The tradition of Easter egg hunts, where chocolate and other treats are hidden for children to seek out, is at least in part extremely ancient. Eggs were a pre-Christian symbol of rebirth and fertility across much of the world, and some authors trace back the tradition of children searching for hidden eggs at least to ancient Sumer—and subsequently to the worship of the Teutonic goddess Eostre, after whom the festival of Easter is named, and whose rites involved both eggs and rabbits.
Others note the beginning of the official White House Easter Egg Roll in 1878 (which put the stamp of state patronage on a popular preexisting tradition) as a pivotal moment in promoting modern egg-related Easter activities.145 When it comes to computing, however, 1979 is the year usually given for the arrival of quite another sense of “Easter egg.”
This was the year in which the video game Adventure appeared for the Atari 2600 console—one of the first ever “action adventure” games, in which players explored a fantasy world of castles and catacombs (i.e., different-colored blocks and blobs) while attempting to gather magical items. In those days, game designers didn’t tend to get credited for their work, so Adventure’s creator, Joseph Warren Robinett, built into the game a secret extra task.
If players picked up a small, near-invisible object and brought it to a particular place in the game, they became able to walk through a normally solid wall and access a hidden area in which the words “Created by Warren Robinett” were spelled out vertically. When the secret content was discovered after the game’s release, Atari dubbed it an “Easter egg” in honor of the tradition of searching for hidden goodies.146
The practice of building hidden details and special messages into products was, of course, nothing new: authors, broadcasters, film makers, and artists had long been including references, details, and cameos that only a select audience would “get.” The interactive nature of software, however, meant that something slightly different was now going on. As the very nature of a game like Adventure suggested, a software Easter egg was more like a hidden place or experience than merely a reference—something akin to an Easter egg physically hidden in a house or garden.
It’s also a term, and a tradition, that has achieved enormously widespread use in the software field since 1979, with perhaps the most populous category of contemporary Easter egg consisting of amusing responses to selected user actions: a programming trick that’s come to be regarded as a useful way of making software seem more “human” and appealing.
Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant, Siri, boasts a well-scripted range of Easter egg responses to questions ranging from “I love you” (Answer: “I hope you don’t say that to all the cell phones”) and “Will you marry me?” (“My EULA [End User License Agreement] does not cover marriage. Apologies.”) to “What’s the meaning of life?” (“Forty-two.”). Similarly, Google’s use of “doodles” to mark important anniversaries—where the logo on its homepage is turned into an appropriate tribute, such as the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth—is a kind of Easter egg, and often involves further hidden features (the Turing doodle, for example, functions as a “live action Turing Machine with twelve interactive programming puzzles”).147
Few modern Easter eggs, though, can compete for sheer oddity with a bonus feature coded within the 1995 edition of Microsoft’s spreadsheet program Excel: a three-dimensional video game called “Hall of tortured souls” accessed by executing a particular button combination in row 95 of a blank spreadsheet. The game itself contained hidden rooms and commands, as well as bizarre pictures on its virtual walls of staff at Microsoft: a hidden surprise that even the wildest imagination might not have expected.148