Ready Player One is a movie that takes place in the future, where a virtual reality world (the OASIS) has been created that people use to escape the harsh reality of their daily lives. The creator of the OASIS (who became rich from this invention) leaves behind his fortune in the virtual reality world to anyone that can find a well-hidden Easter egg in his game. The movie is centered around the massive hunt for this egg. With the release of Ready Player One bringing Easter eggs into the forefront of pop culture, it begs the question of whether the hunt for video game Easter eggs actually spills over into real life. The answer is yes, as seen in the last Easter egg described in this article. An Easter egg is a hidden video game feature that usually requires using certain techniques to complete in-game tasks, entering specific button combinations, or acquiring access to secret game areas.
The first Easter egg in gaming was created back in 1979 by Atari programmer Warren Robinett when Atari would not allow programmers to give themselves credit for the games they made. Being proud of his work and wanting his name to be tied to the project, he hid his name in an empty room that could only be found by carrying an invisible item to a certain place.
In recent times, Easter eggs have taken many forms. Some can be unknowingly stumbled upon while others need many complex steps that can range from hitting buttons in the right order to converting the flashes of a broken light bulb into Morse code. Finding these Easter eggs has become a game of its own with dedicated hunters playing games for hours trying read scraps of paper on the floor and shooting anything that looks like it might be out of place until they find a code or hear an odd sound to signal that they might have found a next step.
These egg hunts can sometimes last for weeks until people make any progress. For example, in the newest Call of Duty game, there is a zombie mode that has become famous for its complex Easter eggs that tend to be difficult to solve. There are four maps for zombies that each have a large Easter egg called a main quest and many smaller Easter eggs that can be a special weapon or just an audio clip. Three of the four main quests have been solved, but at this time, not even the first step has been found for the map Classified, and there are teams of people working around the clock sharing possible leads and trying to figure it out.
Some notable Easter eggs are that in Halo 3, a species of monkey people can be found on a rock ledge on the first level, seen here. My personal favorite can be found on the second level of Call of Duty: World at War called “Little Resistance”. This one can be found right at the beginning of the level and is triggered by jumping into certain craters left by artillery fire. If done correctly, you will be treated to a strange voice speaking, and four lion statues will rise out of the ground with futuristic ray guns in their mouths. The player can then take the ray guns and use them through the entire level. Something about using an alien blaster on the battlefield of World War II makes finding this little egg worth it.
These Easter eggs are relatively simple, but there are others that are so large and difficult that they cannot be contained in a game and spill out into the real world. One example of this is the key Easter egg in the motorcycle racing game Trials: Evolution. For this egg, players find broken boards scattered around the game that when pieced together, show a code that needs to be deciphered. Once the code is cracked, it contains instructions to go onto a specific spot on a certain level in the game, and turn down all of the game’s audio, which then triggers a special song to play. Players then have to record that song and upload the audio into a spectral analysis program which reveals Morse code hidden in the song itself. This code then points to a website that contains images that stand for each letter in the alphabet. Soon after the website’s discovery, the images changed, and a box appeared asking players for an answer.
Through substitution, players were able to determine that the answer was the phrase “Big freeze with no complete end.” This is a reference to a theory on the possible end of the universe. Once the phrase was entered, the website changed again to show 4 sets of instructions for San Francisco, California; Sydney, Australia; Helsinki, Finland; and Bath, UK. For each location, there was latitude and longitude and a set of instructions to find something. After following the instructions, the boxes in San Francisco, Sydney, and Bath were found. The Helsinki location actually hid clues to a secondary location where a box was found that contained 300-year-old documents, a 100-year-old pocket watch, and other things along with a key. Each box contained the message “Midday in Year 2113 1st Sat in Aug One of Five keys will open the box Underneath the Eiffel Tower.” Now you may be thinking, But wait, only 4 keys have been found. But in the game itself, there is a key that, once collected, gives an achievement called the fifth key. I recommend giving this article about the Easter egg a read because it is crazier than we can write and needs to be seen to be believed.
Now, we probably won’t be around to find out how this one ends, but it just goes to show how far we’ve come from developers hiding their names in games.
