Article published April 12, 2009
A different kind of Easter egg
While you hunt for candy today, try to find the treats hidden in video games, DVDs
By KIRK BAIRD
BLADE STAFF WRITER
As a teen, David Weller heard the rumors about the ability to create special creatures in the popular PlayStation simulation game Monster Rancher in which players breed and raise a beastie of their own.
All it took to unlock the hidden monster was a music CD, and if the game recognized the band - and, more importantly, the Monster Rancher's designers liked the band - the gamer would be rewarded with a more powerful monster.
Weller spent hours seeing the effect his own CD collection, and those of his friends, had in Monster Rancher. Then he went online and learned about specific CDs that created new characters.
"I don't like Nirvana," said the now-24-year-old Toledo resident, "but I paid $5 for the CD just to get that awesome monster. That was definitely one of the coolest things, finding the good CDs."
Weller found an Easter egg in the game, a hidden feature that provided a special reward after discovery, just as with the traditional eggs children hunt for this morning.
The treasure in multimedia form can be traced back three decades to the Atari 2600. A game programmer named Warren Robinett was creating the first graphical action-adventure game, Adventure. Game programming in 1979 was a relatively new vocation, and the job required long hours of work for little pay. Robinett felt he deserved recognition for his efforts, so he created a special room in Adventure in which "Created by Warren Robinett" can be viewed. The room wasn't easily accessible - to prevent his employers from discovering it - so the area could only be found through diligence and exploration by the player, including locating a tiny, near-invisible gray dot hidden in a maze.
A few determined gamers found the dot and the room with Robinett's name, and word soon spread about Adventure's hidden feature.
It wasn't long before other programmers began to tuck away their names, messages, or other hidden content in games and software programs to entice and reward users.
The digital era has been a boon to the Easter egg concept, as bands began placing "hidden" songs on the end of CDs that didn't appear on the track listing, and writers, directors, animators, and even special effects teams began to insert images or pop culture references in their work.
Pause just about any frame of a Simpsons episode and you're bound to see something on the screen that's a reference to something or a joke within a joke. Also, the bonus content of DVDs typically has at least one Easter egg, usually found by pressing buttons on a remote control in a specific sequence.
For example, while watching the bonus disc from the DVD box set of the original Star Wars films, enter 1-1, then 3, then 8 for a four-minute-plus collection of bloopers from the trilogy.
"DVDs have been doing it since the beginning," said David Wolf, creator of the Web site Easter Egg Archive, eeggs.com, which tracks hidden content in many forms of mass media. "Part of the selling point of DVDs are their 'extras.' If anything, the Easter eggs are designed right in as part of the product, and sometimes aren't even truly hidden. They even advertise their Easter eggs sometimes."
The Easter eggs, though, can occasionally be pretty rotten. "Hot Coffee," perhaps the most infamous Easter egg, was found in 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas after a player discovered and unlocked the hidden programming. Hot Coffee was a mini game that allowed the player to watch and control the game's main character having sex with his girlfriends. The subsequent political outcry resulted in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas being re-rated for adults only; however, a game patch that disabled the Hot Coffee Easter egg was created, and an updated version of GTA: SA was released with the mini game removed.
"Developers have to be careful what they put in games. People are smart and they'll tear apart your game," said Andrew Reiner, executive editor at Game Informer magazine.
Still, he said, the tendency is for most game makers and programmers to reward players who spend hours playing a title.
Reiner said while recently interviewing Tim Schafer, designer of the upcoming Brutal Legend, the game developer said he put Easter eggs into the game because "it gives people a reason to explore the world [he] took years to create.
"It's a nice payoff if you do take the time," Reiner added.
Bryan Rickard, a 19-year-old Sylvania resident, said he often finds the payoff not worth the effort, especially for DVD Easter eggs.
"Ninety percent of the time it's not anything cool," he said. "It's usually some creature art from Lord of the Rings that I didn't want to see. But if it's an interview or bloopers, I'll check it out. I like the outtakes and the deleted scenes."
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