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Great Gaming Easter Eggs
Gamespot is running a piece detailing some of the most well known Easter Eggs in gaming history. The list starts with the first egg in a game, the Warren Robinett room in Adventure. From the article: "In the depths of the black castle in Games 2 and 3, which required special tools, direction, and a certain amount of know-how, players could maneuver to a room by the catacombs that had a single-pixel gray dot, the same color as the game's background. The dot would allow players access through a wall to a superfluous area with the text "Created by Warren Robinett" running down the middle. Robinett was partially motivated by the fact that, at the time, designers weren't given credit for their games."
Perhaps the best gaming easter eggs aren't in games at all. The Excel flight simulator is an old favorite of mine.
Would have to go to the infamous Hot Coffee mod of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I'm sure everyone remembers the space-ship in the field..and then you had the zany ways you could kill lord british... *sigh* memories
Those two games where filled with easter eggs. And not only bad ones.
One of the most common easter egg is playing the game on xmas, a shit load of games do something special then.
The Ratchet & Clank series' easter eggs are fantastic. You enter a museum with where you can try out all sorts of design elements that didn't make it to the final product. As I recall, one of these Easter egg museums was so large that it had its own Easter Egg.
Some other Easter Eggs that have amused me over the years:
The Kilrathi ship in Ultima VII. If you built a staircase out of crates and got up onto the roof of the blacksmith's in Trinsic (the town you begin the game in) in Ultima VII, you can walk behind the chimney and get warped to a strange sci-fi environment, complete with the "Kilrathi" music from Wing Commander 2. This is as much a cheat as an Easter Egg; the area contains some absolutely godly equipment and copies of a number of key plot items, although using the latter can result in a corrupted save.
The Wolfenstein levels in Doom 2. This one's pretty well known and not especially hard to find, but there's a secret exit from one of the maps, about half-way through Doom 2, which lets you teleport to a pair of secret levels, which are essentially modified versions of two levels from Wolfenstein 3d, including enemy-types and textures from the older game.
The Manic Mansion easter egg in Day of the Tentacle. Not especially hard to find, but certainly one of the most impressive easter eggs ever, given it's basically an entire game.
The Sephiroth battle in Kingdom Hearts. Yes, I know Kingdom Hearts includes a lot of other Final Fantasy characters, but this one is hard to access, so I'm going to include it anyway. Beat all of the regular arena matches, and two special matches are unlocked. One of these is Sephiroth, the iconic villain from Final Fantasy VII. He's by far the hardest fight in the game, somewhat analagous to the "weapon" super-bosses that show up in various installments of the Final Fantasy series. If you have the Japanese International version, defeating him gets you an extra cutscene.
(Not quite an Easter Egg as such, but still...) The AE86 Shuichi Shigeno version in Gran Turismo 3 and 4. This is winnable as a unique prize in 3 and occasionally shows up on the used car list in 4. Its inclusion won't mean much to most players, but anime/manga fans might realise that Shuichi Shigeno is the author of the Initial D manga, which features (by the later volumes) an identically tuned version of this car. I do wonder how this one worked from a licensing perspective, given that several official Initial D games exist.
Command & Conquer's Jurassic Park levels. I can't remember for the life of me now how you actually accessed these, but the original Command & Conquer had several hidden levels where you had to survive attacks by dinosaurs. I do, however, remember these being pretty hard in places.
"There are no Easter Eggs Up Here - Go Away" sign on bridge in GTA San Andreas. Picture Here
Taking Easter Eggs to the post-modern level...
One of my favorites was in Pitfall, The Mayan Adventure. Inside the game was the original Atari 2600 Pitfall.
In River City Ransom NES game (European version was called Street gangs) I accidentally discovered an easter egg which I think others haven't found. I had a lot of luck for this one... it was a night when I as playing this favorite NES title of mine and I was quiting the game after finishing it. I thought I'll still poke around with the emulator a little bit and ta daa: something very unexpected popped up.
You need an emulator which is capable to showing "pattern memory". Pattern memory blocks of graphics loaded to NES memory, i.e. sprites, tiles and letters. Nesticle can do this.
Finish the game. When end credits start to scroll on the screen, show Nesticle Pattern memory window. There are portraits of game main characters, Alex and Ryan, showing middle finger and playboy sign. This might definitely be no no for Nintendo games, but maybe developers thought that no one can read the video memory of a running game anyway at a certain moment of time...
I posted instructions for the easter egg to some (dead) River City Ransom forum a long time ago, but the site seemed to be pretty dead and no one noticed them.
Maybe some other NES games have similiar hidden video memory tricks like this one?
Anyone remember She-Reptile?!
Saw her/him/it a few times, if I remember right you had to get a flawless on everything, including reptile, then get to the double matches, and do the uppercut/moonshadow/whatever thing, and you'd get a different version of reptile!
It was normally a glowing green Sonya, but I remember getting different glowing green characters there too, and they were hard as hell to beat.
Jump through the side of the VCN building and find this...
No one I know remembers that..
My favorite egg, albeit the most useless I know, was the "room of death" in Super Mario 64. I found it one night while trying to get Luigi (not there at all...) I fired the cannon at the Princess's window above the castle entrance, just barely skimming the tree. After hitting the wall, I landed on a small roof. I kept running and jumping out of boredom and eventually fell inbetween the doors... you couldn't get out either, as going out one door would send you in via the other.
Wish I could find pictures but at least I found the cheat again, apparently, from wikipedia:
Another Easter egg actually came about from a rumored glitch. In the original arcade version of the first Mortal Kombat, a rumor stated that the game would sometimes present problems due to a bug and mix two characters together. This would usually be two of the ninja characters, resulting in a ninja in a semi-red suit. The computer would display his name as "ERMAC", short for "error macro." As word spread, people thought they had found a secret character
I can't say I remember the name Ermac, but the character always looked like some sort of glitch, the first time I saw it, it was Sonya, and sometimes the game would freeze in the middle of the battle...strange tho
Actually, two Channel F games had easter eggs in them before Adventure. But since almost nobody had the Channel F, they weren't discovered for years.
The Dot was definitely the first known easter egg, though. It was especially important that it was just easy enough to find (if you noticed the screen flickering when it shouldn't have been) that it could be found without disassembling the game code.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I remember one from DNE (yes, the original version that actually existed) where you fight in a canyon area. At one point, you have to avoid a minimizing energy blast that is sent every five seconds or so from across the canyon to your position.
If you activate the god and fly cheats and fly to the opening where those blasts were coming from, you see a message saying the equivalent of "You're not supposed to be here" on the wall of the chamber.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The Marathon Trilogy was loaded with easter eggs, the most clever being hex codes for icons and an entirely new net-level hidden within terminals.
Bungie tends to love its easter eggs as the Webmaster had people running around trying to find a "Hi Ben" egg in Halo 2 (not to mention the skulls...)
My favourite tradition of Bungie's, however, is they stick acronyms on the bottoms of their game packages that fill out to complete phrases that mean something special to the Bungie team.
How can it be that no one has mentioned The Dopefish?
They mention in tfa the one where if you poke characters repeatedly in the game they get increasingly agitated (which they for some reason fail to mention persisted in other Blizzard games such as Starcraft for some reason), but they didn't mention the exploding sheep easter egg? If you poked the critters that wandered around on the levels eventually they'd moan something ("Baaramyou"?)and explode. Similar exploding critters also in Starcraft. Anyway, the list is obviously incomplete, but I'm not sure what their criterion was for the eggs that did make the list. I seem to recall the exploding sheep egg being pretty well known back in my Warcraft days.
Guess they took that further when they introduced Ermac, the red ninja, in later games. Think he debuted in MK4?
I swear it wasn't on the list the first time I looked... :/
The article mentions that you can poke people to say funny things in Warcraft. I first experienced this in the demo version of the game. If you kept poking people, they'd say "Okay, that's enough. It's time for you to go buy the game. Go buy game now!"
"Derp de derp."
ID, yes ID, back when they were under Apogee's label.
Obviously they have anything in Doom and Doom 2, quake and quake 2, but they also made a few games before that that was quite popular (commander Keen, and others)
I mean considering that at the begining of Keen you first see in the upper left ID in the first level of the first game if I remember right, which puzzled me for YEARS until I realized that's them.
Of course Apogee themselves made Duke Nukem with it's plethora of Easter Eggs.
I don't know if any of you played Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, as well as other from Apogee, but that company knew how to make little easter eggs that were worth finding. Some of them were barely hidden but I don't remember too many that were too frustrating to find them or not worth the time.
Good stuff.
For those who don't know, it was an endless "water world" hidden and accessible through level 1-2.
I am very surprised that Fallout 2 did get a single mention. This game has easter eggs at every corner. Even a literal easter egg that you can pick up. You can have Mike the "Masticator" bite your ear off (-1 CH). You can get the Monty Python "Holy Handgrenade". You even can have a random encounter with an exploded whale carcass with a potted flower. I seriously recommend this game to anybody.
> Robinett was partially motivated by the fact that, at
> the time, designers weren't given credit for their games."
And now they are?
In The Elder Scrolls 3:Morrowind, a common player complaint is that the NPC merchants don't have enough money to buy high end loot from players. The wealthiest merchant in the game is a talking crab on a tiny little island far away from any civilization. It has the most money for purchasing your loot and sells nothing but booze.
There was a neat timing-based easter egg in Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 2) where you could find the psychorabbit Max from 'Sam and Max Hit the Road'. He carried an imperial blaster and if you pushed him out of the special room he would even fire at enemies for you. He was pretty immobile however.
I don't recall the name of the level but it was the one with the canals, bridges, houses and market stalls.
In the original Daytona racing game (for the Sega Saturn), I don't remember exactly what you had to do, but you could acquire a new car which was actually a horse.
:)).
It was pretty fast, and it could run on the grass just as fast as on the road (pefect for cutting corners
When selecting the horse, you could choose manual or automatic transmission, just like any other car. I thought it was hilarious.
Salutaciones, JCAB
Here's an Easter Egg I haven't been able to find any information on anywhere yet. I used to play Might & Magic III (Dos version) a lot, but never was able to finish it because at one point or another my save game always got corrupted for some reason.
The consequence of this corruption was that when I wandered around outside Fountainhead (the first city in the game, where you start), my party got randomly hit by electricity, poison, fire etc, even though the surroundings look normal. No dungeon or town can be entered anymore once outside, and I could walk over all sorts of water etc.
However, nearby the Temple of Moo on a regular grass or forest square, a dialog box to enter some place would pop up. It did not say what the place was called, only showed a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down".
If answering affirmative, my party would be transported to some dungeon. If I looked at the automap, the name of the place was "It's a secret!". The place contained desks with people carrying the names of the programmers, all saying something funny. It also contained two endless piles of gold, one of which gave you a special item each time and the other giving you 1m gold each time. It could be exited again only through a magic mirror.
However, given the fact that I could not enter any other place anymore (except those directly reachable by magic mirror) when I was able to enter this "It's a secret" place, I could not do much with all that stuff. As soon as I went outside, I again was hit by random poison/electricity/... everywhere and could not enter anything.
I can't find any mention of this on the Internet, and even the official Might & Magic III hint book (which we bought, over 600 pages!) doesn't mention it.
If you get the Mac version of the game, you can easily verify that this "It's a secret" place really exists in the game by opening the main application file with hexedit and searching for "It's a Secret". I guess you can also find it by grepping the Dos version or its data files.
The strings of what the programmers say can also be found in the binary, I've reproduced them below.
However, what I would really like to know is how to get to that place without getting a corrupted save gave.
(actually, by searching for one of those strings I found this page, but I don't read whatever language it's written in and given the number of question marks they don't know either what this is about)Donate free food here
I recall playing You Don't Know Jack when they were an online venture, and they had different questions each week. The week of April Fool's they had questions that were practically unanswerable. Things such as the game would play a tone and then ask you which note it was (A sharp, C, Dflat, that kind of thing), or asked you to name an obscure political figure from way back when based on too little information. At the end, the game awarded you the full allotment of points you would have gotten if you answered all the questions correctly.