The first Doodle, circa 1998. Back when Brin and Page posted the Burning Man design, it was less than a week before Google was incorporated as a company on September 4, 1998. It was two years until they used a prototype-Doodle again. But this time, rather than an out-of-office message, the design celebrated France’s Bastille Day on July 14, 2000.

The first Google Doodle was born in the summer of 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin took a vacation to the Burning Man Festival. The Doodle they created was simple, with the festival’s iconic stick man loitering behind the ‘O’, but users loved the playful addition to an otherwise simple logo.