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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.
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
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.
According to this you just need to start the game with a parameter
27 pages of games easter eggs
Sample this!
"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...
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?
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; }
Ready to Rumble did this on the Dreamcast as well. I know it did on Halloween and Christmas at least.
What about, "You Don't Know Jack."? Seems like it always does something on holidays (like insulting you for playing alone on New Years Eve)
Speaking of YDKJ, if you have The Lost Gold check this out (copied from eeggs.com):
1. As in the other YDKJ games, start up a game with 3 contestants
2. When you get the chance to play for a Gibberish Question, take it in turns as each player to type in "Fuck you" (but with no quote marks)
3. As has happened in previous YDKJ games, the quizmaster will remove points, rename and insult you... but he'll eventually totally lose it (he must have said the f word, about 10 times in total), and "drop you into a game more suited to your intellect", which is 'Gorilla Hunter'. Welcome to a low-res jungle screen with 6 bullets, no reload function, and no onscreen movement! You have to Alt+Tab your way out of this game, as far as I can tell, as there's no 'end' to it..
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
Duke was full of such stuff. There's Indiana Jones nailed to a wall in one of the canyon levels, a reference to OJ Simpson, a D00Med marine and whatnot. Oh, and let's not forget the "studio where they filmed the lunar landings", complete with pint-size aliens and a replica of the Eagle module (or am I mixing up my games?).
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
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.
For those who don't know, it was an endless "water world" hidden and accessible through level 1-2.
I worked on that in 1993-1994. It was actually kind of funny, to put that in at the time, we couldn't get a hold of David Crane's source code to the original Pitfall (mind you, this was at Activision too, so I was a bit surprised by that). We had a tester use a VCR to tape himself playing through all 255 levels of the original Pitfall so that we could reproduce the levels. It was an incredible amount of work....
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.