Just as children love hunting for Easter eggs, we love finding virtual Easter eggs in software and Web apps—those intentional hidden messages, features or jokes built into the software that users in the know may stumble upon at some point during their experience with the application. We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite software Easter eggs of all-time (in no given order) in light of today’s holiday. Of course, there are many more Easter eggs out there. Tell us us your favorites in the comments!
1. Atari: The first ever software Easter egg is speculated to have occurred in 1979 in an Atari game. Apparently, programmer identities were kept behind locked doors in the easly days of software development, with companies not wanting staff to gain more celebrity status than their brands. Warren Robinett, a programmer for Atari sneaked his name into the Atari 2600 game Adventure.
Here’s the YouTube video showing the egg:
2. Google’s Picasa Teddy Bears: Image editing software Picasa has an entertaining teddy bear Easter egg. If you open Picasa and press Ctrl-Shift-Y, a teddy bear will pop up.
3. The Book of Mozilla: If you type “about:mozilla” in the address bar of any version of Firefox, you will be led to a page with a quote from the “Book of Mozilla” about the birth of Firefox.
4. Google Earth Flight Simulator: If you open Google Earth, version 4.2, and press Ctrl-Alt-A (”Command” “Option” “A” on a Mac), Google inserted a flight simulator that lets you simulate being in the cockpit of a F16 fighter jet ot a lightweight SR22 propeller plane.
5. The Dark Castle on the iPhone/iPod Touch: According to this report, a teenager in the UK managed to discover this egg, the classic Mac game “Dark Castle”, in its entirety, available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Activating this game is a bit complicated but, here are the directions.
6. Google’s Mobile App: Google unveiled a surprise Easter egg for its Mobile App for the iPhone earlier this year. If you click on the settings tab, scroll to the bottom and keep swiping upwards until a secret option dubbed ‘Bells and Whistles’ appears (this also works in the foreign language versions of the app). The hidden menu lets you change the theme color of the app and its default sounds to chicken or monkey noises.
7. Microsoft’s Volcano: Microsoft inserted a volcano Easter egg in all Windows Operating Systems prior to XP. If you go to control panel display, click on the screen savers tab, select “3D Text,” then click on settings and in the graphics text box type “volcano.” The screen saver then shows names of all the volcanoes in the U.S.
8. Google’s holiday Easter eggs: Last holiday season, Google put Easter Eggs next to the sponsored link search results for terms like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Gifts, Christmas Sweaters, Hanukkah Sweaters, etc.
9. Mac OS X “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”: If you open Finder and go to Applications, look for TextEdit. If you enlarge the icon in CoverFlow, you’ll see a letter from John Appleseed quoting the text from Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign.
10. Goldeneye Breakdance: This egg was recently discovered. Apparently when playing Goldeneye 007, if the user tilts the cartridge during gameplay, this causes the characters to breakdance. It’s pretty funny-see the YouTube video of the dance below:
http://www.goog...ure_easter.html
or search “google easter egg” and hit the I’m feeling lucky button
Wordpress has one, something to do with making revisions and autosaves. I wish I could remember how to recreate it…but it brings up a black screen and it uses your name saying something like ‘you’ve entered the Matrix…(the video below uses my name but thats not my account)
http://www.yout...h?v=gkF4WLSkz-U
I’m sure you tried the iphone one before publishing this, right…?
Yeah that one was confirmed a hoax. Tut tut Leena!
Where’s that “confirmed” hoax link? I’ve actually gotten that easter egg to work…!
We’re talking about the Dark Castle one, not the Google Mobile one.
Try to click on the Yahoo’s exclamation mark at http://www.yahoo.com …
Nice!
Nice eggs! Thanks leena for sharing these ones. girl ur really hot.
What’s the deal with easter eggs anyway? I don’t get their significance.
http://www.f2bbs.com
What’s the deal with putting completely unrelated web addresses in your post? I don’t get the significance.
Nice easter eggs I don’t know some of them ,thanks for sharing
one of my faves is the easter egg in the Palm software; drawing a small circle clockwise in the lower right hand corner of the Prefs main page pops up an actual egg!
There are many examples of “Sotware” easter eggs that pre-date atari, including those found in Unix as early as 1977.
…and you call yourselves “journalists”?
One of my personal faves was the 3D racing game hidden in Excel 2000
Hmm, this is great.. hope I can more.
These are all great Easter Egg tricks! I especially love the 1st user tip on the Google Easter Egg. I just love Easter Eggs like in Star Wars or even in world of warcraft which I miss playing
Thanks for breaking the eggs, got some great goodies there
Go to google reader and enter the Konami Code.
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A
5. The Dark Castle on the iPhone/iPod Touch
That was a fake.
4. Google Earth Flight Simulator
This works on ANY version after 4.2, not just 4.2.
Darn, I was just heading to the Apple Store to buy an iPhone just to play Dark Castle again…
I see Google and Yahoo home pages has no traces of special “Easter” logo art.
Maybe the world is starting to see the truth about these stupid holidays.
Here are some Easter eggs on Facebook: http://reface.m...ok-easter-eggs/
Here’s another good one: http://www.goog...ure_easter.html
Microsoft, as usual, is such a laugh riot!
All About Easter Egg from every where on Internet @ http://search.m...;sa=Search#1051
A true Easter Egg:
(CNN) — The captain of the Maersk Alabama was freed Sunday after being held captive since Wednesday by pirates off the coast of Somalia, a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the situation told CNN…
zdnet.co.uk has a list for this easter!
http://news.zdn...39638892,00.htm
Oh, the Atari memories! I used to love going to the Easter Egg room in Adventure! It wasn’t easy though…
I’m surprised Google didn’t make one.
My favorite was the “Gay”easter egg was in SimCopter back in the late 90’s. When you reached certain levels in the game or on certain day there were characters dancing around in swimming trunks.
I made a mention of it on my Web site back then and linked to the Maxis site. My link came up as a top referrer and they e-mailed me. I upped the ante by pranking Maxi myself. Here’s the link to my prank e-mails:
http://kremer.com/z.php?46
Here’s a link to the original Easter Egg story:
http://kremer.com/z.php?47
Please remember, this is 10 years ago. The Web was a different place back then.
I outgrew Easter when I was 12. Also, I’m not Catholic.
The stock market has been o na tear recent. Do you think this recession hype is overblown? http://iamned.com/blog ? Are we talking ourselves into a depression? Consumers need to do their part to spend more.
I spent the first part of my Easter day installing FC8 via netboot from my laptop and an apache server running on Win and tftp32 on the remaining servers.
The 2nd part of the day will be an update to FC10. Then the installation of custom binaries for clustered computing.
http://picasawe...sterInstalling#
Then I have to configure them all with the LVS and those 2 bad @ss 6 port gigabit pci-x cards.
I actually took it really easy this weekend.
BTW, out of the 10 servers I got cheap from Surplus Computers, only 3 of them had bad RAM. I was expecting it to be way worse than that. I wish I could have afforded 20 of these:
rackable.com/products/c21002u.aspx?nid=servers_11
But that’s outside our budgetary means. Maybe next Easter.
I of course meant that i have to configure ONE of them with LVS and those 2 bad @ss pci-x 6 port gigabit cards.
Interesting
Check this: http://tr.im/iGqL
How to earn a lot of money!
The best way to earn money fast is the stock exchange.
google.com/finance?q=BAC
+2.49 (35.27%)
One day.
Since Rackspace hired Scoble, unbelievably, their stock doubled.
http://www.goog...:RAX&ntsp=0
Is this related to Scoble coming on board ?
Perhaps that would be the subject of an interesting blog article of itself.
Investment is by and far the easiest way to make money. That’s why VCs are VCs and don’t set up server rigs and software like me. They are too damn lazy, and they love easy street and expensive cars.
It’s the easiest way to lose money also, double edged sword thing.
Not to be a negative Nancy, if you haven’t already check this out.
http://www.cnbc...com/id/30111906
Those big multimillion dollar tech deals may be making a comeback later this year.
web 2.0 is no bubble facebook worth 30 billi0on
Don’t you mean Trillion? Let’s not undervalue here.
I made a $1 investement for 1/1,000,000,000,000 th of Facebook. It was matched by not one but TWO hedge funds in NYC.
Let’s not belittle the bloggers behind this by dropping off 3 zeros from the air-valuation.
/sarcasm
but seriously, we are heading for a steep upswing according to many economists. With that investment for mobile apps and other cool sh1t should emerge. Yippeee!!!
Just in time for our startup!
Does anyone else remember the easter egg in Yar’s Revenge on the Atari 2600? After you fired at the swirl and hit it, it would produce a line on the screen. Stay on the line with your Yar until the end of the explosion, the screen would go blank with only the developer’s initials forwards and backwards. The first it happened to me as a young boy of nine, it scared the bejebus out of me.
The Goldeneye one is a glitch, not an easter egg.
I’m quite partial to the Hall of Tortured Souls easter egg myself.
My favorite is Alex Kidd on the mastersystem how I loved that little guy
Even though it wasn’t originally an Easter Egg, ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ has been used as one forever in software. Those always crack me up for some reason.
Check out this cartoon about Easter Eggs!
http://pastexpi...aster-eggs.html
*CARTOON*
Feel free to post on your blog or “tweet”
Easter egg: try type GOBUBBLEGO into bubbleshare.com