Since the earliest days of video games and software, the game designers and programmers have slipped hidden messages and images into the games, must like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven King do when they make cameo appearances in their films without being included on the cast list. At other times they spent a lot more time playing with the code or even putting whole games in.
In Office '97 there was a whole flight simulator game hidden in Excel and Word contained a pinball game. if you want to win Solitaire in Windows XP, just press press Alt+⇧ Shift+2 at the same time.
Asking Google Maps for walking directions from The Shire to Mordor produces "One does not simply walk into Mordor.", a warning that replicates a line from The Lord of the Rings.
Google search has also had a few others, such as typing in 'do a barrel roll' made the whole screen rotate 360 degrees. 'Make it snow' produced virtual snowflakes on the screen.
The people responsible sometimes just wanted to give the users something to do or discover by accident as most of these were not documented but discovered by accident. At other times they wanted to ensure that they are acknowledged as having played a part in the game development, or made political or social statements. Some programmers wrote their names in graffiti on the background, or gave complete new characters for you to play with.
Unfortunately the easter eggs nowadays are security risk as the big players in the industry cannot have rogue code floating around in their programs anymore. But as long as there are programmers with an agenda, even if it is just to make you laugh, we may still discover new and exciting hidden treasures.
No comments:
Post a Comment