A History of Easter Eggs in Gaming
Leonardo Da Vinci hid a musical arrangement in The Last Supper. Michelangelo incorporated scientific references into the Sistine Chapel. Alfred Hitchcock made regular cameos in his own films. Disney’s parks and resorts are full of hidden Mickeys.
Obviously “Easter eggs,” or hidden messages in media, predate the digital age by many, many years. What’s new, however, is to the extent to which some modern-day Easter eggs — especially those found in video games — have evolved into transmedia treasure hunts worthy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
Ready to discover more? Let’s get cracking.
The first video game ‘Easter egg’
Unlike painters, who proudly sign their names on their works of art, early video game programmers weren’t credited for the games they built. Many of the first Easter eggs hidden in games were included by creators who yearned for a little recognition.
Legend has it that the term “Easter egg” was first coined from a 1979 maze video game called Adventure made by Warren Robinett, a programmer at Atari. Robinett put his secret stamp on his work by creating a sequence of moves that would allow the player to enter a room that contained the phrase, “Created by Warren Robinett.”
“I figured the powers that be would not be happy about that little trick, and would remove it from the game as soon as they found out that the signature was in there,” Robinett explained in an interview. “By the time some kid or kids had discovered the secret room and Atari found out, I didn’t work there anymore. So they couldn’t really punish me, and the manager of game software at that time decided little hidden surprises in games, which he called ‘Easter eggs,’ were kind of cool.”
Though Robinett invented the term, his Easter egg may not have been the first. The Fairchild Channel F console, launched in 1976, came with a Pong game that would post the coder’s name (Bradley Reid-Selth) on screen if you punched in a particular keystroke sequence.
Today, Easter eggs in video games are expected. The often-imitated Konami code (that’s “up up down down left right left right B A”) is, without question, the most famous of the bunch. Japanese company Konami built this code into 1998 Nintendo game Contra, which would gift the player 30 lives instead of three. Consequently, the Konami code has been incorporated into hundreds of games (and other media as well), giving players some fun surprises and pretty sweet cheats over the years.
Alternate reality games: Beyond the video game
As Easter eggs in gaming became more and more common, they also grew more complex. Bored with the usual jokes and cheat codes, a few enterprising programmers have created layers upon layers of Easter eggs that produce “a game outside the game.” These hardcore treasure hunts, or alternate reality games (ARGs), traverse medias — and sometimes, even cross over in the real world.
No one’s ever done it quite like Trials Evolution. To say the 2012 bike stunt game took things to a whole new level would be a serious understatement.
Here’s how the insanity went down. A series of unbelievably complex riddles in the game eventually led players to a website. There, they were invited to submit a code by solving a riddle. When entered correctly, the code unlocked GPS coordinates, which revealed buried boxes in Helsinki, San Francisco, Sydney and Bath in the United Kingdom.
These boxes existed in real life, with gamers going to great lengths to visit the exact coordinates. In one instance, a player had to use a literal pickaxe to dig up a buried box.
It gets crazier. Inside each box was a golden key, one of which can apparently be used to open a final box, “Underneath the Eiffel Tower,” — but only at midday on Aug. 1, in the year 2113.
“You’ll be daydreaming about it on the train and thinking about it at night,” explains Brad Hill, a gamer who had a hand in finding the Easter eggs in Trials. “Some days, your mind is just messed up. It’s been amazing.”
What began as an Easter-egg hunt within a video game expanded to a website, and eventually led to a real-world treasure hunt that continues through time. The discoverers of those keys say they plan to pass them along to their descendants so that they can finish the puzzle in the next century, long after they’re gone. (The developer/mad genius behind the puzzles, Antti Ilvessuo, won’t even be alive to see the big reveal, but he says he’s made specific, posthumous arrangements to make sure it all pans out.)
The best Easter eggs keep players engaged through real-world interactions that go beyond a game’s original story. Akin to old-world adventurers, treasures await, to be passed down from generation to generation — gamers just need to join the hunt.
