warren robinett created the first video game easter egg.
warren robinett created the first video game easter egg.
who created the first video game easter egg?
warren robinett
"adventure" was conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 text adventure "colossal cave adventure". it took warren robinett approximately one year to design and code the game, during which time he had to overcome a variety of technical limitations in the atari 2600 console hardware, as well as difficulties with management within atari. in this game, he introduced the first widely known video game easter egg: a secret room containing text crediting himself for the game's creation.
adventure (atari 2600)
in addition to robinett's name appearing in "adventure" (1979), there are many other instances where the easter egg idea has been implemented. the first text adventure game, "colossal cave adventure" (1976), from which "adventure" was fashioned, included several secret words. one of these was "xyzzy", a command which enabled the player to move between two points in the game world. in 2004, an easter egg displaying programmer bradley reid-selth's surname was found in "video whizball" (1978), a game for the fairchild channel f system. according to research by ed fries, the first known easter egg in an arcade game was in "starship 1" (1977), programmed by ron milner. by triggering the cabinet's controls in the right order, the player could get the message "hi ron!" to appear on the screen. fries described it as "the earliest arcade game yet known that clearly meets the definition of an easter egg". the existence of this easter egg wasn't published until 2017, leading fries to suggest that, as more than one hundred arcade games predate "starship 1", earlier easter eggs may still be undiscovered. fries noted that some atari arcade cabinets were resold under the kee games label and included changes to the hardware that would make the game appear different from the atari version. "anti-aircraft ii" (1975) included a means to modify the circuit board to make the airplanes in the game appear as alien ufos. fries surmised that this feature may have been intended for a kee games release. for this reason, and because it required a hardware modification, fries questioned whether it met the definition of an easter egg.
easter egg (media)