Apple Music’s 404 Page Brings Back the Original iPod Complete With Hidden Brick Game

Twenty five years after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod on October 23, 2001, Apple has tucked a working replica of that exact device into the error page of its music service. Anyone who types a nonexistent address into music.apple.com now sees the familiar white player beside the words Page Not Found and Give this a spin instead. The recreation matches the original monochrome screen and mechanical scroll wheel so closely that turning the virtual dial produces the same soft click once heard on every commute and plane ride of the early 2000s.

Menus open as expected. Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Settings all respond to the wheel or arrow keys on a computer, just like they did all those years ago. The Songs list contains a large selection of over a thousand music, hits from the days when the iPod dominated our pockets, including Coldplay, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Daft Punk, Britney Spears, Gorillaz, and Vampire Weekend. When you select one, you will receive a brief overview of the music, similar to how Apple used to allow you to sample tracks in the past, but if the song is longer than two minutes and thirty seconds, you get to experience approximately ninety seconds; otherwise, it only lets you preview thirty seconds.

Rolling back to the old options in Settings, you’ll notice the familiar Shuffle, Repeat, a backlight timer, and that little Click Wheel where they used to be, and as you’d expect, the About screen tells you that there are 1,217 songs on board, a 9.2 gigabyte capacity with 4.5 gigabytes already filled, and the most recent version, 2644.1.0. Press and hold the center button on the About screen for five seconds to bring up Brick, a simple paddle and ball game that first emerged as a secret feature on the original 2001 iPod a long time ago. Jobs and Woz created the first Breakout game for Atari, so it’s cool to see it appear in this small Apple flashback, which takes you back to the company’s early days.

This small trip down memory lane is devoid of the typical subscription fuss; simply launch it in a web browser and you’re golden. You can’t even save it to the Music app if you’re using an iPhone or a Mac. If you’re fascinated electronic devices, this page provides a really exact, working memory of an iPod from a long time ago, as the tiny game that many people never even discovered the first time around is present in all its glory.