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An Easter (Egg) Holiday?
updog asks: "With Easter just around the corner, what better way for folks to celebrate than finding their own Easter Egg? While many people have seen the classic Excel Flight Simulator, there are over 10,000 other Easter Eggs found in DVD's, books, and music — for example, there are over 8 eggs on the Futurama DVD; and some hidden emoticons in Skype. What are some of your favorite Easter Eggs?"
Every disc in every Star Trek box set has hidden special features on it, as menu options hidden in the artwork. These are usually cast and crew interviews, but I believe there were one or two bloopers.
I discovered these by accident, and then spent hours finding and watching them.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"I gotta piss X("
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Typing "sharkysnark" over and over in Big Bang Echo.
Most recently, I was reading through the Supreme Commander game readme text and at down toward the end, it had a little section of trivia. Fun silly little facts like who of the development team certain units or areas were named after or that the Cybrans were originally named the recyclers. That last tidbit was rather enlightening as it help me understand their naming system where all cybran-related objects contain an 'r' for the second letter of the filename.
C&C's dino level was kind of funny, though I don't remember if I've seen it or only heard of it anymore.
Demented But Determined.
If you booted the disk upside-down, the game ran with the graphics upside-down.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Is this just a fancy way of saying "9" or does the submitter simply love the word "over", placing it in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical positions?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The good ol' blue screen of death in Windows.
There was a number of ways to have it showing out. In Vista they have changed the colour.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
How about the entire site of Homestar Runner? The various games and cartoons there are loaded with Easter Egg features, which get cataloged obsessively here.
Revive the Constitution.
You know, the infamous ones like "We made Amiga, they fucked it up", referring to Commodore management. All too true...
According to sources, it's over nine thousand.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
If you live in Glasgow, have a motorbike or even just want to watch or marshall, there will be something around 10,000 bikes riding through the city from about 12:00pm this Sunday, 8th of April.
http://glasgoweggrun.mag-uk.org/
An Easter egg is the required participation fee.
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In that game, the menu concept is based around graphic representations of rooms, in which you click on things like computers and doors to access things. In one of the rooms, you could click on a light and it brought up a big group photo of the dev team, and each member had a little blurb which you could access by clicking their photo.
Best of all, I first found it completely by accident rather than because of some howto on some website, making it all the more enjoyable.
It's Good Friday today...any apps with hidden deicide?
*ducks*
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I haven heard of any opensource Easter eggs, well besides about:mozilla. Is there anything in Gnome, KDE, Openoffice or even less(1)?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Rise of the Triad had tons of easter eggs, Including different loading screens for christmas, new years, 4th of july, and a couple others I'm probably forgetting, possibly Easter. There was also a ton of cheat codes you could type in. That was one of the best games of it's time, with tons of extra content and really interesting gameplay. I don't know why it didn't get more recognition.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
in BeOS, there were some creative kernel system calls. My favorite was to check is_computer_on_fire() http://www.eeggs.com/items/15121.html
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php? action=about:unknown
I'm not as old as those Apple // guys.
MacKido has a great big list.
The ones I remember off of the top of my head:
Iguana Flag
Hidden Breakout Game
Rosetta Rosetta Rosetta
Man I'm old....
Over nine thousand!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBtpyeLxVkI
In Doom 3, right before the 'Hellhole' room with the Cyberdemon, there's a stone tile in an alcove, that has an id software logo on it. If you click it, you can pick up an id software PDA, featuring messages from the dev team.
When ask.com was actually new, you could ask it "What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?", and it would reply with "What do you mean, African or European?" I always got a kick out of that.
From what easter eggs I've heard about, the Matrix Reloaded DVD wins hands down. If you go to the language menu and press left, a phone booth will appear. If you press it, it will take you to four (or is it five?) pages of high quality techno music. The complete movie soundtrack!
If 'Easter Bunny' has reached the list of offensiveness to some people, then I think some people are too easily offended.
Rejoice in the fact that your holidays haven't been sponsored by a white rabbit who clucks like a chicken (apologies to insensitive clod joker whose god is a white rabbit that sounds like a chicken).
Among all the interestingly named cheat codes in Warcraft 2, was UCLA. when typed it would just say "Go Bruins"
Also, after scrolling through the tips of the day, you would occasionally come across some like
"Never pet a burning dog" or "Don't spit into the wind".
And let us never forget all the stuff you could get units to say in all the blizzard games by just clicking on them a bunch a of times.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
This wasn't so much of an EE as it was the developer's testing and QA tool. I don't think I learned about it until it was made public, but it was fun to play around.
Also in U7, you'll find my character's name on one of the gravestones in Skara Brae. :-) I made a friend at Origin right after U6 and she was able to get it in there for me. I think it says "Here Lies Phaltran Pogammon who is [my real name]." I guess that's my 15 minutes of fame. /sigh What a shame.
In Ultima IV you could meet a few celebrities: Paul & Linda McCartney sang to the children in Britain, Short Round was looking for Indy near Yew (maybe Jhelom) and other characters from previous games or history would make cameo appearances.
Several other games have continued this cameo appearance trait. Most familiar to me now is WoW's various characters. Un'Goro crater is populated by characters from "Land of the Lost" and Nintendo games. Searing Gorge has a character based on Homestar Runner animations.
Always fun when the developers drop these little tidbits into the games.
My very first easter egg was in one of the early Infocom games (I'm pretty sure it was Suspended). If you - in a fit of frustration trying to solve one of the puzzles - entered the command "GO TO HELL" it responded, "What makes you think you aren't already there?" When my parents heard me laughing I couldn't tell them what was so funny, because that would have meant repeating to them what I'd said to the computer.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There is a pretty funny one in Battlefield 1942. If you fly an airplane up as high as the game allows, then eject and don't pull the parachute, you will freefall all the way to the ground. The character will scream for a while, and then if you were high enough, right before you hit the ground, you can hear the guy crap his pants.
My all-time favorite, which filled my young self with a sense of glee and wonder, was in the old Mac game Dark Castle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Castle) where the castle entrance would be decorated for Christmas if your system clock was set to December 25.
Watch RHPS looking for easter eggs. Literally! Apparently they had an easter egg hunt around the set, and some were never found, but showed up in the final release of the movie.
Dr Who has been known to pop into Dereth (Asheron's Call) very rarely. Unknown if he is still able to reach it. The Tardis was a very rare spawn on the landscape at one point at least. Unable to actually uncover at will so kinda half an egg ;)
I was watching the Director's commentary of the Excalibur DVD. There's a point in the movie where a rabbit is killed while (don't remember which character) is hunting. The Director says "Notice that we did not say that no animals were killed during the filming of this movie."
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. --Hofstadter's Law
Photoshop has the standard artwork on the "About" screen. But by holding down Alt or something while clicking About you got alternate artwork centered around the code name for that version's project. Big Electric Cat was pretty cool, then there was "Strange Cargo."
Are full of cows that are the same thing as eggs.
If you finished Street Fighter II without losing a single round, you got to see the credits. If you finished it without ever taking a single point of damage, you got to see pictures of the devs along with the credits. Pretty disappointing for beating an entire game perfectly.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Quake II was full of easter eggs, from the level where you weight almost nothing to the underground cave past the dev posters in the last level.
That game actually tells you how many secrets there are and how many you found!
In older versions of UNIX you could type:
> make love
To which the system would reply:
Don't know how to make love, stop.
In Q3A CTF if you had the enemy flag, and were returning it to your base, and you were gibbed within 1-2 feet of your base the announcer would say "Holy Shit!". one of the greatest game sfx ever.. i only heard it once but i was laughing so hard i couldnt play for five min..
In uTorrent (pronounced "Micro Torrent"), you can click the logo in the about dialog and it plays a sound clip. Even better, if you type 't' in the about dialog, you get to play tetris!
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
My all-time favorite was also the first "easter egg" I ever saw, more than twenty years before I first read the term as computer jargon. In the mid 1980's the Honeywell CP-6 operating system had a command-driven user interface that included pretty detailed online help. The syntax was simple, like the old MS-DOS help command:
... The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
HELP commandname
The help was pretty thorough and well-written, considering that CP-6 was a nearly new operating system. Every system command was there, with detailed syntax information. But if you typed HELP SAM, the screen printed out the complete text of the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee".
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee!
A weird and inexplicable bit of whimsy, in a sharp and reliable mainframe OS that probably exists only in archives and memories like mine today.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Macintosh System 7.1.x [?] - Simpletext
:-), step by laborious step I completed the "Help" task (a formatted letter) and felt like I understood how to use the menu, save, etc. better. Then "Help" pops up a font listing - "Pick a font and sign your work" (or something like that), so I pick one of them and type my name:
... but the "font" was a scrawl type font, like writing with the wrong hand - when you were 12. No matter which font you used it was 15-18 pt. and was awful looking.
l
I've never seen this one published and I haven't been able to trigger it since.
I was learning how to use Simpletext (on a Mac IIsi), (a simple editing application distributed with the early Macintoshes) I think I was using the "Help" feature - I was (am) painfully slow at times
MY NAME
I've never laughed so hard in my life. I was truly ROTFL.
Since then that little egg has fueled my lust for eggs and what ultimately became disk forensics study.
System 7.0 CD - Greg Marriot/Sheila Brady
http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/CD-System70.htm
~hylas
I don't know if you could consider some of the errors you get under various conditions "easter eggs", but some of the error messages are interesting.
/etc/password, or otherwise), you get the error message:
For example, being root, and then losing authentication for the root user (some error reading
"You don't exist, go away!"
Others includ the "something wicked happened while X" network messages and various fun messages that occur in certain obscure/erroneous scenarios.
What about all the easter eggs in the mIRC IRC client? Click the author's nose on the about dialog for a squeeful surprise. You'll have to find the others yourself :-)
The old BBC B game "Frac" had a few things hidden in its copy protection. As you peeled away the layers of assembly code you found messages like "Does your mother know you do this", and even some code that played a neat version of "The Trumpet Hornpipe" (which was the theme to Captain Pugwash.
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