The History of Software Easter Eggs

The First Easter Egg

It was the late 1970s, and the video game industry was still in its infancy. Enter Warren Robinett, a quiet yet driven programmer at Atari, tasked with building a title called Adventure for the Atari 2600. While working under corporate policies that prevented developers from taking credit for their creations, Robinett decided to ensure his name would not remain anonymous. He coded a secret room deep within the pixelated castle walls of the game—a room that would display the triumphant statement: “Created by Warren Robinett.”

Rumors of a mysterious hidden message began to spread among devoted players, who embarked on pixel-by-pixel scavenger hunts, determined to confirm this legendary claim for themselves. Eventually, a few adventurous gamers stumbled upon the hidden hallway and revealed Robinett’s tiny rebellion. This discovery was no small feat—on a platform as simple as the Atari 2600, embedding anything beyond the main gameplay was an engineering challenge in and of itself.

The act sparked a revolution in the industry. Word of a “secret credit screen” generated a buzz that rippled through the gaming community, prompting developers elsewhere to consider their own hidden inclusions. As the story spread, Atari leadership publicly shrugged off the stunt, but the impact was undeniable. From that moment on, the concept of a hidden “Easter egg” in software took flight, forever altering how people experienced games and inspiring countless other developers to hide little pieces of themselves in their work.

A Tradition is Born

This one small act changed the software world forever. Developers who had been going unrecognized for their talents and contributions to both games and corporate software began finding little ways to embed a hidden message or credit to be found by their most hardcore fans.

As the culture began to change in the 90's and 2000's to include more direct appreciation for the individuals who built popular software, the challenge began to shift to including surprising and delightful experiences. One such example is the flight simulator built into Microsoft Excel 97.

The Flight Simulator: An Unexpected Journey

It all began with a handful of curious employees at Microsoft, eager to slip an unconventional secret into a product known more for number-crunching than thrills. The result was a hidden 3D landscape buried behind a maze of obscure keystrokes and menu tricks in Excel 97. At first, only a few insiders and die-hard fans knew about it, swapping cryptic directions like a secret recipe for unlocking the bizarre aerial playground.

Within months, rumors started circulating throughout tech circles, prompting countless office workers to transform their desks into cockpit control panels. Eager explorers would meticulously follow each step—launch Excel, navigate to a specific cell, type a mysterious set of commands—and then, in a flash, the grid-lined interface gave way to a rudimentary sky, complete with floating shapes. It was by no means a cutting-edge simulator, but the sheer thrill of piloting anything within a spreadsheet program left early testers grinning from ear to ear.

Like an urban legend verified at last, the Excel flight simulator soon gained mainstream attention. Magazine articles, emails, and online message boards lit up with disbelief and excitement. The once-mundane world of business software received a jolt of playful mischief, proving that even the most serious applications could harbor whimsical delights. In the process, Microsoft’s playful hidden feature helped cement the idea that Easter eggs were not just frivolous pranks; they were also a nod to the passionate, inventive spirit that drives innovation in the software world.

Google Makes Easter Eggs Popular

One of the companies that embraced Easter eggs early on as a part of it's developer culture was Google. They started with a tradition of nutty jokes on April Fool's Day, the first of which was Google MentalPlex a fake product that users could sign up for that would allow Google to download the contents of a user's brain and index it for searching. People soon began to notice that certain search terms (e.g. "Do a barrel roll" or "askew" – still works) would cause amusing effects to search.

Google also had an Easter egg at one point that caused asking for directions from "The Shire" to "Mordor" to display a map of Middle Earth along with a warning to use caution because "one does not simply walk into Mordor."

Why Do Easter Eggs Continue to Appear?

Since the culture changed, developers continued to receive more and more admiration for their work, and games are abundant and cheap, why do in-game Easter eggs persist? Why do developers continue to spend time speaking these things into software?

The simple answer is that the fans absolutely loved them. It was received as a reward for being willing to explore every aspect of a game that had captured their imaginations. It feels like being part of an exclusive club, a secret handshake of sorts - the same way millennials and Gen-Xers identify one another as old game nerds by reciting the Konami Code. Having visited an Easter egg in a video game is a pilgrimage made by the most hardcore of fans, who sort themselves into a hierarchy based on who found the most esoteric oddities added by the developers during production.

Have you found any Easter eggs in the games you play?