History Lesson: The Original Video Game Easter Egg

by Griffin McElroy on Mar 23rd 2008 4:30PM

We know that most of you are probably familiar with this piece of Atari mythos, but we thought it would be a festive way to celebrate this Easter Sunday. While Robinett's egotistical stunt was definitely ballsy, it doesn't approach some of our favorite secrets throughout gaming history -- like the legendary Secret Cow Level in Diablo II, or the bitchin' audio file hidden on the Symphony of the Night disc. We're curious to know -- what easter egg, hidden in the folds of one of your favorite video games, especially tickled your fancy?

[Thanks, Matthew.]

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Tags: adventure, atari, diabloii, easter-egg, easteregg, hidden, robinett, secret, symphonyofthenight

Reader Comments (58)

couple of my preferred eggs..
Quake1: the dopefish room.

Myst: most of the jiberish videos in the books were actually english. just played backwards. one was something about rush limbaugh. I'm too lazy to dig out myst to check.

and of course warcraft2 -> Disco.

Actually, the videos you're thinking of were all gibberish except for the one played backwards. The complete wording was "Rush Limbaugh understands". Riven has a fair number of eggs too, mostly hidden videos (silly putty commercial, Gehn singing opera) or developer's names/kids photoshopped into textures.

There's also a metric ton of easter eggs in the remake realMYST, including the ability to play Pong on the planetarium's constellation viewer, getting a rocket launcher out of the safe in the log cabin, and turning the tower into a rotating cannon (doesn't shoot anything, but it's still amusing to look at).

And now my fanboy is showing ;).

that's right. Probably why I can only remember the one video. It's been so long since I've played Myst/Riven. I seem to remember a Pez dispenser in one of the rooms in Riven as well. hm.
Maybe I should dust those off.

as a kid i loved the banjo-kazooie ice key, shark food island, and gobi's door. i dont know why they intrigued me so much, but I defintely loved those most of all, and was really let down when Banjo-Tooie came out and wasnt nearly as sweet. Ha, I think I'll go by an N64 somewhere tomorrow!

and i loved reading about how you could SUPPOSEDLY get the triforce in Ocarina of Time. Good stuff, good stuff.

I'll never forget the chickens and the chicken man in Dungeon Siege.

It took so much work to get that thing working and we were so underleveled.

Awesomely enough, this is also a nod to the development team.

Where is Bushnell? doesn't he have to say that all new easter eggs are shit and nothing will ever be as good as the pixel dot in adventure?

Blowing up the hamster in the microwave oven in the early versions of Maniac Mansion for the NES (I believe nintendo made the game publisher take it out in later versions) ... still one of my favorites.