YouTube Easter egg turns the site retro

Search queries prefiex by a forwards slash and a space transform the video site

In preparation for the upcoming 'Geek Week' (a weeklong celebration of 'geek culture'), YouTube have teased users with a first Easter egg that turns the site into a retro-looking, ASCII-heavy delight.

The company's Twitter challenged users to "crack the code to go retro", offering up a cryptic string of numbers as a challenge to any amateur cryptographers - "53 65 61 72 63 68 20 59 6f 75 54 75 62 65 20 66 6f 72 20 2f 20 67 65 65 6b 77 65 65 6b".

Fortunately for those of us who don't know our Caesar ciphers from our Scytales an answer has been found. The code translates to "/ geekweek" (without the quotation marks) and when typed into YouTube it transforms the homepage.

In fact, any sort of query can be entered in this way, as long as it's prefixed with a forward-slash and a space, although clicking on a video unfortunately reverts the look back to the original YouTube stylings.