Easter egg (computing)

In computer software and media, an Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work. It is usually found in a computer program, video game, or DVD/Blu-ray Disc 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 encouraged the player to find further hidden messages in later games, leading them on a 'hunt'.

The use of the term "Easter egg" to describe secret features originates from the 1979 video game Adventure for the Atari 2600 game console, programmed by employee Warren Robinett. At the time, Atari did not include programmers' names in the game credits, fearing that competitors would attempt to steal their employees. Robinett, who disagreed with his supervisor over this lack of acknowledgment, secretly inserted the message "Created by Warren Robinett". This message would only appear if a player moved his/her avatar over a specific pixel (the "Gray Dot") during a certain part of the game. When Robinett left Atari, he did not inform the company of the acknowledgment that he included in the game. Shortly after his departure, the Gray Dot and his message were exposed by a player who told Atari about his discovery. Atari's management initially wanted to remove the message and release the game again, but this was deemed too costly an effort. Instead, Steve Wright, the Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, suggested that they keep the message and, in fact, encourage the inclusion of such messages in future games, describing them as Easter eggs for consumers to find.

In addition to Robinett's name appearing in Adventure (1979), there are many other instances where the Easter egg idea has been implemented. The first text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), from which Adventure was fashioned, included several secret words. One of these was "xyzzy", a command which enabled the player to move between two points in the game world. In 2004, an Easter egg displaying programmer Bradley Reid-Selth's surname was found in Video Whizball (1978), a game for the Fairchild Channel F system. According to research by Ed Fries, the first known Easter egg in an arcade game was in Starship 1 (1977), programmed by Ron Milner. By triggering the cabinet's controls in the right order, the player could get the message "Hi Ron!" to appear on the screen. Fries described it as "the earliest arcade game yet known that clearly meets the definition of an Easter egg". The existence of this Easter egg wasn't published until 2017, leading Fries to suggest 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 changes to the hardware that would make the game appear different from the Atari version. Anti-Aircraft II (1975) included a means to modify the circuit board to make the airplanes in the game appear as alien UFOs. Fries surmised that this feature may have been intended for a Kee Games release. For this reason, and because it required a hardware modification, Fries questioned whether it met the definition of an Easter egg.

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