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Games Entertainment

Great Gaming Easter Eggs 88

Posted by Zonk from the hidden-sekrets dept.
Gamespot is running a piece detailing some of the most well known Easter Eggs in gaming history. The list starts with the first egg in a game, the Warren Robinett room in Adventure. From the article: "In the depths of the black castle in Games 2 and 3, which required special tools, direction, and a certain amount of know-how, players could maneuver to a room by the catacombs that had a single-pixel gray dot, the same color as the game's background. The dot would allow players access through a wall to a superfluous area with the text "Created by Warren Robinett" running down the middle. Robinett was partially motivated by the fact that, at the time, designers weren't given credit for their games."
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Great Gaming Easter Eggs More

Great Gaming Easter Eggs

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  • But the best. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nomihn0 ( 739701 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @01:33AM (#13377422)
    Perhaps the best gaming easter eggs aren't in games at all. The Excel flight simulator [eeggs.com] is an old favorite of mine.
  • Would have to go to the infamous Hot Coffee mod of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

  • Bah, no Ultima? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @02:35AM (#13377608)
    I'm sure everyone remembers the space-ship in the field..and then you had the zany ways you could kill lord british... *sigh* memories

  • No ROTT or DN3D (Score:3, Informative)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @02:37AM (#13377615) Homepage
    Those two games where filled with easter eggs. And not only bad ones.
    One of the most common easter egg is playing the game on xmas, a shit load of games do something special then.
    • or setting the systems date to 25th of December.
      The odd Sega Seaman voice activated game(!?) used to know all the major dates (although mainly USA based) and your birthday, if you told him correctly in the first place.

      • Re:No ROTT or DN3D (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pnice ( 753704 )
        Ready to Rumble did this on the Dreamcast as well. I know it did on Halloween and Christmas at least.

        What about, "You Don't Know Jack."? Seems like it always does something on holidays (like insulting you for playing alone on New Years Eve)

        Speaking of YDKJ, if you have The Lost Gold check this out (copied from eeggs.com):
        1. As in the other YDKJ games, start up a game with 3 contestants
        2. When you get the chance to play for a Gibberish Question, take it in turns as each player to type in "Fuck you
        • I recall playing You Don't Know Jack when they were an online venture, and they had different questions each week. The week of April Fool's they had questions that were practically unanswerable. Things such as the game would play a tone and then ask you which note it was (A sharp, C, Dflat, that kind of thing), or asked you to name an obscure political figure from way back when based on too little information. At the end, the game awarded you the full allotment of points you would have gotten if you answ

  • Ratchet & Clank (Score:3, Informative)

    by parrillada ( 264680 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @02:43AM (#13377633)
    The Ratchet & Clank series' easter eggs are fantastic. You enter a museum with where you can try out all sorts of design elements that didn't make it to the final product. As I recall, one of these Easter egg museums was so large that it had its own Easter Egg.

  • Other favorites (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @03:14AM (#13377692)
    Some other Easter Eggs that have amused me over the years:

    The Kilrathi ship in Ultima VII. If you built a staircase out of crates and got up onto the roof of the blacksmith's in Trinsic (the town you begin the game in) in Ultima VII, you can walk behind the chimney and get warped to a strange sci-fi environment, complete with the "Kilrathi" music from Wing Commander 2. This is as much a cheat as an Easter Egg; the area contains some absolutely godly equipment and copies of a number of key plot items, although using the latter can result in a corrupted save.

    The Wolfenstein levels in Doom 2. This one's pretty well known and not especially hard to find, but there's a secret exit from one of the maps, about half-way through Doom 2, which lets you teleport to a pair of secret levels, which are essentially modified versions of two levels from Wolfenstein 3d, including enemy-types and textures from the older game.

    The Manic Mansion easter egg in Day of the Tentacle. Not especially hard to find, but certainly one of the most impressive easter eggs ever, given it's basically an entire game.

    The Sephiroth battle in Kingdom Hearts. Yes, I know Kingdom Hearts includes a lot of other Final Fantasy characters, but this one is hard to access, so I'm going to include it anyway. Beat all of the regular arena matches, and two special matches are unlocked. One of these is Sephiroth, the iconic villain from Final Fantasy VII. He's by far the hardest fight in the game, somewhat analagous to the "weapon" super-bosses that show up in various installments of the Final Fantasy series. If you have the Japanese International version, defeating him gets you an extra cutscene.

    (Not quite an Easter Egg as such, but still...) The AE86 Shuichi Shigeno version in Gran Turismo 3 and 4. This is winnable as a unique prize in 3 and occasionally shows up on the used car list in 4. Its inclusion won't mean much to most players, but anime/manga fans might realise that Shuichi Shigeno is the author of the Initial D manga, which features (by the later volumes) an identically tuned version of this car. I do wonder how this one worked from a licensing perspective, given that several official Initial D games exist.

    Command & Conquer's Jurassic Park levels. I can't remember for the life of me now how you actually accessed these, but the original Command & Conquer had several hidden levels where you had to survive attacks by dinosaurs. I do, however, remember these being pretty hard in places.

    • Re:Other favorites (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr.Opveter ( 806649 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @04:36AM (#13377879)
      Command & Conquer's Jurassic Park levels. I can't remember for the life of me now how you actually accessed these, but the original Command & Conquer had several hidden levels where you had to survive attacks by dinosaurs. I do, however, remember these being pretty hard in places.
      According to this [eggheaven2000.com] you just need to start the game with a parameter

      27 pages of games easter eggs [eggheaven2000.com]
    • Command and Conquer + Dinosaurs.

      Sometimes you've just gotta ask how life could get any sweeter.
    • Kudos for a good list. However the Sephiroth fight isn't really an easter egg. C&C would be, Day of Tentacles is debatable, Wolfenstein levels is debatable as well.

      One that you didn't meantions is "Dopefish" in Quake. As well as about a ton of stuff in the old Apogee games (good things)

      Easter eggs are secrets that are almost impossible to find, and very few people know about at first. It's not something that should be hard to access, it's something that should be impossible to find unless you do EVER

    • Actually, the Kilrathi ship in Ultima VII is in the game also in plain sight, on the field east of Britain. It's worth finding, because the farmer on the field not only babbles more about the Kilrathi ship (pretty funny stuff), but also tells how to get the Hoe of Destruction, one of the most powerful weapons in the game.

      That easter egg wasn't quite as involved as the one in Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle. There's a "House of Wares" in, I think, woods in the north. Finding a key to it is a bit tricky,

      • Hoe of destruction..
        It's locked in a cabin right next to that farmer's house. The lock is not pickable nor can it be unlocked by magic. I don't think the farmer does tell of the way to find it. He just hints to it.
        The key is in a dead fish on the banks of the lake near Cove.
        In one of the 200 dead fishies..

        I'll check out the roof of the blacksmith though.. First time I hear about it, and I highly doubt it's true.
        I think I still have Exult [sourceforge.net] installed somewhere..
        • No, it's definitely true. I can confirm this, having just tested it in Exult.

          Make sure you have the "right" blacksmith. The one you want isn't the murder one where you start the game, nor is it his house, where you meet Spark. It's the "haunted" one with the damaged door (and the randomly moving chairs inside) in the South-West side of Trinsic. You need to use pretty much every crate in Trinsic to make a staircase, though. Once you get up, walk around the North side of the chimney, even though it looks like
        • Agreed, that blacksmith house is definitely true. After using it once, it became incredibly hard to resist outfitting my entire party with magic armor from that cheat room. It was also useful if the game glitched and I lost a quest item.
      • You can actually get to Claw Island in SI without cheating. From http://www.bootstrike.com/Ultima7si/Online/faq2.h t ml [bootstrike.com]

        Cat Isle (also called CLAW) has all the items you need to complete the game. To get to Cat Isle without cheating, you want to start in one of the tree gardens in Monitor. I believe it is approximately 4 or 5 houses west of Lucilla's pub. You need is 3 crates or something equivalent. The garden has a southern entrance and a few trees immediately to the west of the entrance. I believe the clo
    • Actually, I was just looking through the compressed files on my C&C cds the other day and found a folder called "Zounds", or something like that. Basically it's a guy impersonating a whole bunch of sound effects from the game. He's pretty good too :p

  • GTA San Andreas (Score:5, Interesting)

    by irn_bru ( 209849 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @04:42AM (#13377888)
    "There are no Easter Eggs Up Here - Go Away" sign on bridge in GTA San Andreas. Picture Here [gtagaming.com]

    Taking Easter Eggs to the post-modern level...

  • Pitfall (Score:3, Informative)

    by birder ( 61402 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @06:08AM (#13378099) Homepage
    One of my favorites was in Pitfall, The Mayan Adventure. Inside the game was the original Atari 2600 Pitfall.

    • Re:Pitfall (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Radius9 ( 588130 )
      I worked on that in 1993-1994. It was actually kind of funny, to put that in at the time, we couldn't get a hold of David Crane's source code to the original Pitfall (mind you, this was at Activision too, so I was a bit surprised by that). We had a tester use a VCR to tape himself playing through all 255 levels of the original Pitfall so that we could reproduce the levels. It was an incredible amount of work....

    • One of my favorites was in Pitfall, The Mayan Adventure. Inside the game was the original Atari 2600 Pitfall.


      You think that one was good? Play Pitfall II on either the Atari 5200 game system or Atari 400/800/XL/XE computer series. This version had an entire extra hidden level at the end of the game, every bit as big as the game itself was!

  • Undiscovered egg in River City Ransom NES (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Snaapy ( 753650 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @06:16AM (#13378132)
    In River City Ransom NES game (European version was called Street gangs) I accidentally discovered an easter egg which I think others haven't found. I had a lot of luck for this one... it was a night when I as playing this favorite NES title of mine and I was quiting the game after finishing it. I thought I'll still poke around with the emulator a little bit and ta daa: something very unexpected popped up.

    You need an emulator which is capable to showing "pattern memory". Pattern memory blocks of graphics loaded to NES memory, i.e. sprites, tiles and letters. Nesticle can do this.

    Finish the game. When end credits start to scroll on the screen, show Nesticle Pattern memory window. There are portraits of game main characters, Alex and Ryan, showing middle finger and playboy sign. This might definitely be no no for Nintendo games, but maybe developers thought that no one can read the video memory of a running game anyway at a certain moment of time...

    I posted instructions for the easter egg to some (dead) River City Ransom forum a long time ago, but the site seemed to be pretty dead and no one noticed them.

    Maybe some other NES games have similiar hidden video memory tricks like this one?
    • The very first game I ever played on an emulator was Sailormoon for the Famicom. In between levels, it displays the Sailor Senshi in poses. The emulator was a little buggy and had trouble rendering overlapping background layers, revealing that their clothes were a second layer over their naked (though, characteristically for anime, undetailed) bodies.

      I guess you could consider that an easter egg. Only the programmers would have known about it, unless your Famicom was busted in a very particular fashion.

  • Anyone remember She-Reptile?!

    Saw her/him/it a few times, if I remember right you had to get a flawless on everything, including reptile, then get to the double matches, and do the uppercut/moonshadow/whatever thing, and you'd get a different version of reptile!

    It was normally a glowing green Sonya, but I remember getting different glowing green characters there too, and they were hard as hell to beat.
  • My favorite egg, albeit the most useless I know, was the "room of death" in Super Mario 64. I found it one night while trying to get Luigi (not there at all...) I fired the cannon at the Princess's window above the castle entrance, just barely skimming the tree. After hitting the wall, I landed on a small roof. I kept running and jumping out of boredom and eventually fell inbetween the doors... you couldn't get out either, as going out one door would send you in via the other.
    • I believe you could back flip and ground pound to get out.
    • That room was a lot of fun, because you could do wall-kicks off of the wall for a while. You couldn't get out the same way you came in, but if you did a back-flip over the door you would successfully get out of the room.
    • actually you can get out, you can walk through the wall next to the door while inside the castle.
    • It's not a easter egg, it's a bug. Blame bad collision detection. (SM64 is after all, the first 3D platformer Nintendo made as far I know. Unless you happen to count that unreleased SFX2 Mario game...)

  • Not the first! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @09:06AM (#13379085)
    The list starts with the first egg in a game, the Warren Robinett room in Adventure.

    Actually, two Channel F games had easter eggs in them before Adventure. But since almost nobody had the Channel F, they weren't discovered for years.

    The Dot was definitely the first known easter egg, though. It was especially important that it was just easy enough to find (if you noticed the screen flickering when it shouldn't have been) that it could be found without disassembling the game code.

  • Hidden message in Duke Nuke 'Em (Score:3, Informative)

    by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @09:21AM (#13379203) Homepage Journal
    I remember one from DNE (yes, the original version that actually existed) where you fight in a canyon area. At one point, you have to avoid a minimizing energy blast that is sent every five seconds or so from across the canyon to your position.

    If you activate the god and fly cheats and fly to the opening where those blasts were coming from, you see a message saying the equivalent of "You're not supposed to be here" on the wall of the chamber.
    • Duke was full of such stuff. There's Indiana Jones nailed to a wall in one of the canyon levels, a reference to OJ Simpson, a D00Med marine and whatnot. Oh, and let's not forget the "studio where they filmed the lunar landings", complete with pint-size aliens and a replica of the Eagle module (or am I mixing up my games?).
      • You're right, but I don't know that I'd refer to them as easter eggs since they were all pretty obvious or barely hidden in the level but without the need for cheating. The O.J. Simpson ("Innocent?" "Guilty!") statement was there just by turning around when the game starts. The statement about "you're not supposed to be here" could only be seen by using the cheats. There was no possible way to get there without the cheats, unlike all of the other refrences that you mention.

        Not trying to be pedantic.

  • Marathon Trilogy and Bungie in general (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrHen ( 847144 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @10:14AM (#13379657) Homepage
    The Marathon Trilogy was loaded with easter eggs, the most clever being hex codes for icons and an entirely new net-level hidden within terminals.

    Bungie tends to love its easter eggs as the Webmaster had people running around trying to find a "Hi Ben" egg in Halo 2 (not to mention the skulls...)

    My favourite tradition of Bungie's, however, is they stick acronyms on the bottoms of their game packages that fill out to complete phrases that mean something special to the Bungie team.
    • I know of another Halo 2 egg - it's a bit of a PITA, but well worth it. In the Earth level, just after you drive the tank over the bridge, you have to make a banshee follow you through the tunnel and out into the next open area. You cannot board the banshee before you enter the tunnel, because you won't be able to fly in, and you can't board it while in the tunnel because it will explode. Also, you can't let the banshee stray too far from you or it will disappear when you move through a loading zone.

      I

  • What, no Dopefish? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LordJezo ( 596587 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @10:26AM (#13379773)
    How can it be that no one has mentioned The Dopefish [wikipedia.org]?
  • They mention in tfa the one where if you poke characters repeatedly in the game they get increasingly agitated (which they for some reason fail to mention persisted in other Blizzard games such as Starcraft for some reason), but they didn't mention the exploding sheep easter egg? If you poked the critters that wandered around on the levels eventually they'd moan something ("Baaramyou"?)and explode. Similar exploding critters also in Starcraft. Anyway, the list is obviously incomplete, but I'm not sure what

  • Warcraft "Poke" easter egg (Score:3, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @10:47AM (#13380005) Homepage Journal
    The article mentions that you can poke people to say funny things in Warcraft. I first experienced this in the demo version of the game. If you kept poking people, they'd say "Okay, that's enough. It's time for you to go buy the game. Go buy game now!"

    • Blizzard threw that "poking" easter egg in wherever they could. My favourite that I found (that I never saw documented anywhere) was in the warcraft II set-up executable.
      After you set up your soundcard settings, you could click the 'test' button and a voice said "Your sound card works perfectly". Click it a few more times and it changes to "Enjoying yourself?". Eventually it said "It doesn't get any better than this".

      By the way, I just found this (and all other warcraft quotes) documented here: http:/ [wikiquote.org]
    • It's also in Starcraft and Warcraft 3, kind of a long running gag...

      I even think you can do this in Diablo? I think one of the characters will say something if you keep bugging them...
  • ID, yes ID, back when they were under Apogee's label.

    Obviously they have anything in Doom and Doom 2, quake and quake 2, but they also made a few games before that that was quite popular (commander Keen, and others)

    I mean considering that at the begining of Keen you first see in the upper left ID in the first level of the first game if I remember right, which puzzled me for YEARS until I realized that's them.

    Of course Apogee themselves made Duke Nukem with it's plethora of Easter Eggs.

    I don't know if any of

  • SMB1 Minus Worlds!!! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BTWR ( 540147 ) <americangibor3 AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @11:59AM (#13380790) Homepage Journal
    How can no one mention the hidden "minus world" in Super mario Bros?

    For those who don't know, it was an endless "water world" hidden and accessible through level 1-2.

  • I am very surprised that Fallout 2 did get a single mention. This game has easter eggs at every corner. Even a literal easter egg that you can pick up. You can have Mike the "Masticator" bite your ear off (-1 CH). You can get the Monty Python "Holy Handgrenade". You even can have a random encounter with an exploded whale carcass with a potted flower. I seriously recommend this game to anybody.
    • Yes, you can find the Magic 8 Ball in the pool table in Bishop's House.

      In addition to the usual snide responses, it also tells you useful information for key plot points, plus where to get goodies.

      But, there are lots of other fun easter eggs in Fallout 2...all you need is excellent luck and high outdoorsman skill to encounter them.
  • > Robinett was partially motivated by the fact that, at
    > the time, designers weren't given credit for their games."

    And now they are?

  • Drunken Mudcrab merchant in Morrowind (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In The Elder Scrolls 3:Morrowind, a common player complaint is that the NPC merchants don't have enough money to buy high end loot from players. The wealthiest merchant in the game is a talking crab on a tiny little island far away from any civilization. It has the most money for purchasing your loot and sells nothing but booze.
  • There was a neat timing-based easter egg in Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 2) where you could find the psychorabbit Max from 'Sam and Max Hit the Road'. He carried an imperial blaster and if you pushed him out of the special room he would even fire at enemies for you. He was pretty immobile however.

    I don't recall the name of the level but it was the one with the canals, bridges, houses and market stalls.
  • In the original Daytona racing game (for the Sega Saturn), I don't remember exactly what you had to do, but you could acquire a new car which was actually a horse.

    It was pretty fast, and it could run on the grass just as fast as on the road (pefect for cutting corners :)).

    When selecting the horse, you could choose manual or automatic transmission, just like any other car. I thought it was hilarious.

  • Here's an Easter Egg I haven't been able to find any information on anywhere yet. I used to play Might & Magic III (Dos version) a lot, but never was able to finish it because at one point or another my save game always got corrupted for some reason.

    The consequence of this corruption was that when I wandered around outside Fountainhead (the first city in the game, where you start), my party got randomly hit by electricity, poison, fire etc, even though the surroundings look normal. No dungeon or tow

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