The first game ‘Easter eggs’ were an act of corporate rebellion | Hacker News Reader

The first game ‘Easter eggs’ were an act of corporate rebellion

thehustle.co

158 pointsAnon8470 comments

God I love a good easter egg so I'll spill the beans on one we routinely do at the truck shop I work at:

If you're in for new mudflaps, we'll sneak a small pin on the end of the mount point and laser cut the upper edge of the drivers flap. The pin gives you a place to hang your clipboard when you're doing pre drive checklists, and the laser cut? Gives you a bottle opener on the mudflap :).

Got a photo?

In the early days of Electronic Arts (I wasn't there, but knew lots of people who were), Trip Hawkins used to say to his employees who wanted credit, "If you want that, give up your regular salary & stock options, take the risks, and go out on your own. If your game is any good, we'll produce it and you'll have the royalties."

So he had a Hollywood-ish model: the big studio backs an independent who makes the movie -- it doesn't make the movie with its in-house talent, like in the 30's and 40's.

I have no idea how it works now, by the way.

==== epilog ====

We (Analytica) had a softball game against EA. They killed us and Trip hit a towering home run.

Thanks for sharing, fun anecdote.

Works both ways. There are publishing functions and development functions.

A "studio" does development. It can be independent or owned by a bigger company.

A "publisher" focuses on handling distribution / sales & marketing functions. It can publish games from studios it owns ("first party") or from external studios it has business contracts with ("third party").

There are companies that do various mixes of these functions, but the biggest tend to do them all.

Yes, that's a good overview.

In addition, I think in the last few years the swing has been towards bigger publishers or corporate holding groups (Embracer, Microsoft/Sony, Tencent, etc) sweeping up lots of previously independant studios (Eidos, Riot, Double Fine, Mojang, etc) in acquisitions - for the sake of owning the intellectual property and freedom to do more with the license. But also, and crucially, stopping other rival companies doing the same thing first, leading to big arguments like this one: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623363/microsoft-sony-ft...

Perhaps the colder global financial situation will cool this acquisition/centralisation spree, but maybe not!

There's huge advantages to combining together for studios and publishers because then they can demand better terms from Valve/Epic/Sony/Microsoft/Apple/Google, if they are not already working for one of the above.

Hollywood has credits, even for the accounting departments that are definitely getting salaries and not royalties.

difference between "credit" and "royalties."

That's kind of orthogonal to how Hawkins started EA. He launched with this ad putting his game designers up front and naming them outright:

https://www.eurogamer.net/seeing-farther-the-advert-that-cha...

I knew four or five people who were with him at the beginning. How about you?

Note that he doesn't say he'll hire game designers as employees & give them royalties.

And now, 'Easter eggs' are forbidden through policy and a fireable offense if you're not in a creative line of work where it is intentional. The same being for April Fools'.

They seem to serve a legitimate purpose though. Provenance of creators/creation. While it is a cliche Hollywood plot line that true ownership of an entity is proved by an Easter egg, these seem to be harmless ways to stick it to the man.

I work in video games industry for one of the top 3 publishers and easter eggs definitely aren't a "fireable offsense", unless I guess they are in particularly poor taste or something. If you mean things hidden in the game without explicitly telling the player about them and hoping they find them, that still happens all the time. But even things which are hidden which no one really approved also happen on pretty much all levels, both from programmers as well as artists.

No experience in gaming but given the amount of creative control I'm given in other dev work it's not surprising when you're talking about projects at the scale of most video games.

My last project had 800 people on it and little things were added pretty much all over the place without the art directors ever knowing - even us as programmers shipped some programmer art that definitely wasn't meant to be there but it got "accidentally" left in the game files and shipped. And then there is a whole category of "official" easter eggs that obviously get approved by creative directors and are meant to be there for players to eventually find.

Emphasis on if you're not in a creative line of work.

So managers, accountants and VPs?

They are by definition something an engineer snuck in. Anything else is a regular feature that has been premeditated.

If it was snuck in, what else has been? What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

This is why they are fireable offenses. It might not be for a piece of entertainment software like a video game, but sneak one in while working at FAANG and you'll most likely get fired.

Maybe these days. There’s a famous story from early YouTube though and no one got fired. And Google frequently throws in Easter eggs like the time searching for cats or dogs let you trigger a mode where you can make paw marks on the page, although those are more formal affairs probably and not some random thing you throw in there on a whim.

Just to rephrase the OP’s point, I think they are drawing a distinction between “a feature not directly advertised to the user” and “a feature not authorized by whatever chain of command is supposed to be followed at the developer”.

The paw marks are an example of the former, but I believe OP was saying the latter is the fireable offense

The YouTube story I mentioned (couldn’t find it) is an example of the latter. There was like 1 guy and when Google introduced approvals he co-opted a coworker to stamp his PRs. This was a while back so unlikely to fly anymore, but only because the companies are so big and have all sorts of government and large business contracts that prevent that kind of stuff from a regulatory perspective.

> What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

I mean, what does it say about hospitals that doctors can kill you with one stray cut? Ultimately you trust them to be benevolent.

Heh. What does it say about your engineers if they can't sneak something in?

I always found the whole affair of walking people out when they give their 2 weeks to be exceedingly idiotic.

I’ve known for a week or two that I was going to quit. If I was going to do something bad I would have done it before printing out my notice.

> If it was snuck in, what else has been? What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

I mean, of course engineers have that ability regardless? Maybe I’m being too technically-minded, but I just don’t see how not detecting an Easter egg somehow indicates that the engineers haven’t put one in surreptitiously..

>What does it say about your security policies and practices if engineers can sneak stuff in?

What does it say about developer efficiency if you can't make any change or audition without getting approval from the CEO? Giving power for lower levels to make decisions is important to remain efficient.

For security most places don't leader molest require more than 1 or 2 people to approve your change. You just need get them on board your Easter egg.

Not if it’s something really subtle like manipulating a texture to have some small detail in it.

It's older than video games, and there's a spectrum between easter eggs and watermarks. Consider mapmakers adding fictional places to prove map copyright. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trap-streets-with-no-n...

That's a different motivation

If readers refer to the article, the reason for the easter egg was because the textile execs hired to manage game development treated the idea of crediting developers as absurd, and so the developers inserted evidence of their work into the games as easter eggs, literal hidden paths. While it was not direct copyright enforcement, it was leaving a "makers mark" on the product, which has precedents in other fields such as map making. Or, I'm probably just too dumb to tell the difference and this insight was both incisive and deeply edifying.

how about this: Easter eggs as we've been discussing are meant to be found, albeit with a lot of effort and good luck.

Deliberate mistakes in maps are meant NOT to be found. If an infringer found them, they'd be sure to omit them from their maps.

Anything is a fireable offense if you're at-will. A termination like that is not likely to hold up in better jurisdictions.

Although not technically an Easter Egg (more like unused code), the Hot Coffee mod [1] to Grand Theft Auto San Andreas certainly cost the developer and publisher a lot of headaches and money. I can see why Easter Eggs would be forbidden after that experience.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)

I always found it absurd that in a game where the player character is a street criminal and most of the game objectives involve robbery or murder, a minigame depicting clothed dry-humping is what pearl-clutchers found to be a step too far.

When I was a teen my hometown's government fired me for "security concerns" because if you looked at the JS console on their website you'd see an innocent but goofy easter egg.

It's still there, which continues to tickle me.

It was supposed to be a firing offense at Atari. We put easter eggs in the cartridges anyway (it helps when there is no source control at all, and your manager thinks that assembly language has something to do with LEGO).

In my opinion, easter eggs that aren't against the rules aren't actually easter eggs at all. The whole point, and the thing that makes them awesome, is that they're illicit.

> Ron Milner, who worked at Atari from 1972 to 1985, inserted an Easter egg in the arcade game “Starship 1.” If a player followed a certain sequence of controls, the message “Hi Ron” would flash on the screen and the player would be awarded 10 free games.

I'm very sympathetic to having credits in video games and other creative artifacts.

But would this particular "10 free games" Easter egg be a big problem if the secret spread?

(The entire reason for buying an arcade game then was to generate money, by charging for games played, with minimal supervision. And firmware updates to remove an Easter egg once shipped seem expensive.)

Maybe. Arcade owners might buy a game that doesn't offer free plays instead.

> would this particular "10 free games" Easter egg be a big problem if the secret spread?

Similarly, this Galaga trick/easter egg/bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542064

If it was sufficiently difficult to accomplish, I see that as a net positive for a motivated owner.

Consider the special moves in fighting games. They’re not necessary for playing, or winning. But you get social credit when you share with your friends what you can accomplish. And the owner gets your hours worth of quarters.

And then your friends will spend hours worth of quarters to learn the trick.

> Consider the special moves in fighting games. They’re not necessary for playing, or winning.

They very much help with the winning. Unless you're talking about finishing moves, which are mostly superfluous (except to trigger special events, which does definitely have potential to drive more quarters into the machine)

a hidden message or feature that has become commonplace in movies, video games, and other digital content.

The process of businesses turning acts of employee rebellion into product is a phenomenon called recuperation. Once you become aware of it, you can see it everywhere, from star Wars to the establishment's fondness for Gene Sharp.

Recuperation is more about the cultural appropriation of subversive symbols. E.g. "being aware of systemic racism in 1960s harlem" -> "2020s rich white women telling each other their pronouns"

Theres nothing all that subversive about easter eggs is there?

At the time it was to sneak credits past corporate approval (Atari felt that since video games weren't considered art crediting game developers was as ridiculous as crediting their office window curtai). Their hidden nature sometimes allowd devs to vent their grievances or take pot shots at their management and colleagues. The whole point then was that they were hidden from the testing phase of the final product.

In that specific context it is an act of rebellion.

Reminds me the Bill Hicks routine on marketing people. First telling them to kill themselves and then suggesting the marketing people are thinking “he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar, there’s a lot of money in that”, etc.

The machine will always extract whatever is useful and profitable. It co-opts everything to make itself bigger and bigger.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

> The process involved a difficult mix of left brain and right brain

Is this still a thing? I had an EEG done with charts, and it was all top-down view with quite a bit of symmetry broken down into 20+ nodes, but most importantly there was no L/R terminology at all.

To the article's point, I wondered if the humans.txt initiative in web work came from a desire to claim more space for this kind of expression...seems like there are also more creative ways to get recognition in development these days if it's really needed.

You'll have to pry left- and right- brain specialization out of my cold, dead hands, irregardless of the evidence.

Reading Mcgilchrist next to the san diego face statue was a formative experience.

What the line? "Science progresses one funeral at a time"?

> Is this still a thing? I had an EEG done with charts, and it was all top-down view with quite a bit of symmetry broken down into 20+ nodes, but most importantly there was no L/R terminology at all.

Brain lateralization is complex, and the pop-psy ideas of "left brain logic, right brain emotion and intuition" is a vast and incorrect oversimplification -- one that is often used to disparage logically minded people and rational thinking in general. While it is true that Broca's and Wernicke's areas, brain regions important to language, are typically (not always!) found in the left hemisphere, other areas of linguistic processing can be found in the right hemisphere. Women and left-handers tend to have less brain lateralization than do men and right-handers, respectively.

They are not going to talk about lateralization in your EEG charts because fundamentally, it doesn't really matter.

Apparently this is one of those ideas that people cling to, much like "Pluto is a planet" for emotional (right hemispheric?) reasons.

> Women and left-handers tend to have less brain lateralization than do men and right-handers, respectively.

Interesting. Can you recommend any reading/content about this? My left-handed female self is curious.

A looong time ago, I worked at a company that compiled shareware CD-ROMs and sold them when modem speeds were still slow for most people. We tested all the games on Windows (95 I think) before they went on to the CD.

Unfortunately, one game had a splash screen with silly pro-nazi comments that ONLY appeared when the game ran on Windows NT.

We got a call from a "current affairs" show that some poor mother bought the CD-ROM for her sick child and imagine the horror and damage done, blah blah blah.

We said, "How old did you say the child was?"

The CD-ROM also had Doom on it, too, and a clear MA15+ rating on the front - several years older than the poor child.

We said, "Yes, we'll be happy for an interview."

Never heard back.

Assuming this is Australia, it's pretty wild as someone from the US that your movie/game rating system is legally enforced! Here, ratings are advisories for parents, which seems more appropriate. Also, pro-Nazi comments are worse than pixelated Doom gore, surely!

Yep, they were designed not to be hidden from users, but from testers, and the greater corporate environment.

Mortal Kombat created an environment where they were for users. By the time Google got around to doodles they had been neutered, turned into an expression of corporate pride. It took a few years for users to catch up. At this point they are just a dick wagging in your face.

From the letter:

> I AM VERY PROUD OF YOU COMPUTER. I'VE COMPARED. YOU ONLY NEED MORE SOFTWARE AND PERIPHERALS TO BACK IT UP.

The article talks about a request for backup software and hardware.

> for backing up his Atari system

My interpretation of the original letter is that it sees the greatness of the computer, but wants more use-cases as proof - to back up the claim of greatness.

No-one gets that excited about backup-software.

I was going to comment on the same thing then got lost in all the Easter Egg references...

Yes, this was my interpretation as well (or close to it)! There was no way a 15yr old was looking for Backup Software for his Atari (did this even exist?? I was a 10yr old in 1980 and the thought of backup software never crossed my mind).

This kid wanted Atari to release more peripherals and games and such to "back it up". That is, to SUPPORT and SUSTAIN the growth of the gaming system.

The part that had me scratching my head was this. Atari went from founding in 1972 to $40M in revenue in 1974, and Bushnell sold the company for $28M in 1976, and revenue was $120M the next year.

Why did Bushnell sell for so cheap? I realize that revenue is not the same as profits, but with a growth ramp like that, I'd expect it to sell for more than $28M.

It looks like profits were more like $3m. Selling at 10x P/E is very reasonable

This assumes he was then motivated by money or still thrilled about that industry. He probably had his hands full with Chuck E Cheese.

PS: Him (or someone closely resembling him) gave a talk to my high school AP physics class c. 1994 about starting businesses. The school had a computer lab full of IBM PS/2 Model 25 and 30, and a derelict pile of PCjrs. The computers where absolute trash, but the teacher let it be completely unstructured. I think it had token ring and Novell 2. Most lacked HDDs so it was BYOF. I had a mentor for one year, a lady programmer from IBM Almaden.

If you like learning about Easter eggs in video games, I can't recommend this youtube channel[0] enough. Always very interesting, and the videos are very well edited. Here's one[1] going through Easter eggs in Minecraft.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@FunWithGuru [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypTAM3kHFmo

In a discussion of Easter eggs, I cannot help but post Brian Moriarty's awesome "The Secret of Psalm 46" [1]. The narrated version[2] is also extremely pleasant to listen to.

[1]: http://ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html [2]: https://youtu.be/u0OY1RDe8Yg

It's much harder to sneak in an easter egg now that it's common practice to require all code to go through code review.

Have to try to figlet a comment banner at least.

Thank you Warren Robinett for making Adventure so awesome.

It is incredibly amazing how every story about a former tech company that lost its mojo and ended up being sold for peanuts always have this bit about “they brought XXX as CEO, a Harvard MBA…” Sometimes I feel like Harvard Business School was a communist plan to bring a faster demise to capitalism.

Don't see software or hardware easter eggs much anymore.

For startups I touch, I leave interesting and dynamic 404 pages on internal proxy servers and internal apps. :)

> The young fan’s name was Adam Clayton.

and who would go on to global fame and fortune playing bass for the rock band, U2

Apparently, they are different people: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/243163-programmer-adam-cla...

You mean he plays bass and develops software? Is there anything rock stars can't do? Thanks, I was kidding. But it is interesting that he became a developer.

Larry Mullen Jr. was well known for throwing Colecovisions out of hotel windows.

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