Isn’t it irritating when you click on a site link only to receive the message 404 Not Found? Sure some sites will dress up their error messages with a funny picture or a witty saying, but the fact of the matter is that the page you wanted is missing! To help ease this first-world frustration, one web design company has programmed a fully playable game into their error messages. Error screens have never been so welcome!
Mass:werk Media Environments has programmed the error pages on their site to mimic the classic arcade game Space Invaders. The controls are simple. Just use the arrow keys or ‘A’ and ‘S’ on your keyboard to move the laser cannon at the bottom of the screen, and press the spacebar to fire into the descending alien hoard, but watch out for the falling bombs! One hit, and you’ll lose a life; so many of the minor details from the original arcade games are here!
The number of the error message itself offers your laser-firing tank some protection from the oncoming firestorm, but it doesn’t last long in the later levels, when the onslaught becomes much more dense. Though, if you would like to try a different HTTP status code for cover, just click on the title of the error message in the top left corner and type in whatever digits you’d like to hide beneath.
If after hours of playing the part of a pixilated gun tank you grow tired of the game, you might also try going back to the main site, where mass:werk has a number of other classic arcade games (mostly variations of Pac-Man) programmed in javascript for online play. That or you could, you know, get back to looking for the page you wanted in the first place.
Source: mass:werk via Netorabo