A short history of easter eggs

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 grey 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 is the one that got a story attached, and stories are what names need.

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

Films had them all along. Hitchcock walked through his own films. 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 person saying "I was here", inside something that usually hides the people who made it. That is why finding one feels like meeting someone. And it's why the record of who found it first is worth keeping: the finder and the maker are two halves of the same joke.

What this site does about it

Every egg here is one page, with proof, a timestamp nobody can edit, the hunter who documented it, and, when it can be shown, the person who actually found it first. The pages connect: an egg that references another game draws a line on the web. Post one and you're part of the record.