Eggs

A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, or video game. The term draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many western nations. more...

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The origin of the term is sometimes falsely attributed to the movie Return of the Living Dead, where a military officer uses it as a code word for lost U.S. government containers of zombies created by a chemical spill, or to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which actual Easter eggs are visible in certain shots (under Frank N. Furter's throne, for example). Return of the Living Dead was not released until 1985, and Atari's Adventure, released in 1978, contained what is thought to be the first video game Easter egg (the programmer, Warren Robinett's name).

In computer programming, the underlying motivation is probably to put an individual, almost artistic touch on an intellectual product which is by its nature standardised and functional, although Warren Robinett's motivation was more likely to gain recognition, since video game programmers were routinely uncredited then. It is analogous to signature motifs such as Diego Rivera including himself in his murals or Alfred Hitchcock's legendary cameos.

Computer-related Easter eggs

Software based

Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior, that mainly occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. An early use of the term Easter egg was to describe a message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

Two well-known early Easter eggs found in some Unix operating systems caused them to respond to the command "make love" with "not war?" and "why" with "why not" (Berkeley Unix 1977 "The Prisoner" reference). The TOPS-10 operating system (for the DEC PDP-10 computer) had the "make love" hack before 1971; it included a short, thoughtful, pause before the response. This same behavior occurred on the RSTS/E operating system where the command "make" was used to invoke the TECO editor, and TECO would also provide this response. The largest easter egg is purported to be in the Atari 400/800 version of Pitfall II, which contains an entire game that was more complex and challenging than the original Pitfall II (Pitfall). Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) images of the entire development team. The 1997 version of Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator; the 1997 version of Word, a pinball game. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 contained a small, hidden video game named 'GORILLA.BAS'. The Palm operating system has elaborately hidden animations and other surprises. The Debian GNU/Linux package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on "apt-get moo" are typed into the shell. Another notable easter egg is from The MathWorks' MATLAB: the why command provides succinct random answers to almost any question:

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