Favorite Easter Eggs

nothing that we needed to do a lot of research on. Instead, we decided to do something a little bit more fun. Yeah, and this comes to us courtesy of Rich in a little listener mail. Rich says, Hi, guys, I was wondering if you had done a podcast covering hidden Easter eggs and software, video games, et cetera. Couldn't find it if you have. The first one I can remember coming into personally was in the Atari game Yards Revenge. I also remember Microsoft Excel having a hidden game when you went

to a certain cell and type something. Anyway, I thought it would be cool if you guys could cover some of some with their origins. Thanks Rich, Well, Rich, We're gonna cover a few of our favorites. We each picked uhh five, I think and um, because there are hundreds and hundreds of Easter eggs out there. Yes, and we should probably start by explaining what an Easter egg is. Well,

that's a good idea. So Easter eggs are these hidden little features within something it doesn't It can be software, it could be hardware, it can be pretty much anything you can imagine. There are a lot of DVDs of Easter eggs. In fact, we may do an episode just about DVD ster eggs in the future. We specifically avoided them for this episode because they're just they're hundreds of

those as well. But in general, and easter egg is something that someone connected to a particular project slips in as a joke, usually an inside joke, some sort of reference, um, or sometimes just a treat for people who like to poke around and explore uh in hardware and software. M Yeah. Sometimes they're actually condoned by the publisher. The publishing company knows about it and they say, oh, yeah, you know, as long as it doesn't interfere with anything, you know,

go ahead and throw that in there. Um. You know, some of the very uh, my very favorite ones, my very very favorite one especially is one that was done without the knowledge of the publisher, and um it was actually, uh, sort of a punishment to the publisher for not being more accepting of including credits. Interesting. So, yeah, this can be a way for a programmer to either let off a little steam or just be silly. I mean when

you're saying they're designing hardware or software. When you're spending hour after hour in the design process the testing process, it can really become a grind. And these little things are kind of ways of expressing your own little personality quirk or whatever, and away that's kind of fun and and other people can enjoy. And if no one ever finds it, well it's still a joke that you can enjoy. Yeah.

And uh, the reason that they're called easter eggs, well it may or may not be obvious to you, but it's sort of like going on a hunt. The idea is that you will hunt them down and find the little a little bit of secret joy I guess hidden away in the recesses of the program or the the disk somewhere, and they're not supposed to be impossible to find. If you're possible to find, then they're not really Easter eggs, and some of them are really challenging, and some of

them aren't quite so difficult. Like on DVDs, for example, you may have noticed, while you know, trying to navigate from one option to another, that you highlighted something that you didn't think was a choice, and then it turns out that there's some weird little feature behind it. That's a very common easter egg and it's it's not that difficult to find on most DVDs, assuming that you have a you know, normal DVD remote control. Yeah, and even

and computer computers, excuse me. In a computer, you can often move the mouse around and find little spots that you and click on that will activate hidden features. And my in my experience, has been a little easier to find in a on a computer than it has been actually using the remote. Yeah. Yeah, some remotes just aren't as responsive, it seems to that kind of thing. I've noticed the same sort of issues. So let's go ahead

and get started, Chris, watch you start us off. Well, I was gonna I was gonna go ahead and start with my favorite UM. This was an Atari game. UM from Back in the Dark Age is actually somewhat literally game called adventure um, in which you play Okay, you play a square right. No, literally you're not you know someone who's uncool. You are a square but but no, you are an adventurer and you are trying to uh get the chalice and bring it back. Um. The thing

is there are three dragons that are out to get you. Um, and you are supposed to go through the labyrinth and get through the castle and defeat the dragons and and win. It's a pretty simple game. Um. But apparently, from what I have read, UH, programmer Warren Robinette was not allowed to put his name on the final product. Apparently it was Atari's game as far as Atari was concerned. Um. So what he did, uh he embedded a micro dot uh inside the wall of of one of the dungeons.

And UM, I won't get into the details. It's it's kind of complicated how you have to do this. But there's a bridge that you can pick up and carry. You're allowed to carry one item with you. How do you pick it up by running into it? So you yes, well, I mean this is back in the day where you had a joystick with one button, um, which you know. Many of the younger listeners are probably going what really just one button? Oh, I mean no, most the other you know, most of them have some kind of joystick,

except it's the current generation doesn't have, you know. Yeah, anyway, anyway, anyway, Um, you you had to pick up the bridge and ram it a against this wall and it would allow you to cross over far enough you're actually move past the normal line to get into the wall and pick up this micro dot, which was essentially one pixel. And when you had this dot, you could cross over this other wall and see Warren Robinett's name and said created by Warren Robinett. So he does he got his name in there.

But you had to know, I hadn't know exactly how to get through there. Yeah, you had to pick up the bridge and take it with a certain spot and carry it back. And um, it was a little complicated, but not complicated enough to stop lots and lots of

people from seeing it. And I think you know, this is one of the most well chronicled Easter eggs out there, although their websites devoted to this, and yeah, they're a lot of these will spread viral e once someone disavers them, they'll they'll tell a couple of people and then it before you know it. It seems like it's common knowledge. It's kind of funny how fast they can pass through

the entire uh network of folks. Well yeah, I mean this was before the Internet and lots and lots of people knew about you know, this game that came out in the late nineties seventies, so you know, so my first one is similar in that it refers to a the classic era of home video gaming. It's the Konami code, which was first used in a game called Gradius on

then to Know Entertainment System. It was more famously used in Contra and the code itself you would use your Nintendo controller and you would put in the sequence using the controller and go up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b A. I guarantee you that some of our listeners said that with me I started, they probably said it faster because they just you know, it gets stuck in

your memory. So back in the day, this was a cheat code that would allow you to get usually like for most games thirty Extra Lives, a lot of different games use this this code, uh yeah, and a lot of these games, these early in games, because remember this is back before you could do things like save your progress in a game. If you turn the game system off, you you ended your game. You would have to start a new one, so you lost all the progress you

had made. So things like generating extra lives was a big deal because you know you wanted to try and see the end of the game if possible. Um, well, you know I wouldn't normally call that an easter egg, right, that's a cheat code. So cheat codes and easter eggs,

I'd say, were two different things. However, the people who are building the software we're using today are the same people who as kids were playing games like Contra and Gradius, and they were people who knew the up, up, down, down, left, right, left right be a code, so they started to build it into software. Specifically, you find it and a lot of web pages. There's one web page in particular called

Konami Code Sites dot com. If you go there, you can actually see a list of all the different sites that have this as an easter egg in it. In order to access Konami Code Sites dot Com, you have to know the Konami code to do up, up, down, down, left, right, left right b A and then it'll let you in. Uh. And among them are sites like Facebook and dig although I should say that I tried using it on both of those recently and I couldn't get them to work.

I don't know if it was because I was using Chrome, so it may just be that's not supported in that browser. I haven't tried all the different browsers yet. But in Facebook, what it used to do at any rate was create kind of a lens flare effect and it would go away. If you quit out and came back into Facebook, you'd be fine, But I had this kind of weird fantasy lens flare effect. Um also Google Reader, which it still works in Google Reader. If you do it in Google Reader,

the background turns into Ninja's and uh. There are lots of other websites that use it too, and it just shows in this way. It shows that a lot of the people who programmed these websites were big Nintendo Entertainment System fans back in the day. And I think it's

a cool little code to keep going. And you never know, you know, it may be that the website you're on at any particular time has that code and just by typing it in some of them, you have to hit another key after the sequence, like ter or you may have to click the mouse button. But yeah, there are there are several that that use it as a as a key to get into the Easter Egg. Okay, your turn. UM. I actually have a couple from my uh days as

a pseudo graphic designer. Um, those that we're talking about the early two thousand's late nineties when Photoshop three and four were out, and um, actually there's been a series of Photoshop releases that have an Easter Egg. UM, but uh, this is a really simple one actually, UM. And in Photoshop four, which is actually the first one I found out about it. UM, if you hold down alt when you do about Photoshop, I think it's alt, Um, it will bring up a splash screen very much like the

one that that you see when the program actually starts. UM, but um instead actually shows you a picture of a cat and it says big electric cat, which is the which was the development name for the product. And uh, you can actually and scroll through the credits and just just like you would see the credits you know on on other versions of the flash screen, but you can actually make the cat me out using another key combination or or burp actually and then uh in later versions

Photoshop five. Strange cargo shows a box and you can actually open the box to see the cat um. But it's just one of those cool little things that they throw in there and obviously supported. You know, Adobe knows about this, and you know it's not harmful, it's not offensive, you know, why not? You know, yeah, it's just kind of fun, the level of sophisticated humor that your average software developer has. Moving on. So this one, this one is the one that I included mainly because of my

own personal connection to this Easter egg. Okay, uh So, there's a series of of computer games that came out in the eighties and nineties called Ultima. All right, I think you've heard of it. Yeah, uh so Ultimate five was a game in which you were playing UM, a hero who returns to a world after many years of being away from this world to discover that things are not going so well and it's your job to try and make things right and you learn lessons along the way.

And uh I got to play this game back when it was an alpha build, so uh most of the stuff was complete for the game, like the basic mechanics UM attacking, defending, you know, your health, that kind of stuff magic things, but a lot of the other stuff, like conversations with other characters, hadn't been built out yet, so you would come up and try and talk to people and they had nothing to say. One of them actually specifically would tell you he had nothing to say.

Most of them just didn't respond at all. Um But the one who would respond with nothing to say was obviously a joke written by one of the developers. But one thing that was in there was a weird little easter egg that one of the developers told me about while I was there. He just thought it would be funny to tell me, and it was that within certain towns they have wishing wells, and if you tried to use the wishing well, you would lose one gold coin.

And you could make a wish, and you could wish for different things, and in some towns something would happen. In some towns it wouldn't. Most towns, one wish always worked, which was corvette. If you wish for a corvette, a horse would appear next to you and you could get on the horse, and the horse would increase your movement rate, so you could get in between towns much more quickly than you would otherwise. Um, so, just using a gold coin and a wishing well typing them the word corvette

and boom horse would appear right next to you. So I was curious if they would keep this in and uh. Richard Garriott, a k Lord British, was very kind enough to send me a be about to my five. Um. Uh. He had befriended my dad and he was all around great guy. Sent me a copy. And the first thing I did was, as soon as I was able to get to a town the head of wishing well, I used it wish for a corvette and a horse appeared and I thought that is awesome. I was in on

an easter egg before it even went gold awesome. Yeah, all right, next, that's very cool. Um. Actually, uh, in my notes, id you, we were talking about sophistication of the humor um the if just sorry I should have mentioned this before, but if you. Apparently I found this out as I was doing some research. I just wanted to make sure that I had a lite name straight

and things. Apparently, though, if you if you take a screenshot of the splash screen for a special cargo, which is photoshop five, uh and open it and photoshop and hide all the channels, but the blue channel you actually get to see one of the senior science a picture of the senior scientist on the engineering team. That's pretty funny. That's yes. But the other one. I was going to mention that a graphic design program is UH Quirk express. Well,

I guess it's actually a page layout program UM. But this was one of the ones I found by accident. UM because if you had UH and and one of the earlier versions of cork I don't know if it's still there, but in Quirk three, if you had a box basically an image box or a text box UM, and you held down shift option command K, which was a variation. I actually did this by accident and said as a fat fingered key mistake. Normally that would kill

the box. We did uh. I think option command K, but if you add a shift instead, somebody's gonna run in and tell me I'm wrong. Anyway, it's got an extra key in it. There was a little alien that walks out from the side very slowly, just a little make, makes a little clumpy noises, you know, and then comes out and zaps the box for you. So instead of it just disappearing, there's this whole you know, sound effect

gets rid of the box. I found out again in my research and later ver since a cork if you if you hit that key combination, the alien comes out. But if you keep hitting it rapidly, another alien comes out, and apparently they have a fight. Nice. That's a great Easter egg. Yeah, and it's one of those things where I've always pictured Cork is a very serious company, but apparently they had a sense of humor enough to include

that in several releases of the program. Well here's one that also shows, uh, kind of a snarky sense of humor by a company. That company being Mozilla or actually that nonprofit group Mozilla, which responsible for the Firefox browser. If you go to Firefox and type in in the address bar about colon Mozilla, Uh, this is what you get. And it kind of is a little dig at a certain mega corporation that may or may not have the

world's most popular internet browser. Um Mammon slept, and the beast reborn spread over the earth, and its numbers grew legion, and they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops into the fire with the cunning of foxes, and they built a new world. In their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mamon awoke and lo it was not but a follower.

From the Book of Mozilla, chapter eleven, verse nine, tenth edition. So, um, yeah, there's some biblical references in there, Mammon being the personification actually the godlike personification of greed, and specifically greed for money, which may be a reference to a certain Microsoft UM and how Microsoft at the time had been suggesting that Firefox was kind of a flash in the pan and totally unstable and you shouldn't use it, And then they

essentially are saying there that um, eventually they're gonna take over the world and when Microsoft wakes up, it's going to be too late. Uh. Kind of interesting. I was very I actually tried this out in Firefight. It wor Yes, it does work, and it works. So about colon Mozilla in the Firefox address bar if you want to check it out. Okay, from my uh, for my last two I deviated from the UM software model somewhat. Uh. And

I actually own the first one. UM My my very first computer, as many of you know, was an Amigo one thousand and UM and Commodore was far from the only computer company to have done this. But if you open up and I haven't actually done this with mine, I think I was afraid that I mess something up this in the days before I was familiar with the guts of a computer. But if you open up and

I still have it, it's just somewhere else. Um. But if you open up the case and flip over the lid, you will see, um, the all the signatures of the people who worked on the Emigo one thousand. Um. It's a really part of the plastic in the case. So it's it's pretty cool. Yeah, that's not unusual either. It's another one of those easter eggs that has appeared in other products as well. If you were brave enough to

open it up, you would be able to see it. Now, in some cases the items that you'd open up were not easily closable. Again, so it wasn't necessarily something you'd want to attempt. A lot of tech stuff is like that. Yeah, you don't want to hear I got it opens popped out. This one has to do with a programming language. So if you have the Python Interactive Interpreter, so we're talking about the Python programming language. Open up Python Interactive Interpreter

and you type in import anti gravity. It brings you to an x k c D comic about how simple the Python programming language is to learn. Yeah, so Python developers in turn fans of x k c D and and there's like this uh mutual adoration society going on there. But that's kind of interesting. Also very odd that you would type in import anti gravity and that would send you there. I mean, how how often does one type that in Python Interactive Interpreter. I can tell you how

often I've done it. Yeah, zero times. Alright, your turn. Um, the next one. I guess this is my last one, isn't it? Um? The would involve one of our favorite bands. They might be Giants, Um, Who's Factory Showroom CD. This is a little challenging because a lot of bands on the last track of the CD, they'll just leave some you know, silence for I don't know some of them ten fifteen minutes and where No Yankovic did that once

to me and scared the living hell atom. Yeah, because there was ten or twelve minutes of silence and then just thirty seconds of him screaming and banging stuff as loudly as he possibly could. That'll that'll teach you to leave the CD player running, especially if you're like, oh boy, I think I lost at least three years of my life off of that. Anyway, you were saying, well, this one actually requires you to back up while you're listening to the first track to get to the to the

get to the hidden tracks. It's a little bit more challenging. I've you know, frankly, I know it exists because I've seen it replicated. I've never been able to get it to work. I guess I just the CD players I own or are just in it. Yeah, but um no, it's it's documented. It's well documented as a matter of fact. But it's it's pretty cool because you can you actually play track one and then if you just rewind, theoretically is supposed to work. Yep, but I think that's very clever.

I don't know how. I don't know how you do that, how you encode. I mean, I know how to encode a CD and audio CD, but over the first couple of tracks as if they didn't exist, and then you only can get to them by backing out. That's interesting. Um, it's a mystery. Well, my last one is about how Mac window boxes suck. I'm sorry, but I'm sorry. Uh So, when OS ten, you can choose two different ways to minimize a an open box on her on your OS. Okay,

there's Genie and their scale. Those are the two different methods you can use to minimize the boxes. There's actually a third one, but it's not a choice you can see right there. You actually have to do a little work to choose it. It's called suck okay, so it's not in system preferences. What you have to do is you have to open up a terminal window and you have to type the following defaults right calm dot Apple dot doc my men effect M I N E F

F E C T dash string suck. If you type that in and then you restart the dock and you try to minimize something, you will see that the window gets sucked down into the dock like it it shrinks on one side and then just zips on down into the dock as if it's being sucked down by some sort of acute force. And it's actually pretty cool to look at um. And you can also switch it back to you know, going into your system preferences and change it back if you if you don't want to see

your windows minimized that way. But I thought that was a clever one. Interesting that it was included as an option even though it's not visible within the actual system preferences. Wonder if that one was supposed to have been included. Might have It might have been when some things that are counted as Easter eggs originally were supposed to be

part of the the feature project project. Yeah, but either something didn't get done in time, or it was kind of a it was a you know, it was deemed as not as important as the rest of the project and kind of abandoned. Uh. Sometimes that code just stays in there and you might be able to access it a certain way. Um. And the in those cases, it might not technically be an Easter egg because it was something that was supposed to be a feature. It was

just left in. Um. I can think of one. And there's there's kind of on a flip side of Easter eggs too. Yeah, there's stuff that should have been in a product but was left out, and unfortunately evidence of that feature remains in the product. And then you get people who are ticked off I can think of Knights of the Old Republic the video game, there was an entire section uh, I can't remember it was in the

first one, of the second one. I want to say it's the first one, but there was an entire section of that game that's referred to in a couple of different places, and you know that you're supposed to go there, but there is no way to go there because they never built out that section of the game and they didn't go back and remove the other references. So there are a lot of instances of of video games where

something was alluded to but never actually was created. So uh, yeah, there's a dark side as well, appropriate for Star Wars. Um Yeah, just talking about that reminded me of an Easter egg that I did that I do think it's cool. Um ti vo is known as a a device that well, when on its release, a lot of a lot of the content providers, the TV content providers, were really upset about it because they didn't want people Now you could record and playback shows any time and skip commercials, which

was what replay TV advertised. You could just skip ahead thirty seconds. Well, that actually earned replay TV quite a few lawsuits um. But TiVo said, well, you know you can fast forward, but you can't actually skip ahead, which are in them a break from the lawsuits at least for those UM. But there is a way to do it, and I think it's probably one of those things that they had in the code. UM, but they probably had turned off for a reason. I'm guessing that's the reason.

I've never heard anybody say that that's the reason. But if you play, if you if you have a first generation or I don't know if it still works on the newer generations, but I know it worked on on my first generation. So elect play select three zero select on the remote. Suddenly when you press forward, it goes. It skips ahead thirty seconds. You don't have to fast forward through commercials anymore. So send your complaints content providers

to over the inst at how stuff works dot com. UM. Well, that that wraps up our our quick discussion about our favorite Easter eggs. Now. Granted, like we said, there are thousands of these, their websites devoted to Easter eggs, and all kinds of DVN, hundreds of undiscovered Easter eggs out there. In some cases, all it takes is for someone who worked on the project to mention it to someone else

and eventually it will disseminate to everybody else. In other cases, everyone just keeps mom about it and it really does take some creative um snooping to figure out if something has an Easter egg or not. Uh so, uh, I remember that one point I had a DVD and I can't remember what it was now where the Easter egg

was actually a picture of an Easter egg. Really yeah, if you found like the little Easter egg and you pushed the button, it would just gave you a picture of an Easter egg and that was the Easter egg. It was a joke played on you for messing around trying to find the Easter egg. Um anyway, but that wraps up this discussion and it leads us now to our second bout of listener mail. This listener mail comes from Ben in New York and he says, Hey, guys,

I am officially obsessed. I listened to you guys for four hours today. While listening, I thought of some new ideas for the podcast Annoyances and Technology and Science and Medical Technology, your seventh grade fan, Ben, then seek out help. Listening to us for four hours is a sure sign of a problem. I'm glad that you were able to admit this to us. Now it's time to take the next step. Ben, Really, we really appreciate it. That's great. I'm glad that you enjoy the show, and those are

great suggestions. We've added them to the list. If we were to do an episode on annoyances and technology, I'm going to probably need some valume because as it goes on, I will get more and more irritated, and Chris can only put up with so much of that. I'll have to uh have to bring my poncho in from when that vein on your forehead, decide to exclude when I finally have an aneurysm right there in the middle of the podcast. We know what's going to happen. People, It's okay,

I'm all right with that. Well, Ben, thanks a lot for writing in. If any of you want to write in with questions or comments and anything like that, our email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech Stuff blog now on the House Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the

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