404 Tech Support

A Few YouTube Easter Eggs

YouTube has a few easter eggs that are good for a laugh or two.

The arcade game, Snake

With any YouTube video, you can press up while it’s loading to play the game Snake. You can also hold the left arrow key down so the video rewinds to the beginning and then press the up arrow key to more reliably get the game to load.

Then you have classic snake. Eat the apples (blinking white dots) and steer your snake with the arrow keys while avoiding running into the walls or your own tail. The snake gets longer with the more apples you eat. If the video isn’t paused, you can be playing snake over top of the video while it’s playing.

Fancy status bar

The Nyan Cat video has over 19 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded April 5 of this year. The Pop Tart cat has proven himself popular enough to get its own little easter egg. The video’s status bar now features Nyan Cat instead of the little circle and leaves a rainbow behind where it has played.

It even carries through when embedding the video.

Harlem Shake

If you search ‘Do the Harlem Shake’ on YouTube, the search result page will imitate the meme with music and “dancing”.

Downloading YouTube Videos

Not really a YouTube easter egg but it seems related. If you add the word ‘keep’ to the address bar, it will redirect you to the website Keep-Tube and it will give you options to download the video as an flv or mp4. I wish there was an ability to just download the audio of some videos but this is a convenient step closer.