A few minutes ago, Youtube was down (error 500). In place of a plain error page, there was a monkey pictured to illustrate the "team of highly trained monkeys".

As it's the first time that I came up on this, I'm wondering if it's new or has been around for ages and thus would have led the GOG team to be inspired by it to have their own "error" mascot.

Pic attached: partial screenshot as the image was too big to be displayed entirely on my netbook

I doubt it... 404 based fun and mascots are fairly wide spread so I wouldn't have thought Gog was inspired by youtube any more than any other similar instance.

The Blizzard 404 made me laugh.

youtube monkey was inspired by gogbear. Also I remember one time there was just the message about the monkeys but no actual monkey.

I've seen plenty of funny 404 and other error messages, including images of a computer torn apart, that the user broke the internet, and that you saw the end of the internet...

Probably as useful as the original error message for Basic compiling which would say something like 'DURR' or something, but they had to program it to show you where the error was in the compiler stage.

LOL I got the error monkey too today and I also thought about the Gogbear. XD

Funny 404 :)

Most of those are ass. A 404 page should prominently display the human- and machine-readable text "Error 404". This is non-negotiable.

I find the GOG Bear cuter. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Wow. That page is Subtle Propaganda 101. You can’t tell me their list is purely objective and with no hidden political message when a photograph with some text is ranked higher than some artist’s work.

I don't know... I doubt machine readable is really important (as your browser should get the actual error code to do whatever it might need to with, and this should be accessible to any script or bot that needs it too).
As for human readable... we all know what 404 is here, because we're computer geeks and spend time on the internet. Your average person? Probably not. So something humorous (that still adequately explains what's happened, and includes 404 somewhere for people who do know what it is) and interesting is probably more useful in retaining visitors. Yeah... it's not the best list of 404 pages out there... it was just the first one that came up when I searched and I couldn't really be bothered to find more. It illustrates the point though.