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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.
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?
Except that it wasn't an easter egg. Or accesible at all unless the game was modded from outside.
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; }
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?