Easter Eggs in video games: The tale of the great Adventure

Greetings and salutations! Back for another healthy dose of useless video game knowledge, are you? Well good, because there is plenty of it for everyone. For this week, I want to tell you the story of the first ever Easter Egg in video games.

Now, if you are as confused by why there is an Easter Egg in a video game as my dad was when I told him this story, it’s okay, I can explain. An Easter Egg, in video games, is a hidden secret inside the game. Some are found by performing special actions, some by hearing a reference in the game dialogue or some are just blatantly presented outright to the player in all their glory. Either way, Easter Eggs are one of the most cherished parts of video games, so it’s only right to know where they came from and why they are called what they are.

If any of you reading this have seen the film, or read the book, Ready Player One then you probably already know all this, but stick around anyways because you might learn a thing or two not in the book/film. If you have not seen Ready Player One, I suggest you do that, it’s a great movie for any fan of gaming or the culture around it, and if you are spending time on this blog then you are definitely into that kind of thing. Anyways, back to the show.

Back in 1978, the hero of this story, a man named Warren Robinett, was working for Atari. After being told to stop working on a video game adaptation of a text adventure game by the name of Colossal Cave Adventure, he continued his hard work in private, eventually completing a prototype of the game. Soon after, his title, Adventure, was green lit. All this hard work was soon to be unnoticed when Atari gained a new CEO in 1978 named Ray Kassar. Kassar didn’t like developers, and treated them like cogs in a machine rather than the artists they were. This is why when Robinett found out that instead of all the developers being credited in the game’s credits, only Atari, the company, would be credited, he took it upon himself to gain some recognition.

Thus, the first Easter Egg was born! Robinett decided to hide away a special room inside his game, Adventure, which credited him for his hard work. I mean, can you blame him? In less than a year, the secret had been found and Atari was not very happy about this secret. Though, Atari left it in the game because it would have cost $10,000 to replace all the copies already made.

A manager at Atari, Steve Wright, was very into the idea of the hidden secret. That is why he was the one to coin the term, “Easter Egg”, after the act of searching for an egg on Easter, like you search for these secrets in-game.

Today, Easter Eggs are all throughout video games. Almost any game you look at has an Easter Egg in some form or another. One of my favorite games, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, has quite a few Easter Eggs hidden away inside its vast world, most of which I can still recall. While traversing around the fantasy era game, you could find things such as a dead elf dressed as Link from the Legend of Zelda series, a dead Luke Skywalker hanging from the ceiling of a snowy cave reaching for a sword that never flew to his hand or a lone ring sitting at the bottom of a well in one of the towns as a reference to the horror film, The Ring. Though, Easter Eggs could also be more challenging to find, such as the famous Easter Eggs of the Call of Duty Zombies series. Secrets like those require skill and planning to solve and complete, often after several hours of completing strange tasks till you are finally rewarded with a special cut-scene.

Easter Eggs have become a fun and creative way of inserting pop culture references into games for people to find. In every game I play, I am looking, and listening closely in-case a Easter Egg happens to pop up.

Now, it’s your turn to tell me what your favorite Easter Eggs are. Make sure to comment with your favorite ones down below!

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll smell ya later!