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Wild Wasteland

A short history of easter eggs

The short version
  1. 1977Atari's Starship 1 hides a free-game message: the earliest known video game egg.
  2. 1979Warren Robinett's secret room in Adventure. An Atari executive calls it an Easter egg hunt; the name sticks.
  3. 1980s–90sFaces, pets and whole secret levels. Doom II hides John Romero's head; the Konami Code becomes a password.
  4. 1997A flight simulator ships inside a spreadsheet.
  5. AlwaysMovies, records and real places had them all along: cameos, hidden tracks, A113, a face in a spectrogram.
  6. NowHere every egg gets a page with proof, the time it was posted and, when it's known, who found it first.

The term comes from one hidden room. In 1979, Atari didn't credit its programmers, so Warren Robinett hid his name inside Adventure: a single gray dot, carried to the right spot, opened a room that read "Created by Warren Robinett". Atari found out after he'd left. Rather than recall the cartridges, an executive compared it to an Easter egg hunt and suggested doing it on purpose from then on. The name stuck.

Before the name

Hidden signatures are older than the name. Programmers on 1970s minicomputers and arcade boards left initials in code and in high-score tables. The DEC "make love" response to make love in Unix, the Atari Starship 1 free-game message (1977, the earliest known video game egg), and the Fairchild Channel F Video Whizball credit (1978) all came before Adventure. Robinett's room just came with a better story, and the story is what made the name stick.

The golden age

The 1980s and 90s made eggs a tradition. Developers hid their faces, their pets, their studios' in-jokes, whole secret levels. Doom II put John Romero's head behind the final boss. Diablo players invented a cow level out of nothing, so Blizzard built one. Console games hid debug menus and sound tests behind button codes; the Konami Code became a cultural password.

Eggs leave games

Movies had them all along. Hitchcock walked through his own movies. Pixar seeded A113 (a CalArts classroom number) and the Pizza Planet truck in nearly every picture. Directors hid the number 42, the year of a birthday, a friend's name on a shop front. Musicians hid tracks after minutes of silence, printed messages in the run-out groove, and drew faces in spectrograms. Software shipped flight simulators inside spreadsheets. Sampling, arguably, is the egg tradition of music: a piece of one record hidden inside another.

Why they matter

An easter egg is a developer saying "I was here" inside something that usually hides who made it. Finding one feels a bit like meeting them. That's why we think the finder deserves credit too. They're the other half of the joke.

What this site does about it

Every egg here gets its own page with proof, the hunter who posted it and, when it can be shown, the person who actually found it first. Eggs that reference another game draw a line on the Connections map. Found one we don't have? Post it.