If you notice something strangely arcade-like on this New York Times article, you’re not going through video game withdrawal. A New York Times magazine article on gaming includes a simple video game you can play on the screen, allowing you to shoot any of the boxes and widgets surrounding the text.
Adapted by Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at The Times, the game is based on a two-year-old game called Kick Ass. It lets you to blow up websites, to put it simply, using only cursors and the spacebar.
“I wanted to share a joke with the reader,” Huang said about bringing the open-source code to the New York Times website.
The Times writes “even the ad sales department was O.K. with letting the ads on the page be blown up.”
The article in question looks at what the author calls “stupid games” to reflect each generation’s obsession with simple yet addictive video games, from Tetris to Angry Birds.
Despite being known as the “Grey Lady” and having a legacy as old-school mainstream media, The Times has experimented with its web page before, Mashable notes. A homepage ad in February for Met Life, for instance, let you play piano like Schroeder, the Peanuts character.
