The H.A.C.K.E.R. Project

For some, Easter Eggs are a fun treat to be discovered on Easter morning, hidden by the Easter Bunny for children to find. For others, however, “Easter Egg” has another meaning: a secret hidden in a video game or technology.

What are Easter Eggs?

Easter Eggs “can be found in everything from software—especially video games—to hardware where designers will include graphics and messages on circuit boards” (Liszewski). An Easter Egg can take on many forms. For example, if one types in “do a barrel roll” into Google search engine, it will cause the page to rotate around. Other Easter Eggs may display funny images or videos if you do something specific in a video game. An Easter Egg does not need to be digital, either. Some technology companies will print secret messages on the motherboard or internal parts of their devices that can only be seen if the machine is taken apart. Some Easter Eggs, however, are more than just a fun little surprise to find. In some cases, Easter Eggs can actually give you power-ups, extra health or lives, or other benefits in video games.

An example of a “power-up Easter Egg” is known as the “Konami Code”, which involves pressing a series of buttons- specifically, the sequence is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A– on a controller or keyboard to unlock power-ups or other secrets in a video game. This Easter Egg was originally created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto when working on the game Gradius; the game was difficult to play, and so Hashimoto “created the code to make play-testing the game easier for him” (Edwards). Play-testing a game is when the developers actually play through the video game they are working on to make sure it functions as intended. This can help a developer catch errors or mistakes that might not be apparent when simply coding the game. Since Gradius was a hard game, it was difficult for Hasimoto to playtest it fully, and thus the Konami Code was born. The Konami Code was accidentally left in the official releases of Gradius for others to stumble upon, and has become a popular code in many video games since then (Liszewski).

The First Easter Egg

The first ever tech Easter Egg can be found in the Atari game Adventure. Specifically, it can be found in a “secret room”, and it holds “game creator Warren Robinett’s signature” (Atari). Robinett’s signature “is credited with being the first Easter Egg ever released in a console video game”, even though Robinett himself did not consider it so (Atari). He hid his signature as “Atari policy was to not publicly credit developers for their work”; by putting his name in the game, he could ensure that people knew who created it (Atari).

The below image showcases this Easter Egg: written vertically across the screen, it reads “Created by… Warren … Robinett”, and this message shifts through a variety of colors while displayed.

However, this signature was not meant as a fun Easter Egg, but rather as a way for Robinett to claim his creatorship. It was actually another Atari employee, Steve Wright, who “is believed to have come up with the label Easter Egg” (Atari). After this “secret message was discovered”, Wright had commented that he believed “hiding things in games was a positive because they were ‘like Easter eggs for players to find’” (Atari). Thus, the term Easter Egg gained a whole new digital meaning.

There have been other video games released before Adventure that, technically, contained hidden messages or codes, “but it was supposedly Atari that first re-used the term Easter egg to describe Robinett’s secret addition to the game”, and thus his signature remains credited as the first Easter Egg (Liszewski).

Resources & Further Reading

Atari. “So Let’s Talk about That Easter Egg.” Atari®, Atari, Inc., 6 July 2022, atari.com/blogs/atari/so-let-s-talk-about-that-easter-egg. Accessed 28 Mar. 2024.

Edwards, Benj. “What Is the Konami Code, and How Do You Use It?” How-to Geek, How-To Geek, 28 Feb. 2020, www.howtogeek.com/659611/what-is-the-konami-code-and-how-do-you-use-it/.

Liszewski, Andrew. “A Brief History of Easter Eggs in Tech.” Gizmodo, G/O Media, 20 Apr. 2014, gizmodo.com/a-brief-history-of-easter-eggs-in-tech-5900026. Accessed 28 Mar. 2024.