An Easter Egg Hunt for Christmas Contest

A video game Easter Egg (or virtual Easter Egg) is usually defined as being an intentional hidden message -- or an in-joke -- found within video games that are put there by the people who make them.

The very first Easter Egg was created in part due to the existence of the Atari 2600, the home video game console that is largely credited with establishing that industry in its modern form because of its use of game cartridges instead of the game being hard-coded into the hardware of the console.

Prior to the release of the 2600, the most popular home gaming console was the Odyssey, by television manufacturer Magnavox, and Pong, which was created by Atari. Both of these consoles, like the other lesser known consoles sold elsewhere in the world, had their games hard-coded in the memory built into them, offering the player a limited selection of games.

In the case of the Odyssey that meant a Tennis game and a Hockey game, with a simple switch on the device to change between them. Atari's Pong played only one game, which resembled the table game of ping-pong, which explains the name.

When Atari released the 2600 it was a departure from the established technology and market because it used game cartridges instead of hard-coding the games into the machine itself. In addition to allowing the company to market new games individually to consumers, and thus increase their profits from the consoles, the technology also allowed them to incorporate any special hardware that a game might require in the cartridge itself, which allowed Atari to expand the capability of the console and its tech without it becoming quickly obsolete.

This had long been a goal for the company, who wanted to market both the hardware and games for it that would be sold individually. Already a major player in the coin-op arcade game market, Atari thought it might be able to adapt the games it created for arcade play to the home console.

It turned out that selling games was more profitable than selling the hardware, and while Atari quickly saw that its plan to port its established arcade games to play on the smaller home unit was viable, the demand for new games by the insatiable gaming community prompted the company to establish the first of what would eventually be many game studios charged with developing original content for the console.

It is at this point in the story that the video game Easter Egg makes its first appearance, because one of the programmers employed by Atari -- a bloke named Warren Robinett -- found himself bumping heads with the higher-ups at the Japanese game company over the issue of properly crediting the programmers who thought up and then developed the games.

All that Robinett wanted was proper credit for what he viewed to be a creation with the same IP value as a book or movie; an idea that many at the company shared with him. Unfortunately the bosses were not among the supporters of this idea, and his request to add a "credits" screen at the end of a game he was developing was denied.

Born on Christmas Day, 1951, Robinett set off on a career in computer programming in the late 1970's, when that meant the worshiping of mainframes, the deft handling of stacks of punched cards, and an affinity for large spools of magnetic tape. A talented artist from childhood, Robinett had a vision of creating fantasy worlds inside of computers, and was one of the first programmers to realize that vision when he pioneered the very first graphical adventure game at Atari.

That graphical triumph was a game called "Adventure" that he created for Atari's 2600, and as it was both a labor of love and demonstrated the very bleeding edge of technology at the time, Robinett felt that the team that was involved in its creation should be credited with that effort by having their names appear at the end of the game, much like the list of credits that appeared at the beginning of motion pictures at the time. Unfortunately the executives and his immediate supervisors at the company disagreed, and forced him to remove the screen that he had already incorporated into the game.

From Robinett's point of view the team of writers and coders who had worked on that game were in the process of making history, and he thought that if they were not properly credited within the game itself, history might forget their contribution; when he later tried to organize the other contributors to make a collective appeal to the brass at Atari, he found that the early support they had given to the notion had evaporated over night. The fear that they might lose their jobs as a result of their disagreement with the company may have had something to do with this development.

Unable to allow the matter to drop, Robinett secretly added a tiny piece of code to the game, concealing a hidden message with his name on it inside the game world. When the gamer executed a specific set of moves, the secret message was revealed to them. This was not discovered by Atari until long after the game had shipped and was in the hands of gamers all over the world, but rather than react badly to Robinett's gesture of defiance, the company capitalized upon it.

Leaking the existence of the hidden secret to the fledgling games press at the time, the PR people at Atari also coined a phrase to describe it that remains with us to this day -- they called it "An Easter Egg."

That is the widely accepted and semi-official version of the events, but as is often the case with legends, it may not have been the first time that a coder stuck a secret object into a video game. Even if it was not the first such gesture, it was the first to be identified by the term "Easter Egg," so it is safe to call Robinett's defiant gesture the first ever video game Easter Egg!

With so many great games being released in 2010 -- and more than a few landing in gamer hands during the final four months of the year -- it should not be a surprise that the folks who hunt down video game Easter Eggs as a hobby have been quite busy!

It was not long after the Easter Egg became a very popular object in video games that entire online communities sprang up to hunt for and document these entertaining finds. Most gamers fully expect to see Easter Egg finds included in reviews, previews, and feature articles on websites like Kotaku, 1Up, and GameSpot, but it is websites like that of The Easter Egg Archive (www.eeggs.com) that elevate the hobby into an established and well organized pursuit (though the site also covers Eggs found in movies, on TV, and in fact, practically every form of consumer media).

While the Easter Egg Archive runs regular features, like its Top 25 and Worst 25 Video Game Easter Eggs of the Year, and encourages gamers to submit their Egg Finds, it is small sites like Gamer Glitch (gamerglitch.com) that provide Egg Hunters a place to go to not just report the Eggs found in video games, but find a community of like minded gamers as well.

As a gamer you cannot stumble upon one of these rare finds and not be amused, especially when the Egg has a meaning to it -- like paying an homage to another video game as happened with the Portal Tribute in the recently released sequel, Fable III; the Easter Egg Tribute features a creature called a hobbe, who is locked in a jail cell where he is kneeling on the ground worshiping a box with hearts painted upon it, while on a bench nearby is a cake (the cake is a lie!).

Then there are Eggs that slam other games, like the ones that publisher Rockstar Games is well known for: a billboard on the side of a highway in San Andreas advertising the game "True Grime: Street Cleaners" ripping look-alike game True Crimes: Streets of LA, which prompted the game studio Luxaflux (who created the True Crime games) to respond with billboards in its games advertising a line of jockstraps whose label was suspiciously similar to that of Rockstar Games.

The best followed type of video game Easter Egg are the ones that simply blow your mind, either because of their complexity or the idea they present. A full and gory recreation of the bathroom chainsaw scene from the movie Scarface in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was mind blowing, as was the Covenant Disco Club in Halo: Reach, a fully rendered classic disco ala Studio 54, staffed by brutes and other enemies who are dancing the night away. The gamer can spend a few hours dancing with them if they like, no combat involved!

With Christmas rapidly approaching and the plethora of very excellent Easter Eggs in the newest crop of video games, it just seems right to offer you a chance to win a free video game by playing in our Christmas Easter Egg Hunt!

The rules are simple -- create an account on the GU site, and in a comment to this article, tell us about an Easter Egg you have personally seen in one of this seasons games. Describe the Egg in your own words, and tell us what you thought of it.

Shortly before Christmas the most excellent judges at GU will sit down and decide which of you submitted the best Easter Egg Description -- pay attention here, it is not how cool that the Easter Egg was, it is how cool that YOU made it sound in your description of the Egg that counts!

Duplications are fine -- it is your creativity and zeal in commenting that is important -- but you can only enter the contest once, so do your best job in that one go, right mate?

You are probably wondering what the prize is for this contest, right? Well, how does a Steam Code for Mafia II sound to you? It better sound fantastic, because that is the prize!

Just to get you started, and give you an idea of what we consider to be an Easter Egg, take a look at the following examples from popular games of this season:

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

- If you look closely at the computer monitor on the table in one of the scenes in the lab, you will notice that it is logged in to the Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy game on Facebook.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

- From the title screen if you press both triggers you can access a DOS prompt. Typing zork will run the Infocom classic text adventure game Zork: The Great Underground Adventure, one of the very first interactive computer games.

Fable III

- Morningwood Cemetery contains a number of gravestones with numerous messages, many of which are Easter Eggs! Several stand out, such as the one that says "In Loving Memory of Arnold, He won't be back" which is a reference to the Terminator Movies, and one that misses Timmy, who fell down the well.

Fallout: New Vegas

- A variety of Easter Eggs were inserted into New Vegas as part of a competition between programming teams, but when the issue came to the attention of the powers that be, they stepped in to put a halt to it. As a compromise, they added an official PERK to the game that puts the player into Easter Egg mode, and then encouraged the coders to create Easter Eggs and funny content that would be specific to this PERK, in the hopes that this would head-off any further unauthorized Egg Pranks. It did not.

Throughout FNV you will find references to Monty Python (the Holy Hand Grenade appears in the game), the Princess Bride (look for Rats of Unusual Size), and Star Wars (the burning bodies of Luke's Aunt and Uncle can be found near a burning homestead in the town of Nipton).

Mass Effect II

- In the world of television and movies "the fourth wall" is the view from the perspective of the audience, and actors are cautioned from the beginning of their career to respect the fourth wall. Acknowledging the audience is only funny when it is absolutely intended, for example the scenes intermixed with the credits of the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a great example if the use as are the several scenes in which the character pauses and talks directly to the audience.

In video games you never see the characters break the fourth wall, because it just never happens... Except when it does. Depending upon what companions you have with you while riding the lift in the Presidium you may expect to hear some very odd comments, several of which violate the fourth wall in the game.

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Right then, that is really all that there is to it -- you have had your history lesson, and you now know how to play the contest, so get going mate! You cannot win if you do not play!

The winner will be selected from the comments and notified by PM on the site, so make sure that you check your personal messages as Christmas gets closer, because you may end up being the winner!