Ready Player One Was Wrong: The First Easter Eggs In Video Games

April 19, 2021 9:55 AM

While it may have been the first to be described as such, the well-known "easter egg" hidden in Atari's Adventure is not only not the first example of hidden content in a game, but is also not the first time a programmer hid their name in a game. Video game historian “Critical Kate” Willært of A Critical Hit hunts down the earliest examples in her Hardboiled History essay and video.

Beyond secret product placements, Moonlander was a game of many potential firsts, including cutscenes, depiction of a human figure, and ableist source code jokes.

A Critical Hit Previously

posted by subocoyne (13 comments total)

Great post. I legit lol'ed at Crossfire being described as "the most ‘90s board game to ever come from the ‘70s".
posted by tonycpsu at 10:11 AM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

This the kind of story you just can’t write without someone inevitably proving you wrong. Someone claims Video Whizball had the first easter egg, the next person Starship 1, only to be outdone by someone finding an Easter egg in Spitfire that probably couldn’t even be activated on the original hardware.

Even if it was true before, I’m quite sure that the act of publishing this threw us all into a new reality where someone did put an Easter egg in a late 60s PDP-8 version of Spacewar!
posted by delegeferenda at 11:32 AM on April 19, 2021

Historical deep-dives like this would be 100% my jam on their own, but you defintely had me at "Ready Player One Was Wrong".
posted by mhoye at 12:08 PM on April 19, 2021 [13 favorites]

The first *attempted* easter egg was probably in some Dartmouth BASIC program in 1966 or so, but it was probably hard to keep secrets for too long with the source code always online.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:37 PM on April 19, 2021

It's easy to take shots at RP1, for sure, but, when it was written (a decade ago, at this point), Adventure's Easter egg was the oldest that had been publicly discovered. The discovery of the existence of the Video Whizball Easter egg looks to be a year after RP1's publication and the Starship 1 Easter egg wasn't revealed until 2017.
posted by hanov3r at 12:40 PM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's easy to take shots at RP1

No kidding, it's like shooting wamp-rats in a Donkey Kong barrel with a Proton Pack
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:32 PM on April 19, 2021 [24 favorites]

Indeed any attempt to declare anything the first or only of its kind generally is doomed to be outdone, especially with something that, by definition, was designed to stay hidden. I imagine there may be some elderly game programmers who are smirking as they read this article.
posted by subocoyne at 2:02 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

That was excellent. I am both surprised and not surprised to find that all these "firsts" happened much sooner than most people think. It's often the case with film or literature too. When you find a real first it often looks more like Moon Lander — unique, ambitious, and probably still awesome to this day — than Video Whizball.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 5:20 PM on April 19, 2021

Holy cow I was terrible at Lunar Lander. Every time I went to the arcade I'd pump at least a dollar into that thing just to successfully land maybe one time, on the wide low-scoring landing site. Usually I would just run out of fuel.
posted by overhauser at 7:05 PM on April 19, 2021

Lunar lander, or at least a stripped down sort of the teletype text version was the first program I remember keying into my father's HP calculator sometime in the mid 70's when I was like in elementary school. You just had Altitude, Velocity, Fuel available on the stack and you entered a burn time and pressed a key to get your new numbers. If you made Altitude and Velocity both close enough to zero at the same time before running out of fuel, you won. Otherwise you got an error and played again. I rocked the arcade version which evidently came out when I was 9.

All I can say is that is sucks to be right at the age where you were too young to be playing with DEC and too old to be playing with Personal Computers (once they even reached the old stuff).
posted by zengargoyle at 8:03 PM on April 19, 2021

Turns out, if you just flip bit 157 of Mel's blackjack game it turns into a flight simulator.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

No kidding, it's like shooting wamp-rats in a Donkey Kong barrel with a Proton Pack


"Ha, good one!" I replied, instantly recognising references to the classic 1977 space-opera Star Wars (later renamed to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), the Donkey Kong video game franchise (fun fact: Mario's first appearance was in a Donkey Kong game!), and 1984's GhostBusters (possibly my favourite in the 80s-comedy-action-fantasy genre).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:52 AM on April 20, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'd never seen either of those versions of Lunar Lander before - and that DEC machine was completely unknown to me. All the time watching footage of them I was thinking of Thrust
posted by entity447b at 1:58 AM on April 20, 2021