'Easter eggs' not just for children
By Jen Pontzer, Staff Writer
April 7, 2007 | 9 a.m.
Easter is a time for children to find colorfully painted eggs hidden by their parents. College students often search for Easter eggs, too -- on their software, DVDs, video games and CDs.
People add Easter eggs to their products mostly as a signature, an inside joke or just because they wanted to add them. Easter eggs range from the simple (Jerry Seinfeld’s hiding Superman in every episode) to the complex, like the special features on DVDs that can only be found by pressing remote control buttons in the correct order.
Easter eggs were probably first used by programmers who hid messages and jokes for those browsing the code. Software-based Easter eggs can be found by entering a specific combination of keystrokes and mouse clicks. For example, Unix operating systems would respond to the command “make love” with “not war?” More modern and elaborate is Bruce the Wonder Yak, found on Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Once you find Bruce, he will eat grass and offer one-liners like, “It’s hard to be mad in fuzzy slippers.”
DVDs often hide Easter eggs in the actual films and menus. In “Almost Famous,” the story of young journalist writing for Rolling Stone, the real publisher and founder of Rolling Stone can be seen in a taxi near the end of the film. “Almost Famous” also contains extra footage that can only be reached with a certain sequence, which is as follows:
1. From Disc One's main menu, go to "Special Features."
2. Once in “Special Features,” highlight the microphone to the left of "Love Comes and Goes" and press the up button.
3. The third picture will now be highlighted. Hit “enter” to view a clip paying tribute to the film "Stolen Kisses," with an audio intro by Cameron Crowe.
In video games, Easter eggs must be distinguished from cheats. While cheats are nice and can help with game play, Easter eggs are extra content that often have nothing to do with the actual game besides breaking the character of game play. Video game Easter eggs can be accessed by using controller button combinations, discovering obscure areas in the game or, sometimes, on the disc itself.
The first video game an Easter egg appeared on was the 1980 video game version of the text game “Adventure.” In the catacombs of games two and three, there is a grey dot the size of a single pixel that allows access through a wall into a room with the text “Created by Warren Robinett.” Robinett claims to have included this Easter egg because, at the time, designers weren’t given credit for their games.
Easter eggs in music can be anything from hidden pictures and/or messages on album covers to messages when you play a song backwards. Hidden tracks are often found too. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding, you can see a picture of The Beatles. To find it, Easter egg hunters must turn the album upside down and look in the bark of the tree right above the white border of Dylan’s photograph.
If Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” is played backwards, one will hear “It’s fun to smoke marijuana” during the chorus. Whether or not Queen intended this is debatable, as are all backward tracks. On Jimmy Buffett’s Christmas Island album, if listeners fast forward until a minute after the last track, they can hear Jimmy Buffet reading a Christmas story.
To find your own Easter eggs, start with a few that have already been found. Try out different patterns on your own DVDs, video games and software. To find CD Easter eggs, try rewinding to before the first track or waiting until after the last track to hear hidden songs. Happy hunting.