Video Game Easter Egg

A Video Game Easter Egg is a secret bonus level, inside joke, or hidden message coded into a game by its developers.

• AKA: Easter Egg.
• Example(s):
  • Both Alien Invasion and Video Whizball (1978) have a code to display their programmer's last name (Reid-Selth, for Brad Reid-Selth) on the screen.
  • In Star Wars Starfighter, they hid a droid grilling hamburgers in the second mission.
• See: Adventure (Atari 2600).

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References

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media) Retrieved:2017-5-26.
  • An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, a hidden message, or a secret feature of an interactive work (often, a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen). The name is used to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt. The term was coined to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure that led Atari to encourage further hidden messages in later games, treating them as Easter eggs for players to find.

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)#In_video_games Retrieved:2017-6-16.
  • Robinett's addition of his name to Adventure (1979) is recognized as the first well-known Easter egg, as well as the origin of the term. However, Robinett's Easter egg is not the first to be implemented. In 2004, an earlier Easter egg was found in Video Whizball, a 1978 game for the Fairchild Channel F system, displaying programmer Bradley Reid-Selth's surname. According to research by Ed Fries, the first known Easter egg in arcade games came from Starship 1, programmed by Ron Milner and released in 1977, although its existence wasn't published until 2017. By triggering the cabinet's controls in the right order, the player could get the message "Hi Ron!" displayed to them on the screen. Fries described it as "the earliest arcade game yet known that clearly meets the definition of an Easter egg", and suggested that as more than one hundred arcade games predate Starship 1, earlier Easter eggs may still be undiscovered. Fries noted that some Atari arcade cabinets were resold under the Kee Games label, and included easily-implemented changes on the hardware that would make the game appear different for Kee; Anti-Aircraft II, released in 1975, included a means to modify the circuit board to make the airplanes in the game appear as alien UFOs, which Fries surmised would have been for a Kee Games' release, but argued if this is a true Easter egg since it requires hardware modification. Since Adventure, there has been a long history of video game developers including Easter eggs in their games. Sometimes the intent was to communicate with the player; sometimes it was a way of getting even with management for a slight. For example, Robinett's first egg was included because he wanted credit for programming the game, which was not customarily included at the time. Easter eggs in video games have taken a variety of forms, from purely ornamental screens (like Robinett's) to aesthetic enhancements that change some element of the game during play, such as the Easter egg included in the original Age of Empires game that changes catapult projectiles from stones to cows. Video game cheat codes, such as the Konami Code, are a specific type of Easter egg, in which entering a secret command will unlock special powers or new levels for the player. More elaborate Easter eggs include secret levels and developer's rooms, fully functional yet hidden areas of the game. Developer's rooms often include inside jokes from the fandom or development team, and differ from a debug room in that they are specifically intended for the player to find. Some games even include hidden sub-games as Easter eggs. In 1993's acclaimed LucasArts video game Day of the Tentacle, the original game Maniac Mansion from 1987 can be played in its full version by using a home computer in one character's room.

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