Slashdot Mirror
Easter Eggs in Open Source?
David Symonds asks: "We've all known our fair share of easter eggs, in the form of hidden screens or messages that are activated by a certain keystroke sequence, or clicking on a certain pixel, and so on. Easter Eggs have been around for ages, from the old "xyzzy" command for "Colossal Cave" (a text-based adventure), to that move in International Karate (for the C64) which would cause your opponents pants to drop, to the various "about:..." entries in Netscape. My question is, are Easter Eggs a dying breed, and has anyone found any good ones in open source software?" I've always thought that the best Easter Eggs in Free Software was found in the comments of the source-code. What was your favorite easter-egg? I remember the secret room from the Atari 2600 Adventure game, mainly because I had found that one all on my own.
This must be a pretty common thing for hardware designers at HP... even the very earliest DeskWriter's (circa late-80's/early 90's?) can play music using one of the servo motors in the printer... you just have to know the magic PCL sequence and the format to send the "music". This tradition continued at least for a while. The last printer I know of that had the feature for sure was the DeskJet 855, although it still may be there in newer models as well.
I saw it demonstrated in one of HP's labs where somebody sent the PCL sequence to several AppleTalk-connected DeskWriters simultaneously to serenade somebody with "Happy Birthday". Not only was it surprising (being networked printers and all) it was surprisingly loud and the last place you'd expect to hear "music" coming from. Everyone always assumed there was a speaker in the printer until it was explained that it was just the servo motor being commanded to step back and forth several thousand times a second, bringing it up into the audible range of human hearing...
I was working with some middleware, and found a six page long tirade about how "Dante's description of Hell was created for evil hardware makers that force developers to program for an 8-bit proprietary system". When I called the middleware vendor, I wasn't surprised to find that the developer had left. Note that is was published sample code.
This was something of a dare proposed by your friends at ®TMark (pronouced art-mark). See http://www.rtmark.com/simcopter.html.
That was Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A Start
Is this a Slashdot Easter Egg???
Woah cool, someone actually remember that great game! I think it also had other special dates :)
;-)
like halloween and easter? but i m not quite sure
woahhh woauahhh wowuauaa bouuhuuhuhuhuhhhh...(sounds familiar?
---
slashdot probably ran this a few months ago, but it's always a good laugh:
http://www.gnu.org/fun/humor.html
Having worked on a VAX/VMS for two courses, my favorite one is The Varorcist :)
(After a few hours/days of work and a few cups of coffee, who needs easter eggs to start laughing at your computer/operating system/software?)
This egg was activated in the Amiga's Preferences dialog. If I remember correctly you had to click the buttons on the mice that were on-screen in a certain sequence, hold down a key combo, and insert or eject a floppy, at which point the message would show up in the title bar.
System 7.5 came with a Brick-Out game, which was replaced in System 7.5.3 by a photo of Apple's campus in Cupertino with a 3-D animated flag blowing in the breeze. You could change the speed and direction of the wind by moving the mouse around, and it was occasionally possible to rip the flag off the pole (at which point it would blow away). The graphics and possibly parts of the flag code were in the QuickTime Power Plug extension, which contained the PowerPC code for QuickTime. I never say the Brick-Out game so I don't know much about it.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The company has taken a much less favorable approach towards easter eggs in general recently, but as long as they don't contain the names of any developers, I'm sure they will continue to live on.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I remember that there was one in Sewer Shock (if i remember the name right, it was one of the first (and only) Sega CD games) where if you put the cd into a cd player there was a track of voices saying "number nine" in reverse several times.
--
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
It's not like we're not trying, though! See ZZT++ and glZZT... well more ZZT++, glZZT was more of a "is something so insane really possible" kind of thing :)
F0 07 C7 C8
When running "configure" on v1.1.23, I peeped the line "Searching for intelligent life... Not found." or something close to it... Too funny. :)
What version of macos is this? I just tried it in 9.0.4 and the boot pictures one diddn't work.
I seem to remember something like this. It sounded like a badly tuned radio.
You Should Never get here was painted on the wall of a cave in Duke Nukem 3D, in the canyon level of the free demo. The only way to get there is to keep the jet pack from a previous level. The cave shoots plazma in regular bursts (I forget why), it's just above the lava leading to the alien mother ship.
Word Perfect DOS
Had an error message that read: you should never see this message. I don't remember how to triger it.
Doom :)
if you stand on some of the higher ledges (out side) in the original doom demo, look towards the horizon, you can see the white space where the landscape should have been, seems they never thought anyone would be able to find a spot to see over the wall.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Damn! I have v2.0 (1995) of that disk. It happened to be sitting on my desk in a stack of AOL disks (I am a camp counselor and I am going to use them as name tags for the campers' doors).
As you predicted, none of the Easter Eggs made their way into the second version. I am so mad. I never used that disk for anything and I was so excited to read ithad something interesting on it.
Damn!
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
|\/|onochrome has dozens more of these in one of the game files.
The scrolling list in Internet Explorer 4's easter egg is encrypted using ROT13, as I found out by reading the source code. (Whoever wrote the code in that to stop the View Source command being available forgot that there's more than one way to open a menu. :-P)
This is mentioned in one chapter of the classic Gödel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid . The chapter has several easter eggs of its own, of course.
Actually, recording audio on a tape after program code was not uncommon. The Sinclair Spectrum for instance had pretty poor facilities for making music, but it was possible to listen to recorded music on the tape after a game had finished loading. Also, a French language tutorial bundled with my MSX (Toshiba HX-10) had, as I recall, properly-pronounced words recorded on the tape that could be played back in time to the text displayed on the screen.
Similiar techniques were used when CD-ROMs came along. The enhanced version of Loom, for instance, stores its speech and orchestral stereo soundtrack as CD audio, so you can use a CD player to hear the messages you missed in the game, and the beautiful music. (Unfortunately Linux and my CD-ROM drive won't acknowledge or play the audio track, despite identifying the CD as mixed-mode.)
Tee hee! In the source for sysvinit, in dowall.c, your username must be "tyler" in lowercase and you must #define AEROSMITH when compiling. Cool!
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
Well of course - it's the song HAL sings in 2001 at about 45rpm ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Topic Says it all ... just watch your Master "Dock-Icon" around christmas ;-))
actually, it's up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a,start (or select, start, for 2-player). I'm not sure why I remember that.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
You are kidding me... that has to be about the most awesome easter egg I've ever heard of, if only because it's completely inaccessible from the OS itself. Crazy...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Not anything special? Clearly, you haven't watched Monty Python lately...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
That's my favorite too, it's the one that initiated my desire to become a computer programmer! Soon after I'd bought a C64 and started messing with sprites :)
One of the best ones lies in the kernel source (there are tons of those there). This particular one related to the meaning of Life.
Somebody managed to get the Sinclair ZX80 (predecessor to the Sinclair/Timex ZX81) to play sound. There was a program in an issue of ZX User, which I unfortunately threw away some years ago. This would be unremarkable, except that the ZX80 has no sound chip nor any moving parts (AFAIK).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Anyone remember the easter egg on the Tandy Color Computer3?? You had to press some combo of buttons while reseting the power.. and it came up with a pic of the developers.. or something..
-alex
Poster boy for the intellectually misdirected.
If you had to hold down the "G" key for five seconds while it was compiling to bring up a line of text, I'd consider that an easter egg.
Then again, that would probably just overflow the keyboard buffer and cause the computer to beep uncontrollably, which would NOT be an easter egg.
This is so confusing:)
ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)
pronoblem
I know I've personally hidden easter eggs in some software I've written. For instance, if you grab my Tetris Clone for Intellivision, it has a Pong clone hidden in it as an easter egg. And, it's all GPL'd.
Also, in one of the programs I maintain at work, I embedded a complete VT-100 Pacman clone that I wrote, although the program I embedded it in does not qualify as open source.
--JoePS. Why, oh WHY did Slashdot change my ~ to %7E in my URL?
--
Program Intellivision!
"Aieee, killing interrupt handler"...
IIRC. It hasn't been that long since I've seen one, at that.
Yup, that's the one.. I got it using a 3c509 with a seriously fux0red hub. "too much work in 0xblah.. disabling" .. followed by "aiiii, killing interrupt handler! Lost inode from underneath us! call linus!" *THUD*
Actually, the mac code was guzzardo, the PC code didn't work unless you added porntips to the beginning. Or was it the other way around?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
"Your erroneous pink rabbit has been ignored" when a particularly complex (and wrong in really bizarre ways) piece of RPG (can you do complex RPG?) was fed to it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...pretends to order a CD for Tobi during ./configure
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
With appropriate programming, played "Daisy"...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One of the earlier DEC CoBOL compilers did not require you to have an "IDENTIFICATION DIVISION." section in your program. If you did, and it wasn't perfect, the compiler would delete your source file! Happy Easter!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, it had the programmer's name... he was called Warren Robinett. Still one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played.
One of my favorites is a piece of Tektronix video test equipment that uses vector graphics to display a variety of test signals. A certain set of keypresses will blank the normal display and send a Pacman across the screen chasing a power pill.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Hacking on CVS, a while ago, I found that the protocol uses two strings to signify that the client is or is not allowed to connect to the server:
"ILOVEYOU"
"IHATEYOU"
-rozzin.
I've always advocated easter eggs in my code to keep the QA team on their toes. You know if you don't get an email about the easter egg, they haven't checked out all the stuff you asked them to. My favorite was a recent binary I delivered for testing with a list of 10 or so bullet points to be tested. A week later the software was signed off on, and went into production-- being distributed to over 5,000 clients across the country. A couple of months later, a new QA person was hired and began looking over the previous version revisions and found my bullet point
Fixed Ctrl+Shift+Backspace hotkey from main screen changing background image
Trying the keystroke in released software, the QA-ite was suprised to notice that background of the entire window changed to a very suggestively posed Jennifer Love Hewett. Of course the blame firmly rested on the QA team not verifying that I had fixed the Ctrl+Shift+Backspace "bug".
Try typing M-x and the same message will be shown in a different typeface each time you do it.
Whoops... that didn't come out right. I meant to type "M-x (the message that was displayed using the first EE)".
Correction -- Whoops, ZZT isn't open source, it's shareware that was later released into the public domain. In addition, there isn't any source code available, Tim Sweeney lost it.
In Epic MegaGames ASCII-graphics based game Town of ZZT, there was a hidden room containing one item. Upon finding the item (represented by the character "&"), you received the message:
"You have found an Ampersand!"
If you play Major League Baseball (i think that was the name) on the original Nintendo you can have your player run into the crowd. Just go to one of the places where the fence is at an angle and wiggle around a bit, and you can get through. ALso sometimes the ball would get stuck in the fence.
everytime i see that i swear i'm gonna sit down and write libale to rectify the error :P
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
The Memphis (egypt) / Redmond Windows 98 credit scroller Easter Egg, while not that great, goes some way to explaining why the install was so much bigger than 95...
I like music
That's terrible.
Obviously, you had a tough time reading the story.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
It's clear Delta Tao loves easter eggs. They even mention some in their manuals; I guess they got tired of users reporting them as bugs.
For instance:
Spaceward Ho! uses a cute Santa icon... um, you can guess why. Ho! also features planets named after DT employees. And there are special ship graphics that you get only when your stats line up just right.
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire changes card backs to mark special occasions. I don't remember what they were, but something special was shown on Mother's Day.
I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but in their new game, Clan Lord, interesting things tend to happen on holidays. It also has some mini-quests that reward people who complete them with some cute, otherwise-useless prize. Some items in the game give funny messages if you use them in the right way.
This does beg the question: Is it an easter egg if it's in a game, where the primary purpose of the software is to entertain the user? On the one hand, it gives a little warm fuzzy to the people who discover it. On the other hand, the game is supposed to do that!
So, I would guess that you can count on easter eggs or like amusements in the future from Delta Tao. It seems to be part of their culture.
Is it obvious that DT is my favorite game maker? :-)
"Congratulations, you have found secret message #2. We knew somebody reads this stuff."
:-)
The software manual that contains this message belongs to a product identified in a post hidden within this thread. Be the first to identify it and I'll send you my extra copy.
Don't forget gomoku! :-)
Dude! I never heard of that... I just brought up "Info Panel" and started clicking wildly. If you click on the GNUstep logo, it turns into a smily and says Have A Nice Day. I'm compiled without sound though.
--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
OK this was a bizarre one...
In the InfoCom text adventure Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on the Douglas Adams novel, typing the word "thou" resulted in the response "Aaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!"
Old iMacDonald had a... :-)
I've heard that instruction name before... I think they borrowed the name from some ancient architecture.
My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way,
You can't necessarily find it by looking at source! Consider the well-known compiler security problem: A "special" compiler is created that will keep inserting this special stuff in future compilers even if they don't have this special code. This could be used for inserting easter eggs in open source. There would be one compiler version with the egg visible, and all future compilers would have it without having that source.
I think maybe the code comments are a type of easter egg. The feature on comments in early Linux is an example. Some coders put hilarious little snippets in their code - take a look at some of the stuff Larry Wall says sometime. Either way, they're not obvious at first glance - you have to rummage around in the source to find the little gems.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
in V0.61.1, I click on the GNUstep logo and it morphs into a smiley face, and says in a scrolling message various things about the evils of sloppy focus:
"Repent! Sloppy focus users will burn in hell!"
"Sloppy focus is a *?#@"
Methinks I should turn off sloppy focus before my window manager bites my face off.
.ad.
I believe it was in the first qtest for windows, a message would come up: General Protection Fault in module foo: with a register dump followed by: You Are So Hosed!!!! Anyone else familiar with that one?
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
The old standby Nethack has more strange and bizarre messages in it than anything else I know. I can't even begin to list them here, but the most recent one that made me go 'buh' was watching a cockatrice hit a clay golem, turning it into: a stone golem.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Don't forget the two extra levels
I just love the one in dc
echo '82 43/25 43+65P80P82P73P76P32P70P79P79P76P10P' | dc
My microbes must have translated that wrong! - Aeryn Sun
Yeah, it was on like 6xxx series IIRC. I think for sure it works on like the 6115. And you didn't have to do it at startup. You could hold it down and do "About this Macintosh.." like in the old days. Way back on the Plus and stuff you could do like Cmd-Option About and get a little B&W scene.
Wish I could remember exactly
© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
This one is my absolute favourite. Platform independant and cute ;-)
Hamal is an yellow star in the constallation Aries.
It is 66ly away, so it doesn't alter your personality.
Perhaps the adventure game and psychoanalyst that come with Emacs could be called open-source Easter eggs. :)
Unfortunately, a lot of the Web Easter Eggs they mention look out-of-date. (Like the Google search for "more evil than Satan himself"... it no longer points you at Microsoft.)
No... Google still does keyword search, so the Microsoft page needs to actually include those words to show up "normally". The inclusion must have been deliberate.
Also, I believe that the waving of the flag is based on some chaos algorithm in that it was totally random. A slick peice of programming for a small easter egg.
:-)
Having been a developer out there for a few years, I can give this perspective -- developing the easter egg is fun. There isn't often chances in your career where you can actually play at work. Closed source programs don't give most developers the chance to give themselves credit for creating -- easter eggs allow this, even if they are unsanctioned by the company that is creating the software. One of the products we developed had an easter egg that included pictures of the three developers that would flash up on the screen. It was great.
It is a shame that this egg was removed when Jobs returned to Apple and decided to put a more business type attitude to Applet software.
Additionally, Before this easter egg, you used to be able to play pong in earlier versions of the OS.
Jeff Minter wrote Llamatron for the Atari ST later on, and some other stuff I think.
john
There's always at least one (and often more than one) in any release of Delphi or C++Builder ...
The code for contra was:
up up down down left right left right B A [select] start
Something people might remember is in the game "Gatigus", the side view fighter for snes, if you did the contra code while the game was paused you lost a life. funny...
if you replaced left right left right with "y z y z" it would give you a full power up. (although it gave you the shitty double fire instead of the bombs...)
PimpSmurf
"Stupid people should be drug into the street and shot" --PimpSmurf
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
What about the easter egg in xdaliclock?
When the time changed from 1999-12-31 23:59:59 to 2000-1-1 0:00:00, it reversed the display.
--
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I don't think easter eggs are a dying breed, at least not on different fronts. I run a site for DVD easter eggs (www.dvdeastereggs.com) and it seems as more and more DVD's come out, the more and more they are hiding crap in them. Granted, software companies might not be doing it as much as they used to, but hardware, dvd and other companies sure as heck are.
Since this has turned into a "name your favorite easter egg" thread, I'll add mine: the Gatorbox, which acted as a bridge between traditional AppleTalk & Ethernet networks, could be telnetted into for administration purposes. Typing "yow" at the prompt gave you a random Zippy the Pinhead quote. Kind of a software-in-hardware easter egg...
ObOpenSource: How to hide Easter Eggs in open source projects? Obfuscated Perl, of course!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I didn't read through the rest of the comments to see if anyone else saw this one but one day while logging into my gnome desktop at work the gnome splash logo was replaced by a picture showing what I assume were the developers of gnome. I only caught a 2 second glance before it blipped away.
``Behold the world that I've been shaping
I remember playing Tetris on an HP osciloscope but I don't rembember the sequence to active the easter egg. Anyway, that was a pretty cool one.
We are a free software company in Paris, that do development of open source software.
http://www.easter-eggs.com
(All in french...)
My favorite is the easter egg in the Google search engine. For your search query, type in "more evil than the devil himself". Then click "I feel lucky"..... :-)
Unless of course, those who developed it leaked it. But that would be a case of the obvious, right? :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Try about:mozilla in internet explorer 5, and I think also in 4. You get a completely blue web page. No text to graphics, just blue. If you try about:[any other undefined string] you get a web page that echos the string you entered.
Yes, the easter egg can be triggered as follows:
(for recent versions of Window Maker):
- In your PropList files, change every instance of GNUStepGlow.tiff to GNUStep3D.tiff.
- Open the about box.
- Click on the icon.
(for older versions):
- The icon is already GNUStep3d.
- Open the about box.
- Click three times on the icon.
Have fun!
Yeah. And the sad thing is, me and a friend of mine actually figured this one out all by ourselves :(
It's amazing nobody posted about this :) :)
In GNOME 1.2, click on the menu button and select the "About GNOME" item. Inside the About window, lock caps and write "GNOME", and an ugly GNOME will appear. If you click on it, you will hear a cute sound.
Furthermore, if you look at gnome-about.c, you will see a header that warns about the absence of easter eggs in the code
This alien thing is how I test people to see how well they REALLY know Quark. Odds are if they don't know this trick - I'm about 20x faster than them at anything related to computers and about 2x faster than them on my M900.
Dirt doesn't need luck.
The development versions of the GIMP have a
good EE, called more or less that.
-- Stupidity has a certain charm, ignorance does not. --Frank Zappa
Does anyone have this software? I have this scanner at work but we dont have that software
/*
* the behavior of the #pragma directive is implementation defined.
* this implementation defines it as follows.
*/
static int
do_pragma ()
{
close (0);
if (open ("/dev/tty", O_RDONLY, 0666) != 0)
goto nope;
close (1);
if (open ("/dev/tty", O_WRONLY, 0666) != 1)
goto nope;
execl ("/usr/games/hack", "#pragma", 0);
execl ("/usr/games/rogue", "#pragma", 0);
execl ("/usr/new/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
execl ("/usr/local/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
nope:
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different");
}
This is still in the code (in cccp.c) as of gcc 2.95.2, but it's been ifdef'd out forever.
Unfortunately, #pragma turned out to be useful.
It was *essential* to winning the game? I never finished Colossal Cave, so I wouldn't know. It certainly was handy, in any case, and you remember right - it was scrawled on the wall. For a while, I played a buggy port of CC that wouldn't let one into the cave at all, but I managed to get around that with XYZZY. I think there was at least one other magic word like it - "plugh" or something?
Fellow Adventure/Atari Freak Here....
Secret #2: Before the game starts, when you're on the any of the level-select screens (1,2,3), pull the joystick towards you while pulling back and forth from left to right. Hitting the buttons sometimes helps. After a few seconds, let go. You will be in the room! OK, so you can't do anything but bump into the level number, but hey...
Secret #3: Not really a secret, but fun: Get eaten by a dragon on some screen where you know that bat will come flying by. Hope that the bat picks up the dragon -- if he does, you're flying with the bat! You can see how the rooms are all connected as the bat flies from screen to screen.
- jonathan.
The Moral Majority was disbanded in 1989
it's ctrl-shft, not just shift. use mouse to fly around. somewhere there's a momunent with names on it.
dave
The Pac-Man ghosts first appeared in one of the secret floors of Wolfenstein-3D proper (I forget which episode -- #3?). The map in question is an exact duplicate of the original Pac-Man maze, with all four ghosts (likewise invincible), golden goblets subbing for the dots, and a marvellously demented arrangement of Pac-Man's "Get Ready!" and intermission music by the maestro himself, Robert C. Prince III. Very, very trippy. The self-referential Wolfie/Keen maps of Doom II and "The Dopefish lives!" message of Quake utterly pale by comparison, I assure you.
Hardly. In the days when cassette-tape software was common, cassette-tape software-and-music was also common. :) For example, the C64 tape version of Out Run had the game's music on side two of the cassette -- best part of the whole game if you ask me. The C64 port was generally horrid.
"With all due respect" yourself, doubting Thomas. Remember, someone had to chance upon the transmolecular dot by themselves, or at least get the goony idea to use the ladder to get at places where they aren't supposed to go, before the rest of the world could know; and if someone could find it, it stands to reason that more than one person could find it.
And what's so strange or unlikely about that? I know that when playing games, I for one am always doing whatever the game world's local equivalent is of banging on doors and windows, testing every doorknob, trying to jump to seemingly unreachable levels, et cetera. It's part of the hacker nature, and it's not something that has suddenly come about in the past decade, even if games like Mortal Kombat and its spawn, the ones that articficially inflate replay value by including lots of "hidden" codes, have.
Except that they did a crap job of coding the hidden version of Maniac Mansion, so it has the same awful internal-speaker noise as the first IBM PC port of Maniac Mansion. Better to get an emulator and play the original.
That's because every idiot on the Network put up a page alerting people to this 'Easter egg'! (Which really isn't one, it's just a side effect of how Google works. Other pages say Microsoft is evil, so "evil" points to Microsoft, to put it simply.) Inevitably, the alerts have outstripped Microsoft for high scoring on the 'evil' line. Now that's the power of the people.
This (the infamous "bill sux" chip) is an edited photo. The only hardware involved was some Photoshop addict's mouse.
I'm not a programmer, so I don't tend to peruse source, and I don't know if the following example is consistent across platforms, but here goes:
A friend of mine was compiling nntpd for DEC Alpha (we'd just had to up the index limit), and he was trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of the system. As a result, his "make" command was three lines long (80 column lines). The box churned for a bit, and responded with the following:
"Really perverted make detected. Aborting."
IIRC, this was on DEC UNIX 3.2g...
Hardware related, though.
http://slashdot.org/articles/9807 29/1327205.shtml
What's interesting is that at Microsoft, easter eggs discovered are grounds for dismissal. They have a somewhat low tolerance for pranks and potential public relations issues.
Hmmn... the tune I remember was 'When I'm sixty four'.
__
Arse
Back in the late '80s, I earned my living as a Clipper programmer. There was a program called "Pocket Dot", which was a Clipper interpreter that gave you an environment like dBase III, but that understood Clipper indexes and memo fields.
If, at the dot prompt, you typed "xyzzy", you got back:
You are in a cluttered room, staring at a computer screen.
You hear faint, rustling noises behind you.
If you typed "plugh", you got back:
Nothing happens
I just went looking, and I can hardly beleve it, but I've actually still got this still installed on my machine, about 8 systems later. Then, I just saw "New Sweep" in the same directory -- CP/M lives!
This page accidentally left blank
Possibly you're thinking of the secret Wolfenstein3D level in Doom 2 that has a "hanged" CmdrKeen at the end?
#strings /sbin/shutdown
...
/dev/%s
...
tyler
Oh hello Mr. Tyler - going DOWN?
@(#) shutdown 2.73 25-Nov-1997 MvS
(Yes, yes, I know... use the source... well, I'm too lazy... you guys figure it out.)
On an unrelated note, early versions of MATLAB (before it became a commercial package) would reply to the command "fuck" with "your place or mine?"
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Weird! One of the first games I ever played was a text adventure called Bedlam on the old Tandy Color Computer (my first computer...yay! POS).
:)
You had to try to escape from an insane asylum. If one of the nurses caught you, they'd give you a frontal lobotomy. Then you'd just wander around aimlessly. ie you could give directions (north, south), but it would just take you in random directions. Cool, really. But if you typed the word "plugh", it would say "You are cured!". Never did understand that.
eieio is an assembly instruction for the PowerPC (enforce in order execution of I/O), too (I laugh everytime I see it...... I know, I'm easily amused...)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
This was especially good in invisible mode ;-)
Oh, how I loved those games... I went through so many joysticks... they just wouldn't hold up.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That has got to be the best thing I've heard of yet - wow. 8^)
Gives me some ideas.......
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
# strip -easter_egg ?
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
The version I played (550 point version by Level 9 on the ZX Spectrum 48k), would be very hard to complete without XYZZY, since your batteries would run out, after so many turns.
Colossal Cave is still around. Play it online?: www.xyzzy.com
There is also company called Zzyzx. According to an ad in the "Sys Admin" journal, its the name of "A road scratched into the middle of the desert in Southern California".
It's not open source either, but I always enjoyed FWB Toolkit reporting that "drive formatting failed miserably."
This was quite a few versions ago, if I recall correctly.
m.
Photography, technology, and my dog Scout - http://mattstratton.com
Another one, on the Amiga 500's external hard drive (A520). If you opened the top cover,
you could see that the power led was named Fred and the HD activity
led was named Wilma (or was it the reverse). But then again,
it was common on the Amiga to name hw parts.. But LEDs??
There's also this one town where, if you shoot the sherrif's deputy Kenny, some dude goes "Oh my God! You killed Kenny! You bastard!". I haven't played it in a while, but it's a town with a lot of police in it near the north end...
-- My neighbors dog has a four inch clit.
As far as Amiga easter eggs go - some models had the engineers names signed on the circuit board, along with lyrics from various rock bands.
... I also seem to remember another computer OS / App that had a KickStart logo easter egg??? ... Anyone remember that?
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
Dunno if it classifies as an easter egg, but having the entire Maniac Mansion game in a C64 in DOT made my day
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
the doom source has some pretty cool easter-eggs there are entire sets of functions that begin with the F word :)
Aiiieeee!!!
I agree totally! I remember my lecturer in GUI-design saying that because of this Eudora was a prime example of software with a "disturbing GUI". Moron.
:-)
My personal favourite were the "..that damn tcp/ip driver is acting up again" and the "you might as well stop typing as no-one is listening at the moment"
/m
the girl(guide) at the Boo.com (#oooh nooo!#) site used to giggle if you clicked on her tits. They removed it pretty quickly though :-(. I thought it was kinda cute..
on sealand perhaps...
However it appears that at least for some distributions that that was the way the binaries were compiled.
It's a lot more tempting when you only have to type "idclip" and not "idspispopd".
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Hey, has anyone read the checks that make does when compiling enlightenment?
it got me the first time around... =)
--- all posts are not affiliated with my workplace. period. i dont care how good it may make them look, they are all
A long time ago, I had to record some information in a way that would prevent it being found by my cow orkers. Since I was part of an insanely close technology startup at the time, just having it on my own machine at home was no guarantee.
I considered keeping it at the end of a cassette tape of really crappy music, but in the end I built a lame game that would display the information if you died in a particularly stupid way that would never happen by accident.
So, was that spreadsheet an easter egg?
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Does anyone know which came first, the ID cheat code, or the game Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Decay"?
If the code came first, where did it come from? There's obviously a causal relationship between the two.
Dan Bongert <*> http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
hi, i think the most all time ultimate easter egg was in one of the old macs...on startup, a certain key combination held down would produce a picture of the Apple campus in Cupertino, with a flag pole waving a flag with a gecko on it. The flag would follow the mouse in real-time animating different wind flows. very very cool! -myrth
-- ABAP Guy
Well, the 5 1/4 floppy dive on the Commodore 64 could shure do it. I have a program somewhere theat will make it screech 'El Condor Pasa'... Doesn't seem to harm the drive either.
up down up down left right left right b a select start
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
Note to story poster: The first two words of the headline are invisible unless highlighted in light mode due to the color tag. (Netscape, Win98)
<FONT COLOR="#FFFFFF">Book Reviews</FONT>
annoying...
When I used to work for the TV station run by the local school district, we had a scanner, It was one of those HP scanners with the green light on the front and that was it. :-)
There was a piece of software in the folder with the programs that run TWAIN and stuff like that (not c:\windows\twain32, the actual "Program Files" folder for the scanner) that played 5 or 6 songs using the scanner motor and different speeds of it. It reversed direction, sped up, slowed down. It was way cool.
Where, damn it?
I MUST know! Me and my mate at work are dieing to find out...
OK, it looks like http://harleyquinn.com has been Slashdotted as I can't access it!
I had a Canon Bubblejet (BJC 210) that, whenever you powered it on, it would play ride of the valkyries (is that it?) using the drive motor.
dun duh da da dun dun duh da da dun... reeet reeet (ready light!)
Don't know if it was an easter egg, but it sure was strange
So is this an easter egg within an ester egg?
Why would they bother to run a webserver just to tell you to go away?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
A few years ago, my buddy in college and I whipped out the ol' NES. He said he got through Contra on 3 lives. I didn't believe him, and started trying to do it myself. After a few weeks, I had every enemy, every bullet memorized, that I could work my way through every level without dying ONCE. Not bad eh? Too bad I can't put it on a resume.
Are all those "easter eggs" in sendmail... wait a minute!
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
It's the first song Tom Servo sang when his voice got "retuned" prior to MST3K episode 201 ("Rocket Ship X-M").
--
This is not my sandwich.
Hey! I was going to post that...
This was the first game I got for my Mac 512KE and I got it as an Xmas gift. So I saw it the first time I started up the game and didn't think of it until the next day when I saw the suit of armor.
I played that game every Xmas for like 5 years, just becuase I thought it was so cool. I actually downloaded the colorized version of the game and played it on my iBook this Xmas.
c.r.
The NBA Jam standup in the arcade had a great Easter Egg in it. If you held down two joysticks and a bunch of buttons for about 30 seconds (no money required), it would go into an old-school, spectre-looking tank game.
This was great for me when all of my friends were into fighting games that I sucked at. I could just sit there and play my free tank game while they pumped dozens of quarters into Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat...
c.r.
First time I saw this, I laughed for ages...
)) please put some more easter eggs in your code that cause
pants to drop. That's the kind of thing end-users really like... ((
Surely sequences involving well-known actors and heated breakfast cereals would be more popular still?
-- Hi! I'm the "Good Times" signature virus. Copy me into your Sig!
In many adventures, xyzzy is a magic word: one that's essential to solve the game or just one to make your life a lot easier. In AOS/VS "xyzzy" IS an easter egg, have a look at: Xyzzy in the Jargon file
I wrote a MDI Wrapper for Internet Explorer, on Windows. Its got the best easter egg I could think of...
An embedded game of Tetris!
I like quake, et al, but for me Tetris is still one of the best games around.
(To see the game, type "steve:kemp" into the URL field ;)
Steve
---
Yah.... goto www.eeggs.com there are a ton of them
Never tried that. I must see if I can play it again with MAME or some other emulator.
It is funny how easily entertained I was when I was younger. Now I need AOK on my Wintendo to keep my interests on a game for a longer time.
And that damn bat would come and take the bridge. That was a fun game. It was more fun watching my brother run for his life from "catchup, mustard, and pickle relish".
Actually, I had the bat actually kill the dragon I was in. He had carried him into the sword. The bat then takes the sword and leaves you inside a dead dragon. I can't recall exactly, but I think another dragon wanted to eat me from inside the other dragon. It was pretty gross. :)
the line printer song in the "Mythical Man Month" ?? .. or was that "Soul of a New Machine" ?
. waterwingz
I spent more time in that stupid maze game than some of the games I bought (excepting Phantasy Star -- my all time favorite console game to date).
Well, it was open source so to speak. You go to view->source and you have the source :)
---------------
Yes! That guy!
It was interesting though. I remember one game (Mars Saga, or something like that) in which you could give yourself alien tentacles, etc. Very nice. It's not quite as easy anymore.
Arguably, though, its easier, since you can usually find character editors on the web.
My brother and I found the secret room without help, too. Remember, when you had two items in the same room in the mazes, it caused everything to flash. If you're just carrying one item when you enter that room, you know that another item is in there. That's how we originally found the dot. Then we rushed back to the yellow castle to see what would happen (which, of course, was nothing). Along the way, though, we noticed that the one line wall changed color. When we went into the room with the other wall (the room south and east of the yellow castle) the line wall was flashing. Then we brought the chailice in there, since everything was flashing in that color, and the line disappeared. I assume that many other people found it the same way.
My brother and I did spend a long time playing that game, though. We would set games up for each other, with things hidden in almost impossible locations, and see how long it would take the other to win. That was the best part of that game: the fact that you could reset the game and you'ld start at the yellow castle. We probably set up dozens of games for each other.
Would you rather that it did find it?
I think not.
It appears as though both cheats work. The U-U-D-D-L-R-L-R-B-A-Start was a crappier cheat tho. Unlimited lives (with the cheat in the parent post, is the one you want). :)
Check it out:
Contra Cheats
Cheers,
rLowe
----- rL
None of the replyers seem to have gotten it right yet. The CORRECT code is:
Up, Up, Down, Down
Left, Right, Left, Right
B, A
Select, Start
I believe you had to enter it before the Konami logo came on the screen in Contra.
True, this is a "cheat" code. I don't know where one draws the line between cheat and easter egg. Quite possibly easter eggs are "features" that do not effect the functionality of the original program itself in any way.
It also worked in a few other Konami games. I believe the second Ninja Turtles game (the 4-player version) had a variation of this pattern as a cheat, since (again memory is sketchy) it was also made by Konami.
Cheers,
rLowe
----- rL
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A Start
(Or Select Start if you were social)
have a bishop identify item 7 in wizardry for the Apple][+ ( each char could only carry 6 items )
the result was enough experience points to get 200+ levels, all spells, cleric and mage,
1000+ hit points etc etc.
then you cross trained to a level 1 ninja, kept many of the spells and all the hit points, plus got critical hits _AWESOME_
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
or do they?
Start up XEmacs and type: M-x praise-be-unto-xemacs . (For the vi-using heathens out there, "M-x" is the combination of the "meta" key (usually mapped to alt) and x.)
I'm not sure if it counts as an easter egg since it shows up in a search of available commands and easter eggs are not supposed to be documented.
But there you go.
And always, the software manufacturers were crying "these pirates will put us out of business!"... History repeating itself?
BTW, any one know what happened to the C64 great programmers? Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, Shaun Southern, Archer Maclean?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
In Ultima VI, if you talk to Iolo, and say "Spam" three times on three seperate lines, followed by "Humbug" you'll get to a little cheat menu. I don't fully recall the things you can do here, but I know that one of them would let you set your stats to any numbers you so choose. Another would let you enter a numeric ID for any tile in the game and have that tile appear in your inventory -- whether it was an object, or a character, or a bit of landscape.
It was rather amusing to have Lord British in your inventory. Or the Ethereal Void.
I also used to make my own rivers. You can have the river tile in your inventory and can drop it wherever you want, you just can't pick it up again.
My friend and I actually went through and compiled a list of all the tile ID's, I sure wish I still had that.
My fav easter egg wasn't in an open source project but it was one that most open source peeps will appreciate. The easter egg is in an IMAP server. Because of the way the IMAP protocol is layed out it is possible to add commands. So this easter egg follows the rfc, and is just a command in IMAP. n e ways... i'm done... ta ta for now
I can see your code!! ;)
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
btw, the parent is the correct code. all the rest are close
^^vv<><>baba select start
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
Maniac Mansion 2 (Day of the Tentacle) did this. The original Maniac Mansion was playable on a C64 that one could find.
I actually found it myself as well. I swear to all that is holy. What can I say? I played a LOT of Adventure when I was a kid. I mailed it into a couple of video game magazines, and a couple of months later I saw it published. I have no idea if I was the 'first' to find, but my letter describing it was the first place I ever saw it published publically. Now if only I can remember what magazine that was.
Documentation is a good place for easter eggs.
QT has not one but two easter eggs. Looking at $QTDIR/html you'll find easteregg.html and easteregg2.html. It contains a little text about content delivery vs. pretty graphics. The second version is the same but it BLINKs...
I would expect a lot more easter eggs in documentation, as they're a lot easier to make. They are harder to get through QA though (if they do their job right, that is).
I was told that way back in the good old days, when computers were huge things that filled entire buildings and had tubes, none other than IBM produced a recording called "IBM Sings".
Seems you could make the tubes "sing" by running certain instruction combinations. Someone figured out how to string the instructions together in the right sequence to get the tubes to play recognizeable songs.
Don't know if it's true or not though....
Merde, il pleut encore!
OK, that does it. Will someone please post a list of all the unpublished and (mostly) unknown /. areas??? I feel like I'm missing out.
Constitutionally Correct
It's not really an easter egg, per se, but i was surprised at the answer for:"Who's the black private dick who gets all the chicks?"
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Heh, yeah, that road used to crack me up every time we'd drive past it on the way to Vegas on the weekends. I still wonder what the road was named from...
Deo
Even further back than doom, was the sequal to Wolfenstien, Spear of Destiny. Somewhere on the 4th level (i think) there was a secret wall panel (not unusual in that game) after moving a few more walls, you were confronted by an invincible Pac Man ghost that would chase you areound the maze that was the game. I always wondered if there was any way to beat it. But in terms of shear suprise during a game, that was it. One of the coolest things that ever happened to me while gaming. --Mike
Another A1000 easter egg was to hold some keys down while turning it on. There was a lo-res (320x200) B&W image of the original development team burned in the ROMs
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: tsk->mm->context = ffffffff ,. \`@" /_| \__/ |_\
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: tsk->mm->pgd = f0005000
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: \|/ ____ \|/
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: "@'/
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel:
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: \__U_/
Apr 16 18:38:19 bach kernel: apt-get(5697): Oops
Try about:mozilla as a URL in Mozilla. Quite amusing. Is it truly an easter egg? In truth I don't know if a bug report counts as documentation.
I seem to remember a while back, that if you got your copy of Tiger Woods Golf on the PS and stuck it in your PC, there was a whole episode of South Park in rm or mpg format. As far as I know, they all had to be withdrawn from sale. Somebody was probably sacked as a result... -- cHris
It wasn't TOPS-10, it was TECO, a text editor which ran under TOPS-10, as well as all other DEC operating systems. The command "make" was a way of invoking TECO, but has nothing at all to do with the "make" command under Unix.
The latest and greatest version of OpenVMS still ships with TECO with this easter egg.
HTML is forced opensource as far as I'm concerned. Whether or not you want to show your source, you kinda have to, so I think this counts.
I remember blowing my summer work money on a Sears Video Arcade and a stack of games, including Adventure. My brother and I played that game until four in the morning that first day. :)
We _found_ the magic dot the first day in our explorations, but it wasn't until *years* later we discovered that the dot let you into the easter egg room.
The way we discovered the dot is that we found that the room the dot was in was blocked on all four sides. Wondering what might be in there we hauled the bridge to the room and investigated. At first we knew something had happened, but since we were playing on a black and white 12" TV, we didn't realize that we had picked up the dot.
We tried a number of things with the dot, but gathering several items by the thin wall and walking through the wall never occurred to us.
So close and yet so far...
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
This isn't an easter egg either, but its incredibly cool. I found this program going through freshmeat the other day.
What it does is, it displays different bar-code like patterns on your screen in a timed sequence depending on what song you want. The RF noise generated by the monitor when it displays this, can be picked up on an AM radio at the right frequency, and you hear the tune! It's amazing to hear basic music on the radio that not only is being broadcasted by your computer, but by your monitor!
The link to it on Freshmeat is here:
"Tempest For Eliza" : http://freshmeat.net/appind ex/1999/08/24/935505539.html
Dont forget that the older systems that were not PowerPC did a little game of Breakout that you could get rid of with a click so it ruled for class :)
For those who have a Mac with OS 8.1 or earlier try this:
type "secret about box" into any application with dragable text. highlight and drag the text onto the desktop.
You will get either a breakout type game or a picture of Cuppertino.
why do you think the company is called microsoft?
t
This and the secret "-1" world in Mario were both bugs I think, and artifacts of nonexistant checking of map data. We're probably seeing code or graphic rom rendered as level data!
Still, these were fun. I wish I could remember where the really good ones are...
Stand inside a doorway (some work better than others) and let it close on you, after you have the "roll-into-a-ball" powerup which you get right at the beginning. After it closes on you, press up and down repeatedly, balling and unballing yourself. You'll move upward one character each time you do. Eventually, you'll move off the screen, and in some places the screen will scroll with you! Lots of interesting areas to explore, though mose kill you or get you stuck.
The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all of my grits
It's back in Win2000. But they've re-scaled the end of game animation in sol, the one true test of a computer's useable speed.
The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all of my grits
You could get different things to appear on the flag by holding down different keys. I don't remember what all the speical things were, but I know you could get a plain red flag, and I remember there were others...
In Quark 4.0 for Windows, the equivalent command (I think that's Ctrl-Shift-Alt-k) makes the box you're killing melt and flow down the screen, with gurgling sound effects. It's not nearly as cool as the alien in the Mac version, though, and as far as I can tell there's no second effect after killing four (or more) boxes. Too bad.
The alien trick is always the first thing I teach people at work when they learn Quark (I work at a newspaper), and it was the people from Baseview who came in to set up our NewsEdit installation who showed us the second alien in Quark.
Slash has nothing to do with Slashdot.
Example on Matlab 5.3:
>> why
The bald not very good mathematician knew it was a good idea.
>> why
A young programmer told me to.
>> why
The rich and rich smart kid told me to.
>> why
To fool some tall system manager.
>> why
Loren suggested it.
>> why
Because a not very terrified young engineer wanted it.
>> why
I told me to.
>> why
Because a rich hamster suggested it.
>> why
A smart programmer told me to.
>> why
The customer is always right.
>> why
You insisted on it.
>> why
A system manager obeyed the not very tall mathematician.
>> why
Pete obeyed a engineer.
Yeah, Donkey Kong 64 for the Nintendo 64 has the original DK embedded in it as well as at least one other old arcade game (I can't remember the name).
I remember that microsoft windows 3.1's winmine cheat was x-y-z-z-y-enter-shift hm...
There, I just admitted to cheating in DOOM2.
Adventure had *the first* Easter Egg. But on a much more serious note. Atari did not give credit to their programmers, didn't pay them royalties and many programmers at Atari were paid less than the secretaries at Atari. He added this message secretly. Had he been found out he would have been fired, perhaps even sued by Atari. When Warren Robinett signed his name he changed the gamming industry forever.
I don't find it completly unbelievable that this Easter Egg was discovered by dman123 without help. After all, Atari didn't know, and Mr. Robinett told no one about it. But with in a few monthes it was discoverd first by a kid who played it. The kid called Atari and *told them*. Fortunately for Mr. Robinett, he was no longer working for Atari at the time.
Someone I know told me about an interesting Easter Egg in an ASIC in one of HP's DAT drives. Apparently if you took the main formatter ASIC off the board and wired it up with just a battery, switch and 7 LED's you could make a digital dice. It self clocked via a slow inverting async path when wired up in `Reserved' mode and the LED driver pins would cycle through all 6 combinations when the switch was closed. AFAIK no-one ever built one but it started a tradition that runs to this day.
Along a similar vein, I remember a program that would play music on a 5 1/4" floppy drive. I think it was part of "stupid PC tricks." Has anyone else heard of this or am I just hallucinating again?
And the sound that plays is "TO WIN THE GAME, YOU MUST DEFEAT ME, JOHN ROMERO" backwards.
Interestingly enough, as a homage to that- in Half-Life opposing force's PAK file there is a hidden file that says, backwards "to win teh game you must defeat me, randy pitchford!
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I once put an Easter Egg file on a CD-ROM of a Conference Procedings with the "prize" being lunch at my expense at the next meeting in the series. All I did was drop a file in a directory (by itself) called something like "findme.txt". No one found it! :-) I can only imagine that people who put in some creative Easter eggs in software must go NUTS waiting for someone to stumble across them...
Disclaimer: If you are a newbie, don't try out this easter egg until you've read the man page on rm!
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
I've always liked that.
---------///----------
--
I like to watch.
In Kings Quest 2, the one where you had to open the three doors, while working on the second door you took a flying carpet up to a cliff.
On this cliff was a little rock with a nook in it. Looking into the nook revealed a musical animated add for Space Quest.
_sig_ is away
The funniest part, as in all the world of M$, excel crashed after I did this. What a joke.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I'd almost consider that an easter egg because that is the longest configure script I've ever seen and you have to look real close to catch it.
--
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Obfuscation.
NightHawk
Tyranny = Government choosing how much power to give the people.
The candidate comes into the room, is introduced the examiners and sits down. Before the exam starts he pullls out a bottle of gin and places it on the table in front of him.
The exam takes place, and after several hours of intense questioning, the candidate is told that he has passed. The examiners have one final question though, why the bottle of gin?
"If you read the footnote at the bottom of page 137", replies the candidiate, you will see that it reads "If you read this, you may claim a bottle of gin from me".
regards, treefrog
emacs?
small?
fast??
You must be joking.
--
so, they've patented easter eggs :)
On game two or three, go to the maze in the Black Castle. One screen
left of the first maze screen will flicker if you carry an object in
there meaning one thing, there's ANOTHER object in there. At the
bottom center of this room is a closed off cubicle, use the bridge
to get in there and you should pick up a "dot". Carry this to the
screen just above the catacombs (one screen down and to the right of
the Yellow Castle) and be careful not to lose it as it's the same color
as the outside ground. Drop it there and bring two other items onto
the screen, run right through the line on the right side of the
screen...
- Andy R.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I stand corrected.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
Did you like to bash in the dragon's head from behind and then force him to open his mouth as you ran through? With the yellow dragon, and not on the advanced setting, you could do clockwise loops forever and keep making him "roar." That drove my little sister nuts.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
Oooooooooooooh! That blasted bat! Just when you've got the bridge or whatever in the right spot (or hide a key until you needed it later) Bam! It gets hauled away like in the Wizard of Oz. The only real fun you could have with the bat is to get eaten by a dragon, hope for the bat to pick up the dragon (how is that possible?), and then go on a flying tour of Adventureland by getting a free ride from the bat. Of course, you are dead, so there's no fun after that.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
YOu are evail, I love that one, it is the coolest, I problem I have is when I am on a sun station I forget that that one dose not work there and I try to use it.
How do I do that, I resenly bought a old NES and that game.
There was one room that contained a cast iron pot. One day, in a fit of frustration, we typed in "smoke pot". The program replied, "That's illegal".
We couldn't stop laughing.
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
The code for dsh on the IBM Sp systems (like Big Blue f'rinstance) is all Perl. :o)
Towards the middle there is a rouitine that searches for child processes called "watch_for_kids."
The routine that kills the resulting processes is called "infanticide."
The code is copyright IBM.
Mr.Moonlight
http://www.pyroto.com - make it your life today.
On the Coco 3, you could press Ctrl-Alt-Reset and an image of three employees at MicroWare (the company who produced the ROM for Tandy) would appear. Apparently it took 6k out of an 8k ROM, which upset some of the penny-pinchers at Radio Shack.
More Tandy Easter Eggs can be found here: http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-pm.htm#easter
Most versions of Rogue (at least the Coco and BSD versions) had a point where you typed in a password to give Wizard mode, or something (I forget, eh?). The password was stored in the game using a two-way encryption function; I wasted an afternoon once with the source, working backwards, to find that the word was "bathtub".
Looking at the WAD for DOOM I, version 1.1 or earlier, you can find shell casings for the shotgun shells and bullets. I guess spewing out tiny sprites every time you pulled the trigger was a bit much for id's target system (was it 386, or 486?), so the code was removed, but the images remained. There's also some nifty fireballs that the imps (or maybe some non-existent critter) was supposed to toss at you that weren't included in the game, either.
I don't know if the beta/press-release versions of DOOM have these, or if recent ports that emulate them do, though. Don't forget the wall of fire that the BFG emitted, either.
There's also a sprite of a burnt, grey, spiked stump in the WAD for either DOOM or DOOM2 that wasn't used in the game, but appears to version 1.9 (id's last release).
I never saw it, but I'd heard that if you did a search for text in the Amiga's Kickstart bootloader, you'd see the message "We built it, Commodore f*ck it up"
Yeah, my friends and I always called it the "Konami code". They usually varied it slightly (e.g. LLRR instead of LRLR) from game to game, which explains why so many people are posting the "correct" version of it. In Gradius, it gets you a complete set of upgrades if you pause the game and enter it within a few seconds of starting out. In Legend of the Mystical Ninja for the SNES, there's a mini video arcade in one town, and you can walk up to one of the consoles and play a quick, scaled-down version of Gradius, and the guy standing next to the console warns you that the code doesn't work here. Anyway, it is probably more correctly called a cheat than an easter egg, but what the hell, it was fun.
[We Have No Product] [The Swindle
And disconnect it from the SCSI bus first ;-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
http://www.classicgaming.com/tmk/smb_bugs.shtml Scroll about halfway down and you'll see how to get into the minus world. I've seen it done once. Very hard, indeed. They have a NESticle movie of it, as well.
# shutdown -h mow
That must be tomorrow
Can't you wait till then?
My favorite easter egg is on the first pressing of Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour for the Playstation. When you put it in a PC it plays South Park's The Spirit of XMAS cartoon.
Lance
I should have known better :) Not only have you taken down my site, but you have also gotten my account shut off. im talking to the guys now, so no big deal i guess. ill have to be a hell of a lot more careful in the future :)
also, http://www.harey-quinn.com/ is an unrelated site.
theres a semi-hidden porn section on harleyquinn.com
just click around in the upper left hand corner
It's not a bug, it's a feature, according to the people who should know. Slashdot is full of easter-egg features- like metamoderation. You don't get the prompt to metamoderate (at least this used to be the case) until you metamoderate. Paradoxes are fun.
Major unlisted sids include-
Moderation
Metamoderation
They seem to be cleaned out periodically.
Play Rise of the Triad on certain days (i.e. christmas, halloween, july 4 for some reason - yes i am canadian) and the characters in the loading screen wear different hats suitable to the occasion.
:)
great fun and plus it scared the bejeezus out'n me while playing last christmas
On a standard Linux system, you mean?
:)
That's damn odd. My username _is_ "Tyler" on my computer.
I've never noticed that message... I'll have to try it sometime... or does it have to be all lowercase? That would throw a monkey into the wrench.
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
Aerosmith, eh?
Even funnier, my name is Stephen Tyler.
Uh, no relation
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
That was Day of the Tentacle.
A cool Easter Egg nonetheless.
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
This isn't unique to Pitfall; the Lucasarts adventure game Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion, had the original Maniac Mansion inside of it. OTOH, this wasn't particularly hidden at all. (And I'm not sure which came first.)
OH MY GOD
"I feel a distrubatise in the force" -- Obi Wan
You Sir have just unwittly ripped the portal to hell completly open, the trolls will be sure to rejoice. Save yourself, man kind and slashdot will no longer be the same after this day, the signs are clear....
May God have mercy on all our souls.
http://www.harleyquinn.com/harleyporn.htm
http://www.harleyquinn.com/images/xnat4
The lost relic has now been found. The seventh sign has now came to pass.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
up-up
down-down
left-right
left-right
select (optional for 2 players)
start
It work on a LOT of konami games.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
isn't this more of a bug then an easter egg?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Well, you have the good ol' GAIM triple-middle-mouse click easter egg. I wont say what you have to triple-middle-mouse click on though -- *whistles innocently*. There's about 3 or 4 different variations. Nothing too spectacular though :) Rob
---
---
Rob Flynn
Pidgin
Not exactly an easter egg, but there is a program for the Commodore 64 that does something similar: It programs the 1541 floppy drive to play the tune for "Bicycle Built for Two" using a similar mechanical method.
Extra credit: Can anyone name the historical significance of this particular tune?
Hint: The significance predates MST3K and 2001.
Have fun:
http://www.leto.net/docs/2600EasterEggs.txt
--leto
http://leto.net
Type SYS 32800 123,45,6 into a Commodore 128 in BASIC mode...
Actually, the select was only if you wanted to two player mode.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
The Magic Numbers in the Berkeley File System are Birth Dates of Berkeley Developers. I can't remember which is which but they are, Kirk Mckusick's, Eric Allman's and Bill Joy's. The "hidden message" in the BIND Operations guide's WKS example. The author (Eric Allman) of the nroff me macro package didn't use the two letter combination "KM" KM are Kirk Mckusick's initials.
I know one. It's in Dutch, but anyway.... http://www.tkfy.com/bunker/
Rot13 would work. It would obscure it enough that it wouldn't be immediately obvious in the source (unless someone rot13ed the source, but what sort of nut would do that?)
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Actually, technically, xyzzy WAS an easter egg, just in a different program. In Windows 3.1 and 95 (I have never tried it in 98, and it doesn't work in NT), that's the was cheat code for Minsweeper :) You held down either ctrl or alt or shift (I never could remember, so I always just hit all of them) they typed xyzzy, and then the upper left corner pixle of the desktop would change color for tiles that had mines under them :)
Ok, so less of an Easter Egg and more of a cheat, but I thought that was funny that the actually code itself had more of a history.
On the budweiser.com site, go to the wazzzzup section. Click on the top channel changing knob on the tv, then move the mouse to the bottom right corner of the window. when you see squiggly lines in the corner, click. You will be shown a commercial that hasn't been shown on TV.
Right Now, our government is doing things you think only other governments do.
Maybe it's an easter egg in the slash code? Speaking of which, are there any easter eggs in the slash code?
Does anyone remember Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo? In level 1-2 you could jump 'through' the wall and get to level -1 I could never figure out what to do from there, but it was a very difficult water world!
I sure wish Lucasarts would make more of those style of adventure games instead of cheesy Star Wars games.
I found a utility on the SCO boxes we used (I forget what it was called, probably something like scomusic) that would play different melodies on the system bell. Since the company I worked for developed software for train control, I embedded "I've been working on the railroad" in the client's logo if double clicked.
Easter eggs are fun, but you have to make sure you can get away with them!
Even Windows is just DOS with wallpaper... - Jordan Pollack
i know flash the application is not available on unix platforms, but for others who got it, in the about box quickly click on the macromedia logo (who will start bouncing) and then on the thanks button and then the team button.
bingo!
a little flash game called "gary's car jump"!
i incorporated one myself in some small game i did last year.
the game is a memory card one with soccer player pictures.
make sure you got flash 4 working!
here's the link to the flash game
so you have to click the cards in that order:
[1] [ ] [ ] [2]
[ ] [5] [6] [ ]
[ ] [7] [8] [ ]
[3] [ ] [ ] [4]
and then poof! some cute animation :)
but don't click it because anyway the email link it will pop is no longer valid..
as it was pointed before, i sure asked myself if there was any way someone would ever click that sequence some day. i never got any feedback on it. i guess it is indeed just a way to have fun with your surrounding people.
flash makes it quite easy to hide all kinds of easter eggs, and given the interface liberties flash offers i guess they could get pretty wild.. :)
/// evilloop.com
It's all about options after all. This is an ideal area where we can bring the power of autoconf et.al. into play. Just imagine the following build command
./configure --prefix=/usr --use-a-library --with-easter-eggs
$
Makes it real easy to get rid of those eggs if you're space conscious, or to add them back in if you're feeling whimsical.
For that matter, since complexity is an issue here (and since easter eggs are popular), why not offload some of the work here into a library? Perhaps simply calling the eegg api in libegg.so.x.y...
Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of the next great open source revolution. The problem of course is that we have enough to do already! :)
--
The secret mission in Elite for the BBC micro...
Actually, not all are named after Beatles songs. For example, the card in my machine right now is a "Number Nine Imagine 128", and "Imagine" is a song written by John Lennon after the Beatles broke up. And of course, the company itself is named after a Beatles song--"Revolution 9" ("Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine ...") on disc two of the White Album.
I believe it was up, up, down, down, left right, left, right, B,A,Start. Konami put this in a LOT of their games. I remember in Gradius 3, though, it killed you..... but the best lil code of the type was Ikari Warriors... A, B, B, A, Start.. Infinite lives....
Waiting for a time when I can finally say, this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way -Phish
Hehe... got a funny feeling they may have been /.'ed......
Waiting for a time when I can finally say, this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way -Phish
It's been a while since I played the Cave.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Hell, I cheated like a trooper. I even added my own private cheat codes
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Damned right. I can say this without admitting to cheating, because I was responsible for one of the DOOM ports.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
How do you get the flight simulator?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
It was John Romero's head on a stake. At the beginning of the level the demonic voice is John Romero saying something to the effect of "to win the game, you have to kill me, the master" played backwards.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Damn, you beat me to the correction by 2 minutes. :)
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
If you play Unreal Tournament - this is an interesting one. I happened upon it by mistake, but found it at this Easter Egg archive site...
http://www.eeggs.com/items/6036.html
It opens a secret room in the Codex of Wisdom. Inside is a picture of this guy with the text "Pretty Fly" under it... It's interesting.
Later,
Chris
Dark Forces has Max (of Sam & Max Freelance Police). In the first one, there is an Ice cave that you can crawl in, if you use the map view cheat code, your map will show the shape of Max's head. In DF2, at the start of the city level (5?) there is a ramp in a build that if you run down (using force speed) and whip around a corner quick, you can enter a room before a door closes. An animated Max is in there with a blaster, just hangin.
---
--
Ah, but in nearly every adventure game after that, XYZZY was an easter egg. Taking, at random, "Zork: A Troll's Eye View"...
>XYZZY
A hollow voice says "Troll".
A trojan horse can be thought of as an Easter Egg: a piece of hidden functionality in some code. Not having these 'cool' easter eggs in most open source software is a great arguement for the OSS paradigm. Easter eggs are more frequently found in closed, proprietary systems...as are more dangerous bits of functionality.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
'XYZZY' would transport you to the low crawl, allowing you to skip the walk down the riverbed to the locked grate.
'plugh' would take you straight to the "Y2" room. You would learn this by spending time in the "Y2" room where occasionally you would hear "A hollow voice says 'plugh'."
The final magic word was 'plover'. It was how you got the lamp into the dark room behind a very tight squeeze through which your lamp would not fit. You could then see the platinum pyramid. This was behind the alcove where you found the "plover's egg the size of an emerald." 'Plover' would not transport the pyramid, however. You had to carry the pyramid into the egg room, say 'plover'" again to transport out with your lamp intact, go back to the alcove, drop the lamp, go through the crawl and take the pyramid. Of course, once you did this you learned you could crawl to the pyramid in the dark without all the magic word stuff. As long as you didn't fall into a pit and break every bone in your body...
I tried to take the codename XYZZY first, then when that was taken I tried "plugh". That was taken, so I picked "plover." Just in case this discussion ever came up. :-)
John
John
Yeah, that sounds about right. Download a frickin' 20+ Mb of 'innovative' browser software and there is a bunch of images of the development team. Just goes to show how bloated that sack of ____ is, that you can hide a bunch of superfluous graphics in it and no one notices.
I like easter eggs, when they are funny or interesting. Putting pictures of the project team into the program somewhere does not qualify, IMO. Putting in a flight sim, now that I can *almost* forgive!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
My favorite MS Word easter egg was once when I typed in some compound word and the spelling checker locked into an infinite loop, unable to decide if I should have written it as two words or one.
Like say I find an Easter Egg in Word, I should be rewarded by being able to remove some useless piece of functionality that's making my system go slower!
managers...why god invented purgatory
Was this posted on the wrong article? I think you MEANT to post it to Identification By Typing and NOT to Ask Slashdot: Easter Eggs in Open Source?.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What is with "Invalid Form Key"? Half my posts are prevented because it keeps popping up - it's getting to be annoying.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
cool easter egg in Xfree: press ctrl-alt-backspace
:))
In word 97, type "unable to follow directions" -without the quotes, highlight it and hit SHIFT+F7 It pulls up the thesaurus and ...well ...suggests a condition that viagra is for.
This is supposed to be great art. So why does it look like a bunch of decapitated naked people? -- Calvin
The version of the java swingset demo program I have has an easter egg in it. Go search in your /jdk1.2/demo/jfc directory for *.java containing text "easter" (they make it pretty easy! :)
SwingSet.java looks like the spot where it gets activated. Sure, it's still fun to find opensource easter eggs!! 1/2 the fun is tracing the code to figure out how to set 'em off!!
Sid.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
* What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
* Is Jeeves gay?
(Hm, unfortunately it looks like the second one is slightly broken now.)
I remember accidentally pressing "f" or something when paused in hyperspace on Elite when I was about 8, and nearly shat myself when I unpaused, came out of hyperspace and was killed almost instantly by about 6 thargoids. My brother managed to kill all the thargoids, and the invisible ship (cobra? can't remember.), then approached the cargo which was the cloaking device, then... managed to crash into and destroy the cloaking device instead of picking it up. I cannot believe I remember this. I should remember things like holidays, and seeing friends. Not video games. Oh wasted youth :(
Well, all the puzzles that I ever found you could solve without XYZZY. It made the golden nugget puzzle a lot easier though.
Ah yes.. good point. I may have been playing a smaller version.. The hardest things to get were the bear's chain and the rug from the dragon. But then, my dad made a map of the Maze Alike, so I memorized the route through it.
I first came across the on fire message in the 2.0.35 kernel - it's in lp.c (obviously), and originally said 'lp0 on fire, eh?'. This is because the code tries to detect offline and paperout - anything else and it assumes the printer's on fire ;-) After quickly checking the one in the 2.2.x version I notice they've removed the ', eh?' for some reason.
We got some amusing calls from users having it appear on the console of their servers from time to time. The Epson LX300 printers seem to fox lp.c somewhat.
Pete
anybody remember the lawsuit over the easter egg in ms publisher 97 that brought up a picture of a black couple when you typed "monkeys" in a certain field? that did wonders for giving easter eggs a bad name.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
v.3.12
GCS d-(--) s+: a-- C+++$>++++$$ UL++$>++++$$ P+>++++$ L++>++++$ E--- W++$>++
From reading the posts, it seems like the general definition of an Easter egg is a hidden or secret part of a program that is entirely unessential/unrelated to the program itself...more of a 'bonus' type of thing. What about the dick on the poster of 'The Little Mermaid'? If I remember correctly, the artist that did the original artwork for the cover/poster of the movie got fired because of this.
The significance is that it was "performed" in the early 1960's ('61?) by/on an IBM 7094 (with disk heads operated by compressed air :) by researches at Bell Labs.
-- David Smith
C:\ is the root of all evil!
In Excel 97, open a new work sheet... press F5 i think, and type X97:L97. then hit tab so the entire row is selected, but the second cell is highlighted. then hold the shift key and click the chart wizard icon in the toolbar. If you have directx, you get the flight simulator. If not, you get a bunch of dots flying around the screen with the names of coders etc.
"and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere..."
Just a little old-school stuff. ;-)
Those Mac ROM Easter eggs also rock.
- Leam who enjoys every minute of the insanity he suffers!
There is Tons of easter eggs in quicktime software... first, start up your mac with the keys Q, T ,option and command pressed... you will se a sequence of jpegs from the developers, and a midi song. then, enable baloon help, and mouse over the extensions ... you will see, for the QT extension the definition of TIME. "time. n. A non ..." for quicktime music, you will see a definition of music. and for every other extension, dictionary definitions of every term... very cool
I gotta pull one out of the "old-skool" files for this one. Dark Castle would on Christmas Eve and Day replace the Suit of Armor in the foyer (level select room) with a Christmas Tree. A definitely cool thing to do. Beyond Dark Castle would do the same. I hope the folks at Delta Tao are listening (hint hint) cause I sure want that egg preserved in their sequel.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Actually it was the lid/case on the 1000 that had all the sig's and paw print...
Here are a couple of easter eggs in linux.
/etc/sudoers file, try this:
-
If you have sudo installed (tested with CU Sudo version 1.5.9p1) AND you are in the
sudo (command)
use whatever command you are allowed to run in the sudoers file. make sure it is NOT a NOPASSWD marked one.
sudo will print a few lines of text, then ask you for a password. enter some crap. it will spew out funny lines, different ones each time. some examples:
"That's something I cannot allow to happen."
"I've seen penguins that can type better than that."
"You do that again and see what happens..."
-------------------------------------------------
1. Using LINUX 2.2.1 (havent checked others), with bidirectional printer support
2. Print from the network and force a printer jam (tear a corner off a piece of paper and put back into th printer)
3. Issue a print command
4. Watch the output of the console (says lp0 printer on fire!)
If you want to know about Easter Eggs in games, apps, OS', movies, etc... go to E-eggs. They have some pretty interesting ones there.
How about, during a fight on the Portal stage, hit down+start after an uppercut when Dan's picture is on the screen (for the "Toasty!!") to battle Smoke in Goro's Lair.
Or the one where you defeat the guy below the '?' portrait with only low kicks and fight Jade?
Or Noob Saibot... win 50 consecutive battles in 2 player mode. (I think... been a few years)
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Go issue some "funds"... the problem with most EEs is that I don't have time to hunt for them. (Although I did blow an hour or three looking through my A500's ROM once...)
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
If this is the game I think it is (part of Jewels of Darkness, Amiga 500), the closest thing to an easter egg would be the word "plover". It ran between the Plover Room (with glowing green walls) and the room where a hollow voice would say "plugh" once in a while. From there, "plugh" went to the cabin. Anyway, "plover" was essential for getting the tetrahedron out of the Dark Room attached to the Plover Room. (The Dark Room has a plaque in the wall saying, "Congratulations on bringing light to the Dark Room!")
I'm pretty sure there were at least two other words, "sesame" and "turn". Whenever you used a magic word out of context, it would say "Nothing happens". My brother found sesame when trying to "open sesame" the pirate chest, and I found turn while trying to get the bear out (it breaks the bridge when you try to cross) by "turn bear into frog" or something :)
A side note on the parser: to cross a bridge, it looked for the sub-pattern "cros". And trying to "hit" anything would give a message that violence was not allowed.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
In Moria (the Amiga 500 version is the only one I've ever seen, but it was ported from the VAX), go into a shop. If they have exactly one page of items (a-p), purchase item 'q'. Normally, you can buy items a-q if there's two pages, and item q is just from the next page. But with no next page, you get a "nothing" for 1 gold. Nothing too spectacular, though, just a black square. I never did figure out if it did any damage when thrown at an enemy...
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Been there.Done That..This one is LAME.
I'm sorry I can't remember any more details then that, but I'm sure some other Slashdotter can recall more details.
But it seems this was too confusing for one of Cygnus's customers. Alas.
(Hey! It's still in there -- the removal was never checked in. Shhhhh!!)
In Windows:
type format at the command line and it makes it easier to install a real OS
print 'Hello World' # The birth of another would-be programmer
I've seen some people talk about SimCity. I think the best one was in the first version of SimCity 2000 for the Mac. There were dozens of these. My favourite was 'porntipsguzzardo' which gave you a LOT of money and all the buildings. Too bad it didn't work on the PC...
My second-favourite is on the PC, where minesweeper would change the color of a pixel if there was a mine under the box the pointer was over. I would really amaze people when I could finish impossible games. That was fun... yes, I have noticed recent games don't really have easter eggs... =(
I don't know how many of you ever heard about the Easter Egg from SimCopter where at the end of the game if you look in the background you see the pilot and someone else (passenger/civilian?) get it on. The funniest thing is that they are both guys...naturally Maxis was not to pleased with this Easter Egg and fired the guy. It's just a bunch of kissing with groping, although really funny as it's all in those Simtype game graphics.
~ Yes, that's my real name.
HaHa. No, the really sad thing is that if you knew about this easter egg and tried to get to 200 games in a row. Do you have any idea how long that takes? Oh... Wait. I guess you do...haha
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Those were cool too. I sometimes miss the days when Mortal Kombat was the coolest thing you had ever seen and the words "Raiden Wins....Fatality" was in your daily slang.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Not really an easter egg neither, but funny (especially at the first time you realize it :)
Bingo Foo
----
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
They're like security holes -- sometimes funny but obsolete
Why should I like to have a few megs of unusable code in my vi? I don't need a doom game after typing IDDQD on 93th line.
It would be only another thing to be ripped off at compilation time by hand. It suxx
I have an alter-ego at Red Dwarf. Don't remind me that coward.
If I worked for a web-mail or search-engine company, I'd do something like this: If the user sends a message to (or searchs for) nonexistent@nowhere.com, the resulting page is a Java game or something like that. The good thing is, this doesn't occupy space on your HD!
"Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating." --Richard Stallman
Turn on a Mac Classic and hold down Command-Option-X-O (the original name for the computer while in development in Japan was Mac XO, or possibly Mac OX, as I understand it). The computer boots, not from a floppy or the HD, but from a copy of System 6.0.3 stored in ROM (they gave this model of computer a larger ROM than the ROM routines required at the time; the same size as the ones in the Mac II, IIRC). The system folder which is booted from also contains invisible, empty folders (visible with a tool such as MacTools 6.2, which I happened to have) with the names of several of the people who worked on the project. :(
On the SE (I think) the extra space in ROM contains a slide show of B&W, dithered, scanned images of people who worked on *that* computer. But getting at that required dropping into MacsBug AFAIK.
I heard about these two on a great site listing some early Mac easter eggs, but it's probably dead now, and I don't have the URL anymore anyway
Zahlman Q. Namlhaz, esq. {:> "Zahl Incorporated - the Last Word in Everything(TM)"
Go to www.askjeeves.com and type in "Is Jeeves Gay?" in the ask question box.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
In the football game, you could press the button and run backwards, and end at the opposite end of the football field. This was great for the "long bomb" play. "Where in the hell did that guy come from!?!?"
This Sig Intentionally left blank
My favorite Egg was the +30 lives for Konami's Contra on the NES. It was something like, up-up-down-down-left-right-A-B-start. Although not open source, it helped to pass an otherwise impossible game.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
That's not original of me, though no other sites come to mind off hans.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
./configure --with-easter-eggs
check out copyleft.net, they have an xyzzy shirt on there.
Excuse my co-processor chips. I only owned a A2000, and I heard it was the keyboard cover. But, it's cool tribute.
Not open source, but if you open the keyboard on the original Amiga A1000, you'll find the signatures of the creators of the Amiga, plus a paw print of a dog.
Also, if you read the specs for the Amiga, you'ld find song titles buried in the pages.
Day of the Tentacle had all of the original Maniac Mansion embedded in it... the Tentacle had, in its room, an old IBM PC, which, if you booted it up, would run the original Maniac Mansion, to which Day of the Tentacle was a sequel.
Or, you could attend the Puerto Rican day parade in Central Park and have packs of drunk guys remove your pants for you.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
The 4P has an even cooler one! In the ScanJet software directory, there's a folder called "MusicBox". There's an entire music box program for your scanner! And the music files are just regular text files. Hmm... an entire jukebox for a scanner?
char sig[120] = "\0"
first post. me too. no point at all.
In the tank battles, you could move into a corner and wiggle your tank around to jump across the board. (Technically it was probably a bug rather than an Easter egg, but it was still fun, and surprising how long it took opponents to figure it out...)
Totto
Before Apple decreed that there be no more easter eggs, there were some great ones inserted into the (doomed) Newton MessagePad, including a secret poker game! Check 'em out at http://www.oof.org/newton/
Perhaps even more fun than Easter eggs is tricking people into trying ridiculous things in order to access an Easter egg.
This was particularily effective with Nintendo, cause all their games were pretty much riddled with secret levels that you could only access by some foolish carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing sequence of movements.
I remember one time I convinced a friend of mine who was in the second to last level of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' that if he deliberately lost all his lives that a portal would appear that lead to a special level where you could get a magic sword (or something like that.. it's been a while). It was a pretty brutal game, and if I remember correctly, you couldn't save..
Yes, I remember. Near the end of that level, there are the two lifts. The second one should be going up. What you have to do is take that almost to the top, and jump on to "ceiling", so that you're running with your head just off the top of the screen. They have these in levels 1, 5, and 8 (IIRC). Now if you're really good, you can also catch the one-up that's hidden in the ceiling one block past the end of the large brick group that's right after the L-shaped group with the fire flower in it.
I just LOVE console games.
funny munging
Agreed. This isn't an easter egg either, it just happens in the software.
Eudora 4.x for Winblows is full of snotty remarks in various places. There are several messages, but my favorite - the one that happens when your ISP drops carrier as you're transferring your mail - is as follows:
Eudora is tired of waiting for the system to respond.I love software with personality.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
hmm...I wonder how many easter eggs there are involving breakout. In the wonderful(and pretty amazing, seeing as its written in assembly) game Budokan(circa 1989), walking to teh lower right edge of the screen, behind a pagoda, and pressing shift would bring up a game of breakout.
It was a program that simulated cleaning the disk drive by making almost impossible noises with the drive... Sounded like a washing-machine.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I don't think that XYZZY was a Easter Egg. It was a "magic word".
Does anyone know of a website with an Easter Egg?
I always thought that Easter Eggs were a hidden (and hard to find) interesting visual effect that is not part, or a least not a crucial part of the original program.
I always like the easter eggs in SimCity 2000. Type in "porn" and you hear "Can't get enough!" That along with some others it made for a very comical game at times, I mean really, right clicking on the helicopter to make it crash? Ah well, it was a fun game.
Well, it is the best easter egg, but I do believe that it was Quake I that had the well of wishes, although I spent most of my Quake II time in multi-player.
I've had lots of fun searching for easter eggs in the past, but recently, I found a diabolical egg/trojan sort of by mistake. I bought this software for an obscene amount of money... and when I was trying to install it, some stupid torjan in it filled my hard drive with all sorts of gibberish almost completely filling it up. And the next time I booted my puter, it would crash like every 5 minutes.... what was the program?
I belive it was called "Windows."
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
It is possible to find it on your own. I spent hours not playing the game but just screwing with the world. The magic dot wasn't obvious but since objects would flicker when you had more than one in a room you would know there was something odd about the one room in the maze in the black castle. That's how I found the dot... The dot was always in the same place so it was easy to pick up once you found it. It took me ages to accidentally walk though the walls near the yellow castle.
I actually found a good M$ word easter egg. I think it was Word 97 or Word 95. You type in 'xxx' and then spell check it. The word 'sex' comes up as the only alternative.
Keeping
Vigor.
Well, at least in Europe we hide easter eggs for childern to search and find them. So I'd define an easter egg as anything hidden inside a piece of software, be it a visual effect, joke, sound, or whatsoever.
...have a multiplicity of purposes.
One, to give some cred or at least fun to the minions who toil long and hard to create the thing (most people have no idea who coded MS Excel).
Two, to encourage white hat, old-skool hacking (playing around with things to see what you can find/do)
Open Source easter eggs really aren't, after all, you can read the code and figure out how to get the machine to display a picture of the development team, or whatever. And since Open Source developers are credited well, why hide "identifier" easter eggs?
I think there's part of all developers that want to give "props" (what a neat term) to things they enjoy. Witness the "turnip" discussion between guards in Myth II that's cribbed from Black Adder II.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
There are easter eggs in most recent WMS pinball games.. Here are some I can think of off the top of my head.. there are definitly more:
:)
On No Good Gofers, While in attract mode, press the flipper buttons in this order: Both simultaneously, then right 16 times, left once, right 13 times, left once, right 12 times. Behold the game design credits
Tales of the Arabian Nights: In attract mode, hold in the left flipper button while pressing the right button 5 times - Game design credits!
(if you have a monetary credit on the game when you do either of those tricks, you get music to accompany the display.)
On Scared Stiff, get a high score or Scared Stiff, then put in your initials as MOO..
On Arabian Nights, do the same thing (MOO for a high score)
On Arabian Nights, while playing, hit the Bazaar scoop 3 times.. all three times hitting the flippers to skip the animation. On the 4th time you'll get a New Cow!
On Star Trek, The Next Generation, when the chice between video mode (shuttle sim) or 25 million is lit, hold in the GUN TRIGGER and select video mode.. you'll get to play poker against Riker.
On ST:TNG, when you light the video mode (shuttle ramp) - if the display says Holodeck *3* is lit, pull the trigger 3 times quickly and you'll get a hidden Frenzy mode.
On Scared Stiff, when you hit the spider hole and the guy says "Look up.. stop the spider!" WATCH the display carefully.. every once in a while it'll show a "3" instead of a spider crawling up the web.. if you hit something (right flipper button I think) you get 2 spins instead of one.
Also, Scared Stiff has some hidden "Happy Birthday!" messages that will show up when the game is first powered up on the days in question.
ST:TNG has a flipper code (similar to the 1st No God Gofers code) that will display on the dot-matrix display logos for every game Steve Ritchie had designed.. I forget the flipper sequence though.. ask on rec.games.pinball.
Revenge from Mars (Pinball2000) has a flipper code that will display a color picture of most of the design team.. again, the exact code escapes me.. ask on r.g.p.
These are just the codes from the games we own.. I know Addams Family has some.. many of the other games certainly do as well.. most involving cows..
I remember reading about this.. Basically what was happening was that you could search a clipart archive based on keywords.. Searching on "monkey" returned various images of monkeys, and one image of *monkey bars* (playground equipment) with black children playing on them. Some black people were offended by this and raised hell, even though it was pretty obvious that it was just a search engine returning perfectly valid results. Ahh well...
Apple has had it's fair share of Easter Eggs. The classic "free software" one was that on the old demo versions of HyperCard you could go to the info location and type "magic" and voila, the whole program would be provided to you for free. The other alternate one was that the stickies program apparently includes not only the ever popular "secret about box" (type that in a notepad and drag it to the desktop while holding down cmd-h I beleive and you get a realtime 3d flag) but an asteroids style game.
By far the most bizzare has to be the fact that on old macs one key combination caused the startup chime to be followed by the theme from Legend of Zelda.
In essence these are the artistic flourishes of programmers. Bach and other musicians used to insert their names into music or provide counterpoints like the "endlessly rising Cannon." Even microchip designers have begun to hide trademarks and images at the micro level on their chips. (waldo is on one of the pentiums.)
To get rid of these even in open source software might be to deny the fun of programming itself. In some cases as in the Snowboarding game from Final Fantasy the egg can overcome the software itself.
P.S. with regards to Fallout 2 they also included the BB gun which was a holdover from Wasteland. In the original game there wwere 2 BBguns. One red ryder and one standard. There was only 1 red ryder gun and it was, incidentally, the most powerful weapon in the game. Pointless, impossible to find but then that's the point.
PolarBear
I notice that a common theme in the comments is that Easter Eggs do not belong in open-source software...I beg to differ:
What would life be without a little fun now and then? Hideous and boring come to mind for me. Easter Eggs are not about putting in something that will make a program into bloatware, nor to annoy anybody. Easter eggs are there for fun. Admittedly, I do not believe a flight simulator should be included in every software package, but if you can include a small bit of humor, do it!
If, for instance, you come to a case in programming where you are testing values and there is a number that can never be reached, put in an error message if that number does come up...but do not say "Error: Invalid number". Instead, put in something like: "OOPS! The laws of the universe have just been violated. Recommend rebooting universe and starting again!" Perhaps only developers will see the message, or perhaps not. Either way, somebody will get a laugh.
So long as there are not significant impacts on a program, include Easter Eggs freely. A life without humor, after all, is a life that has already ended! I don't think I have ever laughed so hard as when I heard an HP ScanJet playing "Ode to Joy"!
--David
"I might not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!" --Voltaire
Ken Thompson managed to get an early Unix that came with source code to allow logins to anyone supplying a certain password without leaving any traces in the source code !
Read all the scary details in his ACM Turing Award speech Reflections on Trusting Trust.
a co-worker of mine was instructed to write a blackjack game where he used strfry to shuffle the deck. his professor docked him for using an "undocumented interface" -- that worked fine on the schools linux+alpha systems. but after he pointed out to his professor that strfry had manual pages on their system, he was given bonus credit!
a while back, i ran across a patch to Citadel/UX that had a patch to used memfrob to compliment it's "weak" password encryption system. i believe the same author was involved in the lessening of the US export restrictions on ROT-13.
i cant believe nobody mentioned the episode of south park hidden on tiger woods golf playstation game. how about the fact that almost every 3DO game had one? maybe almost all 3DO games werent checked very well(that would explain some of the crappy games released) and these eggs slipped by. sometimes the highlights of the game were in the easter eggs hidden in the game.
Uh... i'd try that, but i'm not insane
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
BTW, any one know what happened to the C64 great programmers? Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, Shaun Southern, Archer Maclean?
Well, I know Jeff Minter's webpage is at http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/
--
Email address is real.
It was "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero".
:wq
...and don't forget warez.slashdot.org for your cool popular software that should be instantly recognizable. Get yours today before it gets slashdotted.
I'm just waiting for mp3.slashdot.org to get started.
When you boot Redhat 6.2 for Sparc with a serial console, the following message shows up after the serial driver initializes:
"And remember that cereal is a part of a good breakfast."
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
if you're running enlightenment, try typing :)
'eesh -e "fx raindrops on"' in a terminal window.
use 'eesh -e "fx raindrops off"' to turn it off
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
There's an easter egg in Window Maker (a fairly obvious one). Go read the source and find it. It's not as easy as you think.
Not really an easter egg, because it was advertised on the box, but getting into it was just like any "real" easter egg... The Sega Genesis version of Pitfall Mayan Adventure contained an entire, fully playable, copy of the original Activision Pitfall game for the Atari 2600. To get into it, you had to play to a certain point in the game then do something particular. I forget the exact incantation, but it was really cool to see an old game entirely embedded inside a modern game.
--Jim
The delight to easter eggs is derived from the same delight behind the real thing: the surprise of discovery. It's hard to hide a delightful surprise in open-source code without severely obfuscating the code.
The other danger, of course, in a less-controlled open-source project is that the program will become more easter eggs than actual functionality. I don't see this happening with, say, Perl, which has a strong central clearinghouse for source code, but it could well happen with other projects that are controlled by a fairly large group. I know I'd hate to see an otherwise useful project for Linux or *BSD get bogged down due to source bloat and programmer distraction.
Easter eggs have also changed through the years. They used to be fairly easy to get to, and they used to do fairly simple things. Excel's easter eggs, for example (last I checked, anyway) were getting completely out of hand, and it's (a) hard not to resent the code bloat in Excel as it is, and (b) it's so obscure to get to that I don't think anyone would have figured it out if it hadn't leaked out of Redmond.
Now, perhaps in a strong-clearinghouse type of project, the clearinghouse might opt to maintain one bit of code that isn't immediately open source---at least, not until the next significant release (as deemed by the clearinghouse). That code would control both how the easter egg is accessed and what it is, and as soon as it's changed, the old version is released.
It's sort of an odd way to look at open source, I realize, but it would provide an environment that provides for the delight of easter eggs, and also not let them get too much out of control.
Just a thought.
It was John Romero's head on a stake. Perhaps an omen of things to come?
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I always loved the secret worlds in Metroid. The basic idea was, you shoot open a door, stand in it and let it close on you. Then you press down (to go into a ball) and up as fast as you can to kind of slid your way up into the wall. Then you hit the jump button to bring the screen point of view up with you. Do this enough and you will have horrible cramps in your hand, and you might make it into a bizzar secret world. This world may or may not have gravity, bad guys, power ups, doors that lead to nowhere, etc.
It was a fun way to waste time with a old favorite Nintendo game.
Finkployd
I'm just glad that I'm a porn connoisseur, or else I wouldn't have know what a "fluffer" is and gotten myself in trouble.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I got a win 95 machine at work from someone. One day I was messing around typeing random things in, and I happened to type 'loadlin'. It started up this weird easter egg called linux.
_______
2B1ASK1
There was one easter egg in version 1.0.x of The GIMP, introduced in 1998 by Adam D. Moss. It was rather hard to find because you had to use the DB Browser and see that one plug-in registered itself as "plug-in-the-egg" but did not appear in any of the menus. If you tried to invoke this procedure, it would display some pretty animations on your screen.
But a few weeks after this was added, it was taken out of hiding in the developer's version of the GIMP (versions 1.1.x), where it registers itself as Filters->Toys->The Egg. As Adam wrote when the hidden plug-in was revealed, I guess we need a new easter egg for version 1.2...
-Raphaël
> Extra credit: Can anyone name the historical significance of this particular tune?
Not like I knew, but google is always on standby with 4000 Linux machines to help. I found this right away.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Better yet, here it is in an audio link.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
(nb: I'm kidding)
A virus, for the Amiga, which would step the heads (3 1/2") to play a song, and in the process throw them irrevocably out of alignment.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
on the Mac.
Make 5 boxes, select one, "command+shift+option+k" repeat with the other boxes.
Does this work with other OSes anyone?
Dirt doesn't need luck.
There are several EEs in BeOS (check the BeOS Bible for an incomplete list). The one I'm fond of is that just about any exotic keystroke-mouseclick combination on the browser's "About" box brings up a pop-up window with the message "Stop looking for an easter egg. There isn't one."
GNOME is full of easter eggs
well 3
1: April 1st, Wanda the fish will die
2: Triple click the right mouse button on the panel tab in the control centre, and a new tab will appear with a GEGL waving.
3: Type GNOME on the About GNOME program and the logo changes to the sqeaky gnome toy, and it sqeaks when you click it.
Thats all.
Here's a place you can start.
I don't know how up to date it is. You can set them up yourself. It's not hard.
--
+&x
Well, you take your average egg, boil it for (I believe) on the order of 15 minutes, pull it out, cool it, dry it, and color it, usually using dyes or paints or some such. And, provided it's fairly close to the Easter holiday, Voila! You have an Easter Egg. :)
I think they're defining an easter egg as being a snippet of code that requires the user to use the program in an unusual way in order for it to be seen. So, if they have to enter a bizarre sequence of keystrokes at a place where keystrokes aren't normally called for, I'd call it an egg.
I'm not at all convinced. Some of the things out of the IOCCC are amazingly small, so they don't cause code-bloat, and amazingly dense, so that you could never work out what they do by reading the source. Perfect for open-source easter eggs. My favourite is this.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
After trying to emulate the linux shutdown message for a text adventure I was writing I was poking through the source code for init and friends and discovered that if your username is 'tyler' and the system is being rebooted you get an additional "Going down Mr Tyler?" as well as the normal 'System is going down for a reboot now' message. :)
BTW, if you want to know the names of the people to blame for the office assistant, follow the instructions for this Easter Egg. It worked on the office computers here.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
great site!
I particulary like <a href="http://www.eeggs.com/items/906.html">this one</a>
---
Of course, you haven't denied cheating either...
Right at the end of the project a coworker put in an easter egg where if you clicked on his name in the about box, you'd see a full-screen photo of him holding his newborn child. This was in the first 2Market CD in November of '94
He showed me this and I asked to add myself. When you clicked on my name, you'd get a recording of me saying "Hi Mom", then giving instructions to search for something in the product search.
We'd already screwed with the search keywords so that searching for certain terms resulted in product matches that were somehow funny. I think if you searched for "Mike" you got a spy camera. I think nearly everyone on the project has a product associated with their name that they got to choose themselves.
The easter egg wasn't discovered until after a quarter million CD's were pressed. Even if they could afford to re-press them, there wasn't time.
The result of this was that I was assigned the special job of ensuring that this never happened again at Medior.
Medior was later acquired by America Online and renamed AOL Productions. I think it's since been shut down.
The fellow who assigned me the special task of ensuring no more easter eggs were programmed into our products was Barry Shuler, who is now some bigwig at AOL and is pictured here in a CNet article.
2Market happened just as the web was just beginning, before there was a significant amount of e-commerce. I think we did a really good job, and I was impressed with how well everyone pulled together to ship the product. I think the user experience of shopping from the CD was much better than shopping via a 28 or even a 56 kbaud modem, which is still what most people have.
But it didn't last long, I think competition from the Internet put it out of business. I think some kind of CD/Internet hybrid, where bulk content like sound files and multimedia movies of product demos on a CD, interacting with a web site to get live content and updated prices would be pretty cool.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Yes, it was a line from Willy Wonka, but my signature contributes it to it's original author. That's where Willy got it from.
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
Do the following in MS Excel '97:
1) in Excel open a blank work sheet
2) press F5 and type X97:L97 in the REFERENCE box, then click OK
3) now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97 )
4) press CTRL and SHIFT while clicking once on the CHART WIZARD icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart)
(Accelerate with the left mouse button, and decelerate with the right mouse button. Hit Esc to exit. Don't miss the part about the nachos.)
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Good! Then I'm not the only one who does this!
I have to write up "ops procs" (Operations Procedures) for anything I assign to our Ops staff, and usually they skip the "definition of terms" and go right to the "type this, type that".
I've started putting restaraunt reviews in the definitions, just to see who's paying attention.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Just for the record, I know what it's referring to. I'm just questioning how an Easter Egg is defined.
it has to be the first one I found without being told it was there.. in doom2, on the final level, the hidden area with an impaled developer that you can only get to by using the noclip cheat and walking into the the middle of the boss monster :)
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
I've only seen it once or twice, and it was YEARS ago, when Linux was less stable. (Even then, you had to be doing something dangerous to see this...)
The Linux kernel would say "Aiieeeee!" and complain about not being able to access code-pages or something like that...
You could just tell that the coder figured, "If it ever gets this bad, the kernel is fscked... might as well be up-front about it..."
Just one more reason why I love Linux...
--jd
>> Q: What do computers have in common with air conditioners?
>> A: They both stop working when you open windows
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You found the secret room in Atari's Adventure all by yourself? Without any help or hint that there was an Easter Egg there?
To do this you had to:
1) Haul the bridge around inside the Black Castle.
2) Set it down and walk through a wall.
3) Pick it up and try a different wall.
4) Repeat, repeat, repeat.
5) Do this everywhere else too in the game because you wouldn't "know" there was a secret in the Black Castle.
6) Do it all again because that magic "key" is only 1 pixel wide
7) Eventually have the idea to walk through the end wall in the main corridor to end up in the magic room.
With all due respect Cliff, I doubt it.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
There are enough bizarre, hidden things in that game to make almost any other adventure game look incredibly shallow in comparison.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It wasn't Tetris® because I haven't seen it on Tetris.com, the place for all licensed Tetris products (anything else using the trademark is illegal. However, it may have been a drop-in replacement like Tetanus, Quadra, Bedter, or the one that comes with some distributions of GNU Emacs (Alt+x tetris RET).
Will I retire or break 10K?
You had to find three grey dots hidden in the walls of certian rooms. If you gathered all three together, you could walk through a special wall that lead to a room with the easter egg. If you didn't have the three dots, you'd just see another (empty) room.
I think the easter egg had the names of the programmers, but don't quote me on that.
Shortly after finding this, I proceeded to tourture the machine with a screwdriver...and "programmed" a few new games.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
VAX/VMS V5.5, on my MicroVAX 3100...
:== $SYS$SYSTEM:TECO32 MAKE
$ MAKE
$ MAKE LOVE
Not War?
*
LONG LIVE TECO! ^_^
what is the best easter egg of all time? None other than the dopefish!! It has become bigger and bigger ever since its first appearance in Commander Keen. It was last seen in the Well of Wishes in quake 2...or so i think.
I had a Mac 2Ci that when booted up on a specific date would show a photograph of the development Team. I'd sure like to see a photo of the guy who wrote that @#$* paperclip in office.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exception of handg
i think the easter egg in fallout 2 takes the cake. it was an actual in-game item called an easter egg, and looked like (you guessed it) an easter egg. it was hidden behind a shelf in the basement of some store and the entrance to the basement itself was hidden as well. to pick it up you had to click on one specific pixel.
in the item description, it said something to the effect of "congratulations, you've found an easter egg." the egg did absolutely nothing. i thought it was a great tongue in cheek addition to what was an amazing (and hilarious) RPG.
Power Corrupts
My favorite easter egg was in the home version of Mortal Kombat 2. If you played 200 games in a row in two player, you and a friend would get to play a round of Pong.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Hold down control, alt, and shift on the left side of the keyboard and press the be menu button. The menu should have an extra submenu that's called "Window Decor". Pressing one of "BeOS", "Windows 98", "MacOS", or "Amiga" will allow you to change your window borders.
There's also some funny stuff in the Be header files, such as the functions is_computer_on() and is_computer_on_fire(), as well as the list of platforms, including the Z80 and the Timex Sinclair.
If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
When you find something in a closed source product (say Excel 97) its a neat thing. However, you have no control over the decisions made at Microsoft, so you accepted it with a smile.
With open source, however, its another story. One of the goals of programming is to develop small, fast, and tight code that leaves as small a footprint as possible. Of course there are numerous examples of bloat ware out there (how many times have you heard "Damn, excel 97 is enormous.. must be because of the flight simulator they included!"), in open source there is no reason why someone should make more bloat than necessary. In other words, with all the talent that is developing open source projects, why should a space-waster make its way in?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I enjoy eggs and I like to see them, with open source projects, you're only going to increase the size of the code (and possibly the complexity too, in hiding it) to add the eggs. If we're trying to prove to the world that open source is a better alternative, then why not try to streamline it as much as possible?
Still, I'm waiting to find that egg in KOffice that lets me play pac-man in my spreadsheet.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
okay, so it's not software or open source. so sue me; it's what I thought of.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
So, you want an open source easter egg?
The GNU C compiler used to have an interesting easter egg: at one point, the ANSI C draft (it wasn't finalized yet) said that the effect of #pragma was undefined. At the time, GCC had no pragmas; RMS didn't like them because you couldn't use a pragma in a macro.
So the easter egg was this: if your code contained a #pragma, gcc would attempt to launch a game of rogue or hack. If it couldn't find either program on your system, it would print a message reading "You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different".
See this link for more details.
Doom 2 had a funny one: at the very end of the game, if you weren't cheating, you had to make it to an elevator in the center of the room and shoot at a hole across the room once the elevator was as high as it would go. If you were cheating, and I couldn't beat the game without doing so, you could get into the little chamber you were shooting at. Inside was (I think) John Carmack's bloody head on a stake.
:)
Actually, it was John Romero's head. You can tell by the hair.
It was funny--the head even had pain animations so it would scream when you damaged it.
Another easter egg in Doom2 was the sound that played when you entered the final room that had the hole where you had to shoot into (and damage the head). The sound was some bizarre language being spoken. If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."
/// Zoid.
> If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."
Ah-ha! Now we know that the "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" from the latest Microsoft scandal wasn't really the password to a backdoor, but just part of an unfinished easter egg!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Heh.
/usr/doc/HOWTO/HOWTO-EasterEgg
/etc/easteregg.conf
/var/log/easteregg/found
*cough*. Obviously, there should just be single, large "easteregg.lib.so" that people could install or not when they set up the system.
Any app that wanted to do an easter egg could just dynamically link to the lib. This would have several advantages:
- reduce code bloat in apps, yet provide a very large library of cool easter eggs.
- Easter eggs could be themeable under Gnome and KDE.
- It would be possible to upgrade easter eggs without modifying applications
- Make it possible to abstract the easter egg functionality - for example, on a machine with X, a fancy graphical easter egg could be displayed, but on a console, a simple message could be printed like "If you had X, you would see the really cool easter egg here... Congratulations".
- Debian users could just "apt_get eastereggs", and RPM people could "rpm -i eastereggs" for maximum convenience.
- A useful set of files to know:
- Each Linux distribution could customize the easter eggs without modifying the source of all the included apps.
- Other advantages are left as an exercise to the reader.
(Just kidding. Sort of.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
"The term 'Easter Egg', as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their
creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch."
As copied and pasted from http://www.eeggs.com/ and if you can't trust them to define an easter egg who can you trust?
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Yes, but it clearly does not work. I had a whole case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in my refridgerator, and it still reported it "not found".
I demand an update from the Enlightenment team immediately.
The cake is a pie
They used commodity cassettes for some copies due to production underrun early on. Of course, this meant they had extra space on the cassette. What to do? Six and a half minutes of the Frogger game music, and someone saying 'Goodnight'.
What I'd like to know is who the hell was whacko enough to play back the entire Frogger program cassette in a audio tape deck.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It was part of the game, scrawled (ISTR) on the wall in a cave, and essential to the game's completion.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Atleast for a while, Windowmaker would pop up a window with a smily face and play music if you clicked in some special way on the "about" box.
I never would have known this, if I hadn't been digging through the source, looking for something else. Ah...the joys of open source.
I never have gotten it to trigger, though. I think you have to compile with a special option for all the bells and whistles. I kind of like Easter Eggs, though...
--Lenny
Macro: int ED
The experienced user will know what is wrong.
Macro: int EGREGIOUS
You did what?
Macro: int EIEIO
Go home and have a glass of warm, dairy-fresh milk.
Macro: int EGRATUITOUS
This error code has no purpose.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
This one was totally cool. It required MS SQL Server 6.5, SMS 2.0 and perfmon. Basically, you installed SQL and then SMS. Then you open perfmon and have it display CPU activity. When you do, you'll see the easter egg (a red line at 100% since one of the SMS components gobbles all your cpu and renders the machine useless.)
They removed this easter egg in SMS 2.0 sp1. Pity, as it was pretty cool, and you triggered it whether you wanted to or not!
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
It's the 5P, not the 4P
It's the one with the green scan button in the front.
And YES, this is the coolest hardware easter egg ever.
Music made by moving the scan head back and forth and the whine of the motor plays the notes.
Amazing!
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly.
The other option would be to hide them by obfuscation, but i think that is a fairly irresponsible thing to do in a case where other people actually have to put up with your source. Now on the other hand, they could still be thrown in there to amuse users. Most of the pieces of software i use, honestly, i don't ever read through the source, i just build it and install it. I guess i'd still get a kick out of those then, but i think i'd go and read the code for the egg anyway.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
How can we possibly compete if open source spreadsheets don't credit their programming team via an obelisk that you have to find via the carefully hidden flight simulator built into the thing? Oh, wait, we might actually just put their names prominently on the project web site, and in the README or NEWS file, or provide a documented way to find information about the project.
</sarcasm>
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
It was a really nicely done one with a photo of the courtyard inside the Infinite Loop engineering complex at Apple, and superimposed on the photo (and apparently in the center of the courtyard) was a reflective flagpole with a flag of an iguana with an electrical power plug on his tail.
The flag waved, responding to the blowing wind, and reflections of the courtyard and the waving flag appeared on the flagpole. You could change the direction of the wind with your mouse and by moving your mouse just right you could cause the wind to blow the flag off the flagpole so it fell to the ground (not visible below the frame).
It was extremely well done and apparently was custom coded just for that purpose. It didn't use any of the 3D api's in the mac, the 3d was handrolled. I don't think it used 3d hardware accelleration in the graphics card, I don't think those models had 3d hardware accelleration.
Also there would be scrolling credits at the bottom of the screen, in a couple of the systems you'd see my name (Michael D. Crawford) listed among them. I was very proud to be there.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Well, OK, maybe that isn't REALLY an easter egg...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
There's a collection of easter eggs at the Easter Egg Archive. It lists a couple for Linux and one for gcc.
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
While Easter Eggs may not be as prevalent recently, I have been happy to find many Easter Eggs placed on DVD's. My personal favorite is the Evil Menu on the Austin Powers 2 DVD. Easter Egg hunters should checkout "http://www.dvdeastereggs.com/easter_eggs.html" for some cool easter eggs.
--C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN
This site (www.eegss.com) has a big list of them! My favourite one was the doom-style thing in one of the M$ Office applications - It had a shrine to Bill Gates in it!
Also, when compiling Eterm, you'll see a message like this:
Not really an easter egg, but definately worth a laugh.
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
That's one of those great questions like, "Am I pretty much just stealing from my employer when I'm pontificating about these things on the clock?"
Slightly offtopic, I know, but I was once reviewing a document for a serial-port driver or some such. As these things usually are, it was page after page of mind-numbing detail about hardware registers, state graphs, interrupt handlers and the like. About 3/4 of the way in, the author described yet another hardware register, which had three or four bit fields of varying length. One of them was called "EAD - Earn a Dollar".
Being the naive newbie engineer I was back then, I went in and asked him what that was, and he promptly handed me a dollar. He said he had put that in just to see if anyone would read that far.
On the HP ScanJet 4P SCSI :
It will proceed to play "Ode to Joy" using variations in the scan-head motor speed.