Easter egg (media)

[3][4] Robinett, who disagreed with his supervisor over this lack of acknowledgment, secretly programmed the message "Created by Warren Robinett" to appear only if a player moves their avatar over a specific pixel (dubbed the "Gray Dot") during a certain part of the game and enters a previously "forbidden" part of the map where the message can be found.

[12] According to research by Ed Fries, one of the earliest Easter eggs in a graphical video games could be found in Starship 1 (1977), programmed by Ron Milner.

Anti-Aircraft II (1975) includes a means to modify the circuit board to make the airplanes in the game appear as alien UFOs.

[14] In 2004, an Easter egg displaying programmer Bradley Reid-Selth's surname was found in Video Whizball (1978), a game for the Fairchild Channel F system.

The Easter egg included in the original Age of Empires (1997) is an example of the latter; catapult projectiles are changed from stones to cows.

[16][17] Similarly, a programmer included the whole of TimeSplitters 2 (2002) within Homefront: The Revolution (2016), accessed by using a special code at an in-game arcade cabinet.

The results can vary from a simple printed message or image to a page of programmer credits or a small video game hidden inside an otherwise serious piece of software.

In the TOPS-10 operating system (for the DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer), the make command is used to invoke the TECO editor to create a file.

Other notable examples include some versions of the AMI BIOS that on 13 November 1993, proceeded to play "Happy Birthday" via the PC speaker repeatedly instead of booting,[34] as well as several early Apple Macintosh models that have photos of the development team in the ROM.

These Mac Easter eggs were well-publicized in the Macintosh press at the time[35] along with the means to access them, and were later recovered by an NYC Resistor team, a hacker collective, through elaborate reverse engineering.

[36][37] Similarly, the Radio Shack Color Computer 3's ROM contains code which displays what looks like three Microware developers on a Ctrl+Alt+Reset keypress sequence—a hard reset which discards any information currently in RAM.

Vector and Waveform Monitor which displays swimming fish when Remote > Software version is selected on the CONFIG menu.

[46] The firmware of HP's ScanJet 5p image scanner contains an easter egg wherein, on a cold power-on, holding down the scan button when the SCSI ID selector on the back is set to "0" will cause the ScanJet to play a rendition of Schiller's "Ode to Joy", by modulating the speed of the audible stepper motor drive to produce specific pitches.

[49] The Commodore Amiga models 500, 600, and 1200 each feature Easter eggs in the form of song titles by the B-52's as white printing on the motherboards.

American comic book artists are known to include hidden messages in their art:[55] Easter eggs are found on films, DVDs, and Blu-ray Discs, often as deleted scenes or bonus features.

"[65] According to American film critics James Berardinelli and Roger Ebert, most DVDs do not contain them and most examples are "inconsequential", but a few, such as the one found on the Memento DVD release, are "worth the effort to seek out".

[67] The 1980s animated series She-Ra: Princess of Power featured a character named Loo-Kee who typically appeared once per episode, hidden in a single screenshot.

[70] More recent broadcast media, where viewers have access to high-resolution digital copies or streaming services, may include further Easter eggs that can only be found by freezing the show at certain points.

[71] The opening credits of Season 2 of the animated series Arcane: League of Legends feature Easter eggs that foreshadows the episode.

The Netflix series Stranger Things had a real-world Easter Egg where a pizza delivery van featured in the show's fourth season had the phone number (805) 45-PIZZA shown on its side.

Kabay asserts that this undermined the Trusted Computing Base, a paradigm of trustworthy hardware and software in place since the 1980s, and is of concern wherever personal or confidential information is stored, as this may then be vulnerable to damage or manipulation.

[24] In 2006, Douglas W. Jones said that while "some Easter eggs may be intentional tools used to detect illegal copying, others are clearly examples of unauthorized functionality that has slipped through the quality-control tests at the vendor".

[76] Netscape Navigator contributor Jamie Zawinski stated in an interview in 1998 that harmless Easter eggs impose a negligible burden on shipped software, and serve the important purpose of helping productivity by keeping programmers happy.