Snake game hidden in YouTube: Procrastination squared

Tired of spending your working day discreetly trawling through vlogs, musical animals and copyrighted TV clips? Bored of flaming other people's hard work with expletives and l33tspeak? Fed up of pretending to pretend to work? Google shares your pain, and is here to lull you into an non-productive stupor by sneaking a hidden game of mobile classic Snake into YouTube.

Snake first hit our tiny, 8-bit colour screens in the 1970s and was catapulted into the kingdom of the classics in 1998 when Nokia pre-installed it on their 6110 phones. Snake eventually went into retirement after a long career, shrinking away from the public eye and frequently declining interview. But now he's back and trying to break a new generation of work-resistant minds.

This procrastination within procrastination is only available on the newest version of YouTube's player and accounts vary on how to activate it. Some assert that you need to wait until the video is fully buffered (in our tests, the game appeared before it had buffered).

To find Snake as reliably as Samuel L Jackson, click the video window (the video will pause) and hold the left arrow button on your keyboard until a series of small, moving dots appears -- it's Snake. You can watch the video in the background while you play, but there's no score or lives -- go off the screen or eat yourself and you'll have to hold the left key again.

Snake hasn't aged very well -- he's white-haired, not as skinny as he used to be (actually, rather lumpy) and a smidgeon slower to respond, but at his heart he's still the same Snake -- a classic.