What Was the Theme of the First “Google Doodle”?

The Google Doodle had simple beginnings. In August 1998, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were headed off to the annual Burning Man event in the Nevada desert, and they decided to let the site’s users know that they would be out of the office. So they designed a simple stick-figure man and placed him behind the second “o” in the Google logo. The idea caught on from there, and special events and anniversaries were celebrated periodically with one-of-a-kind logo enhancements. Since then, thousands of Google Doodles have been created for Google's regional and international home pages, with topics ranging from Bastille Day and Chinese New Year to the birthdays of historical and cultural figures such as Isaac Newton and Charlie Chaplin.

Man burns, ideas churn:

• The stick figure eventually led to the creation of a Doodle department at Google, with a team of illustrators and online engineers creating Doodles for amused users around the world.
• Some of the Google Doodles have been animated and interactive, such as the Doodle game that celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man in 2010.
• Although it is often called a "festival," the organizers of Burning Man describe it as a community and art experiment. The event's organizing principles are radical inclusion, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, gifting, de-commodification, participation, immediacy, and leave no trace