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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?
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.
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."
For those who don't know, it was an endless "water world" hidden and accessible through level 1-2.
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.
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