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Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Easter Egg? (slashdot.org)
One year ago, Easter Sunday was greeted with the news that many companies were increasingly cracking down on "Easter Eggs," like the harmless snippets of vanity code playfully hidden by developers. "As programming becomes more corporate, more official, one cannot appear to have code that is not officially sanctioned," the author of The Elements of Computing Style told the BBC, though other programmers they spoke to disagreed.
The Easter Egg is a tradition which dates back at least to a hidden room in a 1979 Atari game, and I still have fond memories of the Batmobile Easter Egg (video) in King's Quest II (1985) and tales of that weird musical Easter Egg in Windows 95 which scrolled the names of their entire development team.
So share your favorites in the comments. What's your favorite Easter Egg?
The Easter Egg is a tradition which dates back at least to a hidden room in a 1979 Atari game, and I still have fond memories of the Batmobile Easter Egg (video) in King's Quest II (1985) and tales of that weird musical Easter Egg in Windows 95 which scrolled the names of their entire development team.
So share your favorites in the comments. What's your favorite Easter Egg?
My favorite Easter egg is the Hershey's chocolate eggs with the blue foil wrapper.
Dark. What? I like dark chocolate.
In the old days we had to smash the egg to get the sweets but now it's just a generic egg packaged with the sweets separately. Some progress makes me sad.
Back in the day, when we slew the dinosaurs with our slide rules, DEC had a product that ran on PDP11s and VAXes called Datatrieve. It was a query and reporting language, with extensive help. If you typed "Help me", it would reply that "Datatrieve is not in the counseling business - you should see a therapist, Priest, or Rabbi". Datatrieve help also had the feature that if you wanted more detailed help on a subject, you could type HELP ADVANCED subject, and it would give more detail on the subject. If you typed "Help advanced me", it would rely that "you are not advanced". A DEC executive got wind of this, and demanded that it be removed. It was removed in the next release - at which point DEC was deluged with problem reports from customers, complaining that it had been removed.... Datatrieve help would also reply to request for the subject of Wombats...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
"Created by ... Warren Robineet"
Forever burned into my brain.
I happened to love the porntipsguzzardo Easter Egg in SimCity!
The flight simulator in MS Excel 97 (I think)...
10 year anniversary in a few days
You hold down Ctrl at one point at that librarian chick shows her boobs.
Word verification: raping (what?!)
My favorite is a nice homemade hamantash, you insensitive clods.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
At least on the Apple II version, if you inserted the game disk upside down, the game booted and played upside down.
As seen in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ed
I liked the .fortune egg in the original Halo: Combat Evolved.
I discovered it by accident and was floored by the Unix reference on a Microsoft Console by a Microsoft owned Studio. Bungie previously made the Marathon FPS for the Mac, and Halo is a spiritual successor to Marathon (even includes Marathon Terminals in Halo3, and Guilty Spark 343 has the Marathon Logo in his eye [more easter eggs]).
Perhaps not the best eggs, but the ones you hear about first and thus expect don't seem to make as big of an impression as the ones you find yourself.
I would say some good things about Nethack, but that seems to be a game that is built out of easter eggs.
Used to be if you typed "How is babby formed?" in any search box on Facebook you'd get Rickrolled. Oh, Rick...
Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajAMiCEc6cg
The first one I ever encountered was the one hidden in the Atari 2600 Adventure game
ResEdit back in the System 7 days had a special "Pig Mode" dialog box that would pop up if you used the right key combo. I mean, I was like 9 or something, so I was easily amused; but I thought it was great.
If your program is big enough to hide easter eggs in it, it needs to be broken into smaller parts that each do one thing only and do it right.
The first two bytes of every MS-DOS .EXE was the signature "MZ", which happened to be the initials of a Microsoft developer.
Kinda like how technical book authors like to slip in their own names in script code examples... only MZ got his wired permanently into *every single* DOS app.
Within excel
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
make love: I don't know how to male love
rm God: God non existent
I al noto dure they weren't easter eggs.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I put an easter egg into some search results code that I wrote. If you searched for a word that ended in "er" and that search produced zero results, you could then hover your cursor over a certain part of the page and get a special message. For example, if you searched for "Jumper" and that didn't match anything, you could find a hidden message that said, "Jumper? I hardly know her!"
I don't think anyone ever found it.
Aw, looks like part of our shared cultural heritage has been lost.
I remember when Slashdot had hidden SIDs (story IDs), which were IDs that could be entered in the URL and would take you to a discussion that wasn't actually part of a story and wasn't shown on the front page or any section page. One of those was trolltalk, which was a hidden SID dedicated to discussion about trolling Slashdot. I'm not aware of this being documented on Slashdot, but trolls (and others, no doubt) were aware of it and used it. I'd say it qualifies as an Easter Egg.
On the about page there was a picture of the little mouse logo. If you clicked it, it would look startled raise its arms above its head and squeak. Was quite cute. Not sure if it is still there.
Tetris on HP 54600 scope
Help Wombat and Help Advanced Wombat
Datatrieve was an early Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) database product for PDP-11 and later, VAX Don't know if it ran on the PDP-10 or not..
Don't remember the name of the guy who did it, but it was a well received hack in the field (and us software types didn't care what management thought of it).
Lame. It's just Goatse. Up your game, troll.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Tesla Model S Ludicrous mode.
It was a stupid mind game that DOS let you play when you were stuck because of bad sectors on a floppy. In retrospect, that was a rather bad and unfunny Easter egg!
Dartmouth Timesharing had the "what" command that gave info about the system. Don't recall the legitimate uses, but as a special case if you entered "what 2+2" it output "4". Comment in the code was "joke".
"Don't click on my head"
Once upon a time I put a Pong game in a CNC machine, played through machine's controls.
Does that count? I remember putting other stuff through the years, but with age that decreased to zero. For now, at least.
in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl
Excel 2000
Excel 97
Up up down down left right a b select start.
All the cats on Adobe Photoshop's about menu... Last time I checked they were still there. On a particular version I think you could actually make it meow clicking on the nose
My most recent discovery is :smile. My most memorable is probably the legendary secret page of The Mushroom Kingdom... That was a long time ago, and in hindsight, the staff did a great job ensuring users who knew the secret did not spoil it for others. I still check on the secret page from time to time, just to make sure it is alive and well.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/545...
It was in my "Rock Lobster" revision of the A500. I'm not sure how early the Easter Egg started in the AmigaOS or how long it was allowed to continue in future revs. If you hit a certain key combination, you would get a message: "Amiga: Born a Champion." If you could manage to keep four fingers on the keyboard while pushing a floppy disk in with your big toe, the message would change to: "Amiga: We made it, they fucked it up." Obviously, a rebellion against Commodore taking over the brand.
In python2.7 interactive mode:
>>> from __future__ import braces
File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
In versions of Quark xPress in the late 1990s, there was a series of keystrokes that when performed while a text box was selected, would cause a small robot to appear from one side of the screen, walk across the screen, raise his arm to point at the box, and then fire a ray gun that would make the box disappear. I discovered it one day when a guy in the office who could barely breathe and see at the same time started yelling something about a robot with a ray gun had just destroyed the page he'd been working on.
Type webdriver torso into the search bar on YouTube. Creepy! Doesn't work on mobile.
In win95 and 98, using the 3d text screensaver and typing "volcano" in the text field would bring up a rotating list of volcanoes.
Similarly, "beer" would bring up beers.
You could make a text file called "secrets.txt", with a certain format, and it would play your lists. :)
It was changed for win2k and later.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
It has been a long time since I have fallen for a Goatse Troll, congrats! Sadly it looks like the site has been taken down. I wonder how many hits that page got, that's a very large opening to fill!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
# aptitude moo
/ \
There are no Easter Eggs in this program.
# aptitude -v moo
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.
# aptitude -vv moo
Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?
# aptitude -vvv moo
Stop it!
# aptitude -vvvv moo
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?
# aptitude -vvvvv moo
All right, you win.
/----\
-------/ \
/ |
-----------------/ --------\
# aptitude -vvvvvv moo
What is it? It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nowadays they are vanishly rare.
An ATM-type machine developed by an ex-employer used to play Silent Night on Christmas Eve by spinning its motors. Unfortunately, that model is no longer in use. :-(
The taxi that used to appear at random on the Palm Pilot.
There were a few easter eggs on the original Palm Pilot. One showed the Development Team Credits with a photo, another was dancing palm trees in the Giraffe app.
I used to have a web site listing a lot more, but it's been lost many ISP's ago...
edit: Found it!
https://web.archive.org/web/19...
My favorite easter egg is the one that lets you inherit a ~$240 billion dollar business. To get it, all you have to do is clear the Tomb of Horrors, defeat an AI player in a game of Joust, clear Dungeons of Daggorath, recite the script of WarGames, finish Zork, finish Black Tiger (upgraded to a modern 3D layout), get a score of ~800,000 in Tempest (with one credit), and finally recite the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Riven has many, many easter eggs. My favourite is a scene where Gehn (the big bad) sings the first verse of O Sole Mio. Gehn's actor, John Keston is actually quite a decent singer.
Rawa said that during filming of his scenes, John at some point suddenly started singing instead of saying the lines he was supposed to. They decided to keep it as an easter egg because it was so awesome.
That said, I've always been a bit uncomfortable about easer eggs, especially in office software and, worse, operating systems. Sure, it feels really good to find them, and I guess that's why people like them, but what if there's some bug lurking inside them? What if there's a security issue? Easter eggs by their very nature are often not vetted as well as the rest of the code. And there's the issue that some easter eggs must have taken quite some time to code; is that defensible given that the software is riddled with bugs?
Not a software Easter egg, but a hardware one.
On the inside of the back plastic cover of the Mac Plus was the signature of everyone who had worked on it. Probably no more than fifty people if I remember right.
$ python3
Python 3.4.3 (default, Jun 29 2015, 12:16:01)
[GCC 5.1.1 20150618 (Red Hat 5.1.1-4)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from __future__ import braces
File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
>>>
Fergus mcgovern sadly died this month but his easter egg lives on
In MacOS 7.5, drag and drop the "secret about box" text snippet to the trash, and get a waving MacOS flag. Wind direction and force is controlled by mouse position.
I'm having trouble remembering a specific one, but a lot of games and apps for classic Mac OS (7-9 mostly) included Easter Egg pictures, sounds, and text if you opened them in ResEdit. Usually they'd be something along the lines of "What are you looking in here for?", "Stop trying to bypass the registration!", etc kind of things. There was a little shareware app that tweaked menus that had the author singing Daisy, Daisy I'd love to find again, but I can't remember the name of it.
I think it was in Gnome (maybe still is), where you could use the ALT+F2 keyboard shortcut to bring up the run dialog, and type in "free the fish". And a swimming fish would appear across your screen. You could click on it and it would swim away, but would return a few moments later (unless you killed gnome-panel). We used to do it to each other if we left our machines unlocked.
import __hello__
Self explanatory.
from __future__ import barry_as_FLUFL
That one takes a bit to figure out but once you find it, you may use it as standard behavior.
If you hit F1, then Ctrl-3, the C64 would start belting out "Pomp and Circumstance" in all its SID (Sound Interface Device) glory!
Every 777th snapshot (or so the rumor says), Solid State Logic's G series audio consoles would put up the coveted "Begbroke" Easter Egg. The legend said that if that happened when you were mixing, you'd come up with a gold record . . . I can personally attest that that was NOT the case. ;-) https://www.reddit.com/r/audio...
http://rickadams.org/adventure...
The Apple MPW C compiler had a notorious set of error messages (does this count as an Easter egg?). http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jo...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I recently picked up a used HP 54600B oscilloscope and whilst searching for the manual came across a "three finger salute" that launches a fully playable version of tetris [ http://www.eeggs.com/items/392... ]. I wonder how many hardware engineering hours were spent "debugging" hardware during the 90's with one of these. I also wonder how this slipped through code reviews.
The text editor TECO that ran on... TOPS-10, I think, before most of you were born had a fun Easter egg. To create a file once you started TECO, you'd type "make ". If you typed: >make love TECO responded: ?not war?
not war.
Sadly, long since removed.
d@dancer:~/git$ make love
make: *** No rule to make target 'love'. Stop.
It is a sadder world for this loss.
Photoshop 4 (not CS3... we're talking way back in 1997 or so): the project code name at Adobe was "Big Electric Cat". If you held the Apple key (or Option on PC version) when you clicked "Help / About Photoshop" it opened the Easter-Egg version of the about screen - an image of a big electric cat.
On the Mac version, if you continued to hold the Apple key, and you clicked on the cat's nose, it burped.
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/apps/photoshop/aboutboxeasteregg
Enter about:mozilla in a Firefox location bar.
Have gnu, will travel.
still remember that one
Around 30 years ago, I was one of the lead developers for the first query server for Unisys V-Series/Medium Systems. The product (named Exxtract(tm) ) would display a little "text picture", on the system console (ODT) at midnight Christmas Day of a small Christmas Tree, with presents around it, and at midnight new Years Eve/New Year's Day would display a little text picture of a couple glasses of Champagne, along with the words to "Auld Lang Syne", and best wishes from M. V. and Associates. No harm done, and we usually got some sort of pleasant comment from the customers after their first time seeing the messages. Also, if the server ever detected a fatal/impossible/irrecoverable error, it would memory dump, and display the message "And Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash - Where *EVER* you are!" We got more squawks when people saw that one, though it was probably more related to the crash than the message, per se.
If you type zzzz and right-click, the suggestion is 'sex'.
The two that come to mind for me ... Opera 7-12 and now Vivaldi will come here if you type /. in the address bar ... and some old programing language - I forget which one now, it was ages ago - that if you typed "What is the meaning of life?" would respond with 42.
Or maybe it was SImCity 2000. Anyhow, you could get a window where one of the dev's favorite jokes (also one of mine) would scroll past. A punny joke about bits of string trying to get served in a bar.
I guess they're not really Easter eggs if they're in the documentation... still amusing: /|
ack --thpppt
_
\'o.O'
=(___)=
U ack --thpppt!
ack --bar is a bit better (but slashdot won't allow "junk" characters)
If you use google.co.uk and search for Jason Isaacs, the actor who has played many bad guys including Lucius Malfoy, the page will say "Hello to Jason Isaacs". This spun out of a film program and podcast from the BBC when the hosts learned Jason Isaacs was a regular podcast listener. Every episode of the radio program/podcast contains a "Hello to Jason Isaacs" from the hosts.
-Christopher J. who clearly needs to get a slashdot account set up
I seem to recall the vi man page having a pronunciation guide in HP-UX 10.10 or 10.20. I might be wrong on the particular operating system, but it was funny nonetheless.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Centipede on the old HP oscilloscopes. Yeah!
SSIA
All your Easter Eggs are belong to us!
The "Rocks" game in the Agilent Oscilloscopes. Pretty good Asteroids clone.
How it was hidden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO_aBoCQQkU
A detailed explanation here
You know the cross hair to center the map? Try clicking on the helicopter flying over crossings. If you have catastrophes enabled, it will even start a fire, else it just will crash into the ground and a new one will appear later
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/v...