sequence, in more ways than one.
- This send-up of the upcoming X-Men movie from World of Heroes has a "Pow" mode that adds a linescreen effect to the video for true-to-life comic bookness.
- Typing "ponies" in the search bar generates ponies.