Fans of the cult classic video game Atari Breakout are being treated to a fun Google Easter Egg, that commemorates the 37th anniversary of the title's release. To access it, users need to simply Google Atari Breakout, hit the Images tab and the search results morph into a game of breakout.
While office workers kill endless hours of productivity playing Atari Breakout on their desktops, it might come as a surprise to many Apple stalwarts that this particular online game will actually run on certain iOS devices - namely iPads.
It's unclear why Google disabled the Easter Egg from functioning on iPhone and iPod Touch, but reports indicate that the game will indeed work for iPad users. This points to the fact that Google's homage to Atari Breakout is running on HTML5 rather than Flash.
As many are aware, Steve Jobs famously swore to never allow Adobe's Flash onto iOS devices, calling the platform buggy and slow. This became a heated debate within the Apple community, with many creating jailbreak tools to get around Apple's ban. Even the official App store saw a few short-lived browser variants that supported Flash. Nonetheless, recent years have seen a shift away from Flash, with more and more developers embracing the HTML5 standard.
This isn't the first time Atari Breakout has been playable on Apple hardware. The original iPod had its own Easter Egg that allowed users to play Breakout by holding down the center button while accessing the About menu. It's likely that this wasn't a random addition: few fans know that Steve Jobs along with Steve Wozniak played an interesting role in the creation of Breakout.
In 1975, Steve Jobs was working at Atari and tasked with creating a prototype for Breakout that utilized a smaller chipset than the company had been working with. Jobs' friend, Steve Wozniak was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard at the time and had a knack for producing designs that employed small amounts of chips. Jobs and Wozniak eventually designed a prototype that Atari was unable to comprehend and the company wound up manufacturing its own version anyway.
