8 Insanely Hard-to-Find Video Game Easter Eggs
There’s always that one final egg on Easter morning that’s impossible to find. It mocks you from the shadows, tucked away in a corner you feel you’ve checked a dozen times, its color blending into whatever object hides its presence.
Like the parents who hide these eggs, developers also conceal nuggets of fun in their games, sometimes covering them so well that it takes even the most devoted gamers years to find.
We salute those efforts this Easter with some of gaming’s hardest-to-find Easter eggs.
The Calendar Man — ‘Batman: Arkham City’
The Calendar Man may not be one of the most popular members of the Bat’s rogues gallery, but that didn’t stop Rocksteady from sneaking in a date-centric Easter egg. For this gem, players need to roll their device’s clock back to December 13th, 2004, the date Rocksteady Studios was formed.
When Batsy visits The Calendar Man, he’s treated to dialogue that, at the time, didn’t mean much. The bald-headed inmate talks about being there at Batman’s beginning and being there the Dark Knight’s end.
May sound like a threat or an allusion to Rocksteady’s journey with the Arkham series, but fast-forward four years to Arkham Knight’s release and it all comes together in another hidden Easter egg that, well … you’ll just have to play the game to find out.
CLUCK! — ‘World of Warcraft’
The universe of Warcraft is filled with obscured references and musings, but one of the strangest — and hardest to find — was an inane side quest: CLUCK!
As the name implies, a chicken is involved. As is performing the “chicken” emote 75 times. And finding special chicken feed.
This Alliance-only quest yields 100 XP and a vanity chicken pet. That way people will know you truly have too much time on your hands.
Rebecca Chambers’ WNBA Days — ‘Resident Evil 2’
Far from everybody’s favorite Resident Evil character, for some reason Capcom decided to focus a tedious Easter egg around her. Chances are, if not for the Research on BioHazard 2: Final Edition game guide, this pointless egg would have remained hidden for years.
Why, you ask.
Because why would anybody search Albert Wesker’s desk 50 times in a row?
Thanks to Ayumi Saito, though, we can rest easy with our new favorite background wallpaper and newfound reason to revisit the ominous Raccoon City Police Department dark room.
Chris Houlihan’s Secret Room — ‘Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’
You’ll have to put those Pegasus Boots to use to uncover this Link to the Past secret!
A year prior to the game’s release, Nintendo Power ran a contest requiring participants to take and submit a photo of the Warmech encounter in Final Fantasy. From the submissions, the winner was chosen randomly and was promised their name in a future Nintendo title.
The winner was Chris Houlihan, although he’d have a heck of a time finding his name anywhere in Hyrule. Rather than plaster it somewhere obvious for Chris’s bragging rights, the game’s programmers built a special room for him that only served as a preventative measure to keep the game from crashing when it couldn’t determine which room to load next.
Accessing Chris Houlihan’s secret room can be done one of five ways, but players tend to gravitate toward rushing from the Sanctuary to the Sewer Passageway entrance.
For breaking the game, players were awarded with 45 blue rupees.
PuPu the Alien — ‘Final Fantasy VIII’
Sweet, adorable little PuPu is hidden deep within the unnamed world of Final Fantasy VIII, accessible only by the most persistent gamers. To trigger this extraterrestrial egg, gamers had to first uncover a hidden magazine by investigating a random stack of magazines multiple times.
Square Enix apparently took cues from Capcom for this one.
What follows is an obnoxious … well … Easter egg hunt as players try to decipher absurd clues and hunt down little PuPu’s craft. After pinpointing four very precise locations, it’s time to take on the UFO. But even after taking it out, the quest still isn’t over.
There’s still the fight with PuPu, which takes forever to find and can go one of two ways:
- Kill the freak for wasting your time.
2. Waste five Elixers on him for a PuPu Triple Triad card.
Underground Duck Racing — ‘Shenmue 2’
The Sega AM2 developed Shenmue 2 made video game roleplaying a little too true-to-life by introducing part-time work as a vital means of making money.
But it also reeled everything back to fantasy with this quirky Easter egg, which requires a very specific sequence of events to unlock.
Gamers that had the patience to scour the map, meet three NPC’s, find a bronze medal, and triumph in a street fight were introduced to the underground world of duck racing.
Yes, duck racing.
If dissatisfied with just betting on ducks, players could complete another slew of absurd tasks to obtain their own duck to race.
NARPAS Sword — ‘Metroid’
There’s a lot of technical jargon revolving around this Metroid secret password and how, unlike other passwords, it won’t show up with password generators. But none of that is really important.
All you need to know is that typing in NARPAS SWORD0 000000 000000 in the password screen completely changes how you play the original Metroid.
And by that we mean you don’t actually play it. You just sort of run through.
NARPAS Sword (or NAR Password if you realize NARPAS stands for absolutely nothing) gives Samus infinite missiles and energy, the altered Ice Beam, and every in-game power-up, making the game incredibly easy.
But that’s not all!
If you beat the game and press “Start” after the credits, the game will restart and feature a scantily clad Samus.
Reow.
Play as Master Hand — ‘Super Smash Bros. Melee’
That’s right, you can play as Master Hand, Super Smash Bros. Melee’s quirky final boss, but cracking Da Vinci’s code was easier to figure out.
A convoluted mix of pressing and releasing certain buttons, placing the controller in port 3, and hovering over a variety of options eventually results in a glitch that calls Master Hand to the arena.
Just like the AI-controlled iteration, the player-controlled hovering hand is not much fun to play against. His difficult-to-dodge, room-clearing move set is as devastating as intended to be, adding another layer of frustration to the friendship-ruining fighter.
Mark LoProto is a dedicated gaming fanatic who’s been frustrated by more than a few Easter egg hunts in his time.
