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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."
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.
You fly (using cursors) in first person mode over a spooky dark violet landscape, at night, and at one point you find a tombstone with designer names scrolling through its surface.
My bet is it increases memory stamp of Excel by some 3 megabytes.
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.
One of my favorites was in Pitfall, The Mayan Adventure. Inside the game was the original Atari 2600 Pitfall.
Except that it wasn't an easter egg. Or accesible at all unless the game was modded from outside.
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.
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.
We must be talking about different versions of Office 97. The one I'm talking about requires 73 MB of space for a miniumum installation, on top of a minimum 50 MB Windows 95 or Windows NT installation.
Maybe you mistyped or were confused or something, but 80 MB harddrives were state-of-the-art long before Office 97's release. Hell, my Compaq LTE 386 laptop, bought several years before Office 97's release, had a 400 MB HD, and it was middle-of-the-road hardware even back then.