Entertainment makers have been secretly hiding weird things in their craftswork for a very long time. It's only after the advent of the DVD that finding weird things became popular, and was given the unoriginal term "Easter Eggs." The Internet helped the spread as well...now that such information can be easily traded, it doesn't take long for secrets to get out and there are now a billion websites cataloguing hidden material. You might have heard that the first electronic "Easter Egg" was in the 1978 Atari game Adventure, in which programmer William Robinett, frustrated with the Atari tyrants not giving him any credit for his game, hid his name in it. Picking up an invisible block and carrying it back to the first screen produced a huge flashing "CREATED BY WARREN ROBINETT!!" sign, and by most accounts the "Easter Egg" was born. But if we're counting any piece of electronics that you're supposed to stare at, there was a robot at Disneyland in the 70's that would perform for an audience, then the curtains would shut...and it would whirl around and make an extremely obscene gesture to nobody but itself. It wasn't caught until one morning when the curtains got stuck and wouldn't close. Every mother in the audience blew up.
But that's not all! The rest of this page is comprised of the most interesting easter eggs to actually exist:
MYST
The original MYST had a nice one too. You explore the CD and find
the vids of the brothers talking gibberish. Play one of them
backwards and you realize he's actually saying "Rush
Limbaugh understands..."
CASTLEVANIA
If you put Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in a CD player,
you'll soon hear Alucard's voice saying something along the lines
of "You shouldn't be playing a data CD in an audio CD
player, but you aren't going to listen to me, are you?" and
then a secret song plays.
COIN-OP PINBALL
From the little-known "Bride of Pinbot" - and quite
possibly, the most difficult and pointless easter egg to find.
After a ball is plunged into the plunger lane, hold the right
flipper for 45 seconds, then the left for 45 seconds, then both
for 45 seconds. A beep should indicate you did it right. Then tap
out the song "Old McDonald Had A Farm" starting with
the right flipper (timing is important, so it helps to sing
along). When you finish OLD MCDONALD HAD A FARM the DMD will
display EEEEEEIIIIII EEEEIIIIII OOOOOOO. Continue on with AND ON
THIS FARM HE HAD A and the DMD will show a cow, which moos.
Continue still with WITH A MOO MOO HERE AND A MOO MOO THERE and
the game responds with HERE A MOO THERE A MOO EVERYWHERE A MOO
MOO.
Wow, I'm....speechless.
ZELDA: LINK TO THE PAST
This was in the game for years, but not many really knew
that...until the Internet blossomed, various gamers got together,
and said to each other "What, you found that one day? Hey, I
did too!" It's a room full of Rupees and a message from
"Chris Houlihan," who by current theory must have been
the winner of a Nintendo Power contest that promised your name
mentioned in a Nintendo game. It was never revealed who won and
for which game, however....and this room is almost impossible to
find; to get in here most accounts say you must zoom around
Hyrule performing several stunts with no room for error, then
race right into an open hole. The room is only activated by
glitch errors involving screen changes, so your only hope is to
glitch up the game at the exact moment you fall in a hole that
leads somewhere.
ZELDA: LINK'S AWAKENING
This is even more confusing than the room, and it's easily
doable. Just sprinkle Magic Powder on any Buzz Blob in the game,
and it'll turn into a strange-looking wiggly thing. Talk to the
thing, and it says any one of the following four phrases:
"Hey Mon!"
"You know me, I like short names the best..."
"It can display millions of polygons!"
"I definately need it, as soon as possible!"
My best guess is that this is an inside joke aimed at one of the
game developers. Some think it was an early hint at the Nintendo
64 based on the "polygons" comment, but the N64
couldn't display MILLIONS of them.
SKIES OF ARCADIA (Dreamcast)
If you put it in a CD player, Vyse and the Crew yell at you to
take it out and put it back in the Dreamcast.
LUNAR: SILVER STAR STORY
The CD contains a secret message from the game's villain that can
only be accessed if you rip the file off of the disk. In the
audio file the villain commends your "evil" ways and
claims that you would make a good minion for him.
DONKEY KONG COUNTRY 2
Using a cheat device to get every item in the game, you'll
actually recieve a 103 percent score--one percentage higher than
the highest score normally obtainable...and your rank will be
listed as "Cheating Chump."
OLD CRUMMY TRS-80 COMPUTERS
Radio Shack used to sell these back in the late 80's; they would
call them Tandy computers and they used your television as the
monitor. Before I even had an Apple, I had one of these things,
and the Net has since revealed to me that if I ever by chance
pushed Control, Shift, Alt and Escape at the same time, the
screen would have transformed into a full-color picture of the
TRS-80 developers. The only reason a picture could be saved on a
computer like this at all was because the ROM size was just above
4K, and they used two 4K-size chips, then just filled up the
extra memory with that. And I COULD have found it by
chance--about the best entertainment value I ever got out of the
TRS-80 was to switch it on and off and watch the pretty colors.
GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS
To see this one, you must go to the bridge that connects San
Fierro to Las Venturas. Now you've got to find some way to the
top of the bridge, and once you do, head to the central pillar to
FIND:
Indeed.
MANIAC MANSION
Hamster + Microwave = FUN!
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