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An Easter (Egg) Holiday? 104

Posted by Cliff from the hippity-hoppity dept.
updog asks: "With Easter just around the corner, what better way for folks to celebrate than finding their own Easter Egg? While many people have seen the classic Excel Flight Simulator, there are over 10,000 other Easter Eggs found in DVD's, books, and music — for example, there are over 8 eggs on the Futurama DVD; and some hidden emoticons in Skype. What are some of your favorite Easter Eggs?"
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An Easter (Egg) Holiday? More

An Easter (Egg) Holiday?

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  • Star Trek box sets (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) *
    Every disc in every Star Trek box set has hidden special features on it, as menu options hidden in the artwork. These are usually cast and crew interviews, but I believe there were one or two bloopers.

    I discovered these by accident, and then spent hours finding and watching them.
  • Typing "sharkysnark" over and over in Big Bang Echo [freeverse.com].

  • Most Recent Favorite (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr. Eggman ( 932300 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @02:40AM (#18631593)
    Most recently, I was reading through the Supreme Commander game readme text and at down toward the end, it had a little section of trivia. Fun silly little facts like who of the development team certain units or areas were named after or that the Cybrans were originally named the recyclers. That last tidbit was rather enlightening as it help me understand their naming system where all cybran-related objects contain an 'r' for the second letter of the filename.

    C&C's dino level was kind of funny, though I don't remember if I've seen it or only heard of it anymore.

  • Karateka for the Apple II (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kymermosst ( 33885 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @02:56AM (#18631633) Journal
    If you booted the disk upside-down, the game ran with the graphics upside-down.

  • "Over 8 eggs"? (Score:4, Funny)

    by GroeFaZ ( 850443 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:17AM (#18631715)
    Is this just a fancy way of saying "9" or does the submitter simply love the word "over", placing it in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical positions?

  • My favorite thing (Score:3, Funny)

    by VincenzoRomano ( 881055 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:35AM (#18631771) Homepage Journal
    The good ol' blue screen of death in Windows.
    There was a number of ways to have it showing out. In Vista they have changed the colour.

  • Homestar Runner (Score:4, Informative)

    by Garrett Fox ( 970174 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:05AM (#18631867) Homepage
    How about the entire site of Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com]? The various games and cartoons there are loaded with Easter Egg features, which get cataloged obsessively here [hrwiki.org].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Avatar8 ( 748465 )
      Absolutely!

      I always look for the (expected) easter egg at the end of Strong Bad's e-mails.

  • You know, the infamous [eeggs.com] ones [amigahistory.co.uk] like "We made Amiga, they fucked it up", referring to Commodore management. All too true...
  • If you live in Glasgow, have a motorbike or even just want to watch or marshall, there will be something around 10,000 bikes riding through the city from about 12:00pm this Sunday, 8th of April.

    http://glasgoweggrun.mag-uk.org/ [mag-uk.org]

    An Easter egg is the required participation fee.
     

  • Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linvir ( 970218 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @05:45AM (#18632159)

    In that game, the menu concept is based around graphic representations of rooms, in which you click on things like computers and doors to access things. In one of the rooms, you could click on a light and it brought up a big group photo of the dev team, and each member had a little blurb which you could access by clicking their photo.

    Best of all, I first found it completely by accident rather than because of some howto on some website, making it all the more enjoyable.

  • Today (Score:1, Funny)

    by SleepyHappyDoc ( 813919 )
    It's Good Friday today...any apps with hidden deicide?

    *ducks*

  • Linux Easter eggs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LinuxGeek ( 6139 ) * <djand.ncNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @06:38AM (#18632289)
    I haven heard of any opensource Easter eggs, well besides about:mozilla. Is there anything in Gnome, KDE, Openoffice or even less(1)?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite ( 721679 )
      $ apt-get moo

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by JonJ ( 907502 )
        $ aptitude moo and $ aptitude moo -v
        • Increase the verbosity level by adding v to -v
          so -vv -vvv -vvv :) Interesting literary reference as well :)

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          For those not on debian or its derivatives, I will spoil it.

          $ aptitude moo
          There are no Easter Eggs in this program.

          $ aptitude -v moo
          There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.

          $ aptitude -vv moo
          Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?

          $ aptitude -vvv moo
          Stop it!

          $ aptitude -vvvv moo
          Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?

          $ aptitude -vvvvv moo
          All right, you win.

          Slashdot will not allow me to display the ASCII art, its a rather crude drawing of 2 para

          • Adding more v's doesn't appear to change the output any further.

            It won't, I read the source :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Skater ( 41976 )
      $ tar cf test.tar
      tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SNR monkey ( 1021747 )
      In OpenOffice Calc, type
      =GAMES("StarWars")
      in a cell to play a little space invaders-like game. It works in in the windows version of Open Office, I haven't tried it in the Linux version.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bssteph ( 967858 ) *

      cthulhu@mal ~ $ emerge -v moo

      on Gentoo has a cowsay ASCII art of a cow (the humorously named Larry the Cow, which is definitely female) asking "Have you mooed today?" Not as cool as the other ones above, but it's something. kdebase-3.y.z.tar.bz2 (I've seen it as far back as 3.1, and I just checked and it's still in 3.5.6)'s configure script makes the following superfluous check:

      checking for easter eggs... none found

      You can find other goodies in configure scripts around the software universe, but I d

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bssteph ( 967858 ) *
        Er, you don't need the -v in the emerge moo command. I was checking if it did anything different when verbose, and pasted the wrong command.

  • Rise of the Triad (Score:4, Informative)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @06:44AM (#18632303)
    Rise of the Triad had tons of easter eggs, Including different loading screens for christmas, new years, 4th of july, and a couple others I'm probably forgetting, possibly Easter. There was also a ton of cheat codes you could type in. That was one of the best games of it's time, with tons of extra content and really interesting gameplay. I don't know why it didn't get more recognition.
  • in BeOS, there were some creative kernel system calls. My favorite was to check is_computer_on_fire() http://www.eeggs.com/items/15121.html [eeggs.com]
  • I'm not as old as those Apple // guys.

    MacKido has a great big list [mackido.com].

    The ones I remember off of the top of my head:
    Iguana Flag [mackido.com]
    Hidden Breakout Game [mackido.com]
    Rosetta Rosetta Rosetta [mackido.com]
  • I still remember finding the hidden room in the black castle in Adventure on my Atari 2600

    Man I'm old....

    • And the "transmolecular dot" that made one of the walls turn into the authors names. That was cool.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Avatar8 ( 748465 )
      That was my first EE as well.


      I hope Warren Robinett received the recognition he deserved from the developer community. He set a great precedent.

    • I still remember finding the hidden room in the black castle in Adventure on my Atari 2600

      I remember stumbling across that playing at a friend's house...still think of it whenever the topic of software Easter eggs comes up.

  • In Doom 3, right before the 'Hellhole' room with the Cyberdemon, there's a stone tile in an alcove, that has an id software logo on it. If you click it, you can pick up an id software PDA, featuring messages from the dev team.

  • shrubbery (Score:3, Funny)

    by turbopunk ( 806995 ) <cgardnerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @09:49AM (#18633465)
    When ask.com was actually new, you could ask it "What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?", and it would reply with "What do you mean, African or European?" I always got a kick out of that.
    • There's still a minor easter egg there. It now gives "Are You Suggesting that Coconuts Migrate" as a possible narrowing search.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Umbrae ( 866097 )
      Similarly, if you google "The answer to life the universe and everything" (no quotes), google calculator will return 42.
  • Among all the interestingly named cheat codes in Warcraft 2, was UCLA. when typed it would just say "Go Bruins"

    Also, after scrolling through the tips of the day, you would occasionally come across some like
    "Never pet a burning dog" or "Don't spit into the wind".

    And let us never forget all the stuff you could get units to say in all the blizzard games by just clicking on them a bunch a of times.
    • I don't remember if it was all Warcrafts or just WCIII, but if you clicked any 'critter' 60 times, it would explode. Rather funny if you did it in mutiplayer to opponents' bases. In III it would take a chunk out of the ground with it.
  • In Ultima VII (first part) you could build a staircase of crates to a chimney on a house in Trinsic when you first started. By moving correctly, you entered a hidden cave. Within this cave were several of every item in the game, tons of gold and moongates that would take you to various parts of the world.

    This wasn't so much of an EE as it was the developer's testing and QA tool. I don't think I learned about it until it was made public, but it was fun to play around.

    Also in U7, you'll find my character's


    • Also, let's not forget that in Ultime 7 part 2 (serpent isle), you could add a command-line parameter that would alter the Guardian's opening speech, such that he would say "Avatar! Know that my face is most muppet like!"
  • My very first easter egg was in one of the early Infocom games (I'm pretty sure it was Suspended). If you - in a fit of frustration trying to solve one of the puzzles - entered the command "GO TO HELL" it responded, "What makes you think you aren't already there?" When my parents heard me laughing I couldn't tell them what was so funny, because that would have meant repeating to them what I'd said to the computer.
    • My first easter egg goes a ways back. Any old copy of Linux that still has the text adventure game will have it. I originaly was shown it at work in the late 1970's when working on a PDP-11/35 computer. Just type in the single most common curse word you know and smile.

      It simply replys "Watch it"
  • There is a pretty funny one in Battlefield 1942. If you fly an airplane up as high as the game allows, then eject and don't pull the parachute, you will freefall all the way to the ground. The character will scream for a while, and then if you were high enough, right before you hit the ground, you can hear the guy crap his pants.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Pitr ( 33016 )
      Wow... I think you just said the one thing that could make me want to buy that game...
  • My all-time favorite, which filled my young self with a sense of glee and wonder, was in the old Mac game Dark Castle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Castle) where the castle entrance would be decorated for Christmas if your system clock was set to December 25.
  • Watch RHPS looking for easter eggs. Literally! Apparently they had an easter egg hunt around the set, and some were never found, but showed up in the final release of the movie.
  • Dr Who has been known to pop into Dereth (Asheron's Call) very rarely. Unknown if he is still able to reach it. The Tardis was a very rare spawn on the landscape at one point at least. Unable to actually uncover at will so kinda half an egg ;)
  • I was watching the Director's commentary of the Excalibur DVD. There's a point in the movie where a rabbit is killed while (don't remember which character) is hunting. The Director says "Notice that we did not say that no animals were killed during the filming of this movie."
  • Photoshop has the standard artwork on the "About" screen. But by holding down Alt or something while clicking About you got alternate artwork centered around the code name for that version's project. Big Electric Cat was pretty cool, then there was "Strange Cargo."
    • And with the Big Electric Cat you could click on his nose for a nice "buuuurrrp!" sound.

      Quark 4 had a key combo that would march a small alien out to zap your selected item to delete it, also with sound effect..
    • In early versions of Photoshop, this alternate artwork would actually appear as the MAIN splash page every April 1. Can't remember the names now, but I remember being thoroughly confused the first time I launched Photoshop and some completely new software app appeared. Took me a while to realize it was tied to the computer's date.
  • Are full of cows that are the same thing as eggs.
  • If you finished Street Fighter II without losing a single round, you got to see the credits. If you finished it without ever taking a single point of damage, you got to see pictures of the devs along with the credits. Pretty disappointing for beating an entire game perfectly.
  • Quake II was full of easter eggs, from the level where you weight almost nothing to the underground cave past the dev posters in the last level.

    That game actually tells you how many secrets there are and how many you found!

  • In older versions of UNIX you could type:

    > make love

    To which the system would reply:

    Don't know how to make love, stop.
  • In Q3A CTF if you had the enemy flag, and were returning it to your base, and you were gibbed within 1-2 feet of your base the announcer would say "Holy Shit!". one of the greatest game sfx ever.. i only heard it once but i was laughing so hard i couldnt play for five min..
  • In uTorrent (pronounced "Micro Torrent"), you can click the logo in the about dialog and it plays a sound clip. Even better, if you type 't' in the about dialog, you get to play tetris!
  • My all-time favorite was also the first "easter egg" I ever saw, more than twenty years before I first read the term as computer jargon. In the mid 1980's the Honeywell CP-6 operating system had a command-driven user interface that included pretty detailed online help. The syntax was simple, like the old MS-DOS help command:

    HELP commandname

    The help was pretty thorough and well-written, considering that CP-6 was a nearly new operating system. Every system command was there, with detailed syntax in
  • Macintosh System 7.1.x [?] - Simpletext

    I've never seen this one published and I haven't been able to trigger it since.
    I was learning how to use Simpletext (on a Mac IIsi), (a simple editing application distributed with the early Macintoshes) I think I was using the "Help" feature - I was (am) painfully slow at times :-), step by laborious step I completed the "Help" task (a formatted letter) and felt like I understood how to use the menu, save, etc. better. Then "Help" pops up a font listing - "Pick a font
  • I don't know if you could consider some of the errors you get under various conditions "easter eggs", but some of the error messages are interesting.

    For example, being root, and then losing authentication for the root user (some error reading /etc/password, or otherwise), you get the error message:
    "You don't exist, go away!"

    Others includ the "something wicked happened while X" network messages and various fun messages that occur in certain obscure/erroneous scenarios.
  • What about all the easter eggs in the mIRC IRC client? Click the author's nose on the about dialog for a squeeful surprise. You'll have to find the others yourself :-)
  • The old BBC B game "Frac" had a few things hidden in its copy protection. As you peeled away the layers of assembly code you found messages like "Does your mother know you do this", and even some code that played a neat version of "The Trumpet Hornpipe" (which was the theme to Captain Pugwash [whirligig-tv.co.uk].

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