In this final Easter egg themed post, I’ll explore the world of the computer Easter Egg.
The world of IT and software development has embraced the concept of the Easter egg with open arms and many examples exist, just waiting for people to find them.
Some of them are fun games, others are messages, whilst others are just plain odd…
First up, squarely sitting in the odd category is the Photoshop Banana toolbar icon.
In Adobe Photohop, if you choose the Edit – Toolbar option and then hold Shift whilst you click Done, the edit toolbar option on the tools menu turns into a banana.
Another odd Photoshop Easter Egg is the Coffee/Toast colour theme picker
To access this egg, open the Preferences – Interface toolbox and whilst holding CRTL+ALT, click on one of the colour theme options. This will turn the colour pickers into images of toast in various levels of toasty-ness.
Once you have your toast, you need a cup of coffee right? To change the Toast for coffee, hold SHIFT+CTRL and once again, click one of the colour picker options.
Another odd Photoshop egg is the appearance of a cute monkey
To access this egg, when editing an image, choose Window – Layer comps, create a new layer comp and name it Layer Monkey 0. Instead of the usual eye icon, you will now have a little money looking back at you.
Fun times in Redmond
Microsoft Office used to be so much fun – even if you ignore Clippy, the developers of office 97 certainly had a sense of fun…
One of the most well known eggs appeared in Microsoft Excel 97. By entering a short combination of commands, you could launch a very odd and almost uncontrollable flight simulator.
There was a slightly more controllable game hidden away in Word 97 – Pinball.
To access this egg, you had to type the word “Blue” into a new document, then formatted it with a blue font colour. Once the text was blue, you added a space after the text and then clicked the Help – About Microsoft Word menu option.
In the subsequent pop-up, if you held CTRL+SHIFTand then clicked the Word icon, the game appeared.
It’s not just desktop applications that feature eggs in the world of computers though. Websites and online services have also got in on the act.
The IMDb entry for the film This is Spinal Tap is the only entry that ranks a film out of 11 instead of 10 – a reference to Nigel Tufnel’s amplifier.
Google is well known for having multiple Easter eggs.
If you are unfortunate enough to lose your Internet connection, Google has a nice offline game to play while you wait for the data faries to fix the problem.
Opening the Chrome browser, you will be presented with a neat little game whereby you control a tiny T-Rex and have to avoid obstacles on your way to getting the high score.
Google also hide eggs in other places – some are in the daily Google Doodle, whilst others are activated by typing certain words and phrases in the Google search bar.
A full list of the google Easter eggs can be viewed on Wikipedia, but one of the most well-known ones is “do a barrel roll” – If these words are typed into the search bar, the entire screen flips around.
A more recent Google Easter egg is the appearance of Groku from the Disney+ show The Mandalorian when you type baby yoda
Another place for Google Eggs is the results page itself. When certain search terms are typed, Google displays appropriate responses in the results.
For example, searching for WWII code breaking station Bletchley Park results in an encoded version of the location appearing which then decodes itself.
Google also have some device specific Easter Eggs too. On a mobile device, if you search for bubble level, you get an interactive spirit level which moves as you tilt your device. Safe to say that this doesn’t work on a PC!
Another device specific Google Egg is one just for Android users.
If you locate the version number of your Android device in your settings and tap on the version number multiple times, you will get a cupcake clock appear.
Internet Eggs
Network engineers have also got in on the act too by hiding Easter Eggs on the Internet.
Another contender for the odd category is the trace route command for the domain bad.horse
This trace route displays the lyrics to the song bad horse which is a song from the 2008 musical comedy-drama miniseries Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which was produced exclusively for Internet distribution.
Sadly no longer available, there used to be another cool trace route – one which generated the opening text to Star Wars Episode IV: A new hope.
Games
Whilst there may be many, many Easter eggs hidden across the range of IT and computer related systems, no platform has embraced the concept of hidden eggs than that of the PC / Console game.
The sheer number of Easter Eggs hidden in the millions of games that have been released on different platforms over the last 40 or so years is simply amazing, and a blog post like this really cannot do justice to the vast array of Eggs available.
One Egg which must be written about though is quite possibly the most well known hidden game egg of all is the Konami code, or Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A
This code is a cheat code which appears in many games from legendary game producer Konami and was first seen when the 1986 game Gradius was converted to the NES console under the title Contra.
When entered into the game via the game pad, the player magically received 30 lives to enable them to have a better chance of completing the game.
The Conti code has since become a part of game lore and appears in many other games and even some more unusual places.
Some games which feature the Conti code are:
- Fortnite Battle Royale
- Little Big Planet 2
- Just dance 3
- BioShock Infinate
Outside of games, the code has made appearances in other places, including:
- The Opera browser
- Netflix
- Amazon Alexa devices
- Apple’s Siri voice assistant
- The 2016 Marks & Spencer Christmas website
- The WWF-UK homepage
Final thoughts
Easter Eggs, whether they be of the chocolate kind, or the ones found in music, movies, or IT are a always a delight when you find them.
Keep hunting for them, there are plenty to go round!