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Best Easter Eggs and Other Software Surprises
the_insult_dog writes "Computerworld has an article up (with videos) about some of the coolest Easter eggs and other software surprises, ranging from full-featured games to strange messages from robots. What other eggs are out there? What's the coolest egg ever?"
uggh what a horrible spam submission is this a domain squatters site ?
loads of adverts and 1 eegg on each single page, desperate for revenue much? ill be glad when adblock finishes these domains off for good, no value at all.
anyway http://eeggs.com/ is the source where they have cut and pasted their content from
On the about / register splash screen type:
a r n i e
The picture of the creator turns into a picture of a stuffed dinosaur, presumably names Arnie.
Various Photoshop splash logos in the past have had hidden images.
Typically you would have to grab a screenshot of the splash logo and then do CMYK separation, fiddle with brightness/contrast, grid masking, etc. to see the images.
^^ Incredible.
Netherlanders == Nerds
pwnt
killall gnome-panel
What about the old sega master system trick to get the snail game by holding Up, buttons 1 and 2 simultaneously and powering on the system.
This is somewhere between an easter egg and a surprise. Beating the Call of Duty: World at War single player mode and being patient enough for the credits to end unlocks a mini-game: Zombie Survival that you can play solo or co-op with upto 3 other players.
Lot of fun, adds to the game value (and kinda apologizes for the quality of multiplayer offering).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJwYmxaZ-9I - Found on youtube.
Found out the game mode purely by accident after I beat the single player mode and went to make a sandwich...A lot of gamers knew it and it was all over the web but I was oblivious to that part which made it a nice surprise.
1. Go to the spreadsheet application in the OpenOffice suite
2. Go to any cell
3. Type in: =game()
The response will be "say what?"
4. Type in: =GAME("StarWars")
5. Press the enter key -- the opening screen shows up
6. Pick your icon -- a message will appear in German
7. Pick your level (again, in German)
8. Click 'start'
fuck computerworld, 80 adverts for a single pages worth of crappy eggs ?
enjoy unemployment fuckers
Star Wars game
1. Go to the spreadsheet application in the OpenOffice suite
2. Go to any cell
3. Type in: =game()
The response will be "say what?"
4. Type in: =GAME("StarWars")
5. Press the enter key -- the opening screen shows up
6. Pick your icon -- a message will appear in German
7. Pick your level (again, in German)
8. Click 'start'
Wanda the fish
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: free the fish
Gegls from outer space
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: gegls from outer space
No Easter eggs here
1. On Debian-based Linux distros, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in: aptitude moo
3. After the response, type: Aptitude -v moo
4. After the response, type: Aptitude -v -v moo
5. (At this point, after the computer program argues with you, you're just adding one more -v each time.) Remember that five is your lucky number!
Robots
1. In Firefox 3, go to the Location bar
2. Type in: about:robots
Star Wars movie
Not technically an Easter egg, but still cool
1. In Windows XP (or any OS that supports Telnet), click Start, then Run
2. Type in: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Terminal Tetris
This actually is a function of the emacs text editor. Type "doctor" at the prompt and you'll get a free session with a psychotherapist.
1. On the Mac, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type: emacs
3. Press Escape & X at the same time
4. After your cursor moves to the bottom, type Tetris
Book of Mozilla
1. In Firefox location box, type: about:mozilla
Crazy Dates
Again, perhaps not really an Easter egg (though a lot of people on the Web think it is)
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in the 'ddate' command followed by a date in the format of number, space, number, space, four-digit year number (for instance: 4 6 2009)
3. Each time you type in a different date, you get another bizarre response from the 'Discordian' calendar
Pipes screensaver
1. In the Google Chrome Web browser's location bar, type in: about:internets
Have you mooed today?
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accesories > Terminal
2. Type in the apt-get package manager command and a bovine parameter: apt-get moo
Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
Link to the single page version.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
Where if you typed something in a cell near the far right, you got a driving game. With guns in your car to shoot other cars.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
From the "up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-select-start" department?
Surely you meant "b-a." I'm pretty sure a-b didn't do anything. :)
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
In Mac OS 7.5 - 8.5, you could get easter eggs by typing the text "secret about box" into any text editor that supported drag & drop and text clippings, selecting the text and dragging it to the desktop. In one OS, it would start a "brick-out" type game with the developer's names.
The HP Oscilloscopes used in my EE Circuits lab had a hidden Tetris game. It was a great way to have the Lab TA give you a funny look.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/28801.html
My dad designed HP test equipment, along with some other clever people. When they had extra space in ROM they'd put in things that would trigger if you pushed the right buttons on power-up.
One of my function generators plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" if you know what to push and when. (And you have an 8 ohm speaker plugged into the output.)
As it so happens, this was such a spectacular usage of the machine -- taking a single-output function generator and getting it to produce four-part harmony by synthesizing waveforms with embedded harmonics -- that when a sales engineer found out about it he started showing it off, and pretty soon it had stopped being an easter egg and started being a front-line sales demo.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/quests/cow.shtml The cow level was hilarious. I still break out laughing sometimes just thinking about it.
Use it!
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.