Easter Egg (virtual) Computer related Easter Eggs

In computing, Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behaviour, that occur in a program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other similar stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. See also Undocumented feature. A former use of the term Easter egg was to describe a message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of Unix operating systems caused them to respond to the command "make love" with "not war?". Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) images of the entire development team. Microsoft Excel has a well-known car racing game secreted inside. The Palm operating system has elaborately hidden animations and other surprises.

Whilst computer-related Easter eggs are often found in software, occasionally they can exist in hardware or firmware of certain devices. On some PCThe term personal computer or PC has three meanings: IBM's range of PCs that led to the use of the term see IBM PC. A generic term used to describe all microcomputers (mentioned here). A generic term sometimes used to describe a computer based on IBM's ors, the BIOSIn computing, the Basic Input-Output System or BIOS is computer interface code that locates and loads the operating system into RAM. It provides low-level communication, operation and configuration to the hardware of a system, which at a minimum drives th ROM contains Easter eggs. Perhaps the most famous example of a hardware Easter egg is in the HP ScanJet 5P, where the device will play the Ode to JoyThe ode "To Joy Ode "An die Freude in German) is an ode written in 1785 by the German poet and historian Friedrich Schiller, and known especially for its musical setting by Beethoven in the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony, for four solo vo by varying the stepper motor speed if you power the device up with the scan button depressed.

2 Video game Easter eggs

Easter eggs in computer gameA computer game is any sort of game that is played using a computer. General Although often associated, computer games are not necessarily video games although all but the earliest video games (such as Pong, which used dedicated analogue circuitry) are cos and other video gamescreenshot of Tetris for the Nintendo Game BoyA video game is a game played using an electronic device with a visual display. Overview Often "video game" is taken in a narrow sense to mean those games played on consoles for television and similar handhelds are distinguished from cheat codeCheat codes are codes that can be entered into a computer game to change the game's behaviour. It is unknown when this practice started, but it is possible that the codes were implemented and used by game developers to playtest certain aspects of their gas which allow you to cheat - see Minesweeper for an example. The first known video game to feature an Easter egg was the classic Atari game Adventure, in which a designer's name would be displayed if the player used a certain item in a certain location in the game. For a more recent example, featured a literal Easter egg hidden inside the upper floors of a normally inaccessible skyscraper. The tradition of including Easter eggs in video games has created small sections of gaming fandom that are as devoted to finding Easter eggs as they are to playing games as they are intended.

3 Compact Disc and DVD Easter eggs

Some Compact Discs include hidden features which may be called Easter eggs, such as screensavers for a computer which can only be accessed if the CD is played in a CD-ROM drive, or hidden music tracks appended at the end of the disc, or prepended to the beginning (before the first track). An example of the former is the album The World According To Gessle by Roxette's Per Gessle: at the end of the disc an unlisted acoustic version of Kix appears, sung in Elvis style. An example of the latter (which is somewhat more rare) is the album Factory Showroom by They Might Be Giants where a short song called "Token Back to Brooklyn" can be heard when the CD is "rewound" to approximately negative one minute and twenty seconds on track one.

Even more prevalent are Easter eggs in DVD releases of movies; these are often in the form of hidden trailers, documentaries, or deleted scenes, and are accessed by manipulation of the disc's interactive menus. An example is the DVD for The Abyss, which has at least nine Easter eggs, including at least three different trailers for Aliens and two for True Lies, two other James Cameron films. More elaborate eggs include that for Memento, which plays the scenes of the movie sorted into chronological order. In order to distinguish between different editions of the same film, some distributors have taken to listing Easter eggs in lists of "extra features" on the packaging and promotional material; some do not consider Easter eggs advertised in this way to be true Easter eggs.

4 Easter eggs in movies and fiction

Various forms of fiction, particularly movies, have a long-standing tradition for hiding references to people or previous works, which could also be considered a form of Easter egg, although they probably predate this use of the term. Often, such references are homages to other writers or directors, but sometimes they are more like in-jokes referring to the previous work or private life of a member of the cast or crew in some way. Such references usually take the form of incidental details such as the name of a minor character or location, or text written on a prop that is not significant to the plot. For instance, in one of the original Star Wars films, a storm-trooper is heard to use the call sign " THX 1138", which is the name of director George Lucas' first movie.

5 External links

Easter Egg Archive – Up-to-date lists and discussions of digital Easter eggs
Egg Heaven 2000 – Computer Easter Eggs Database
DVD Easter Eggs – Lists many Easter eggs in DVDs

Computer terminology

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1 Computer-related Easter eggs