Today is Easter Sunday – a religious occasion for some, a celebration of new life for others, but almost universally celebrated with the gorging of chocolate. A common fixture of Easter Sunday for many children is the Easter Egg Hunt, a concept which stretches over into the world of video games, where instead of chocolatey goodness, game developers hide little secrets, amusing anecdotes and references to past products.

This week, The Warp Pipe will look at a couple of our favourite video game Easter Eggs.

The Easter Egg Hunt

Video game Easter Eggs can be traced back to the days of the first cartridge based system, the Fairchild Channel-F, but the most popular early hidden secret (often mistaken for the first) is found in Adventure for the Atari 2600. In a day where the company refused to give programmer/designers any form of credit for their products, Warren Robinette hid a secret room deep within the game’s recesses with the note “Created by Warren Robinette”. As time has gone on, Easter Eggs have become more and more commonplace in video games, essentially to the point where games are expected to include them, and communication on the Internet allows them to be found much easier than in the earlier days of gaming. For your enjoyment on this lazy Sunday, I’ve put brought together a few of my favourite gaming Easter Eggs.

Created by Tom Hall in 1991, the Dopefish is perhaps the most prolific game industry in-joke and Easter Egg. The Dopefish is a large green fish with buck teeth, described in its original appearance in Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle as the second dumbest creature in the universe. Dopefish appears in close to 30 games, including Quake, SiN, Max Payne, Warcraft 3 and Psychonauts. Much like Dopefish among id/Apogee games, “hyperkinetic rabbity thing” Max had a tendency to show up as a gag in LucasArts games (before they went south). Max has shown up in various maps and background features in games such as Star Wars: Dark Forces, The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, and in a more active capacity as a hidden enemy in Jedi Knight and as an ornament on a hidden vehicle in Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike. One could dedicate an entire column to the references, gags and Easter Eggs in Metal Gear games, but one particular one that stands out is the Guy Savage/Nightmare hidden game that you can trigger by loading a save file at the point where Snake is being held after infiltrating Groznyj Grad. During the game, the player controls a character who wields twin blades and must slash up a near-endless army of zombies. An amusing diversion, it’s often been rumoured that Guy Savage was to be a full blown project at Kojima Productions, headed up by creator Shuyo Murata (co-director of MGS3 and 4). Rumours persisted among the Diablo community of a cow level which would open up if one clicked on a cow a specific number of times. While it was a hoax, Blizzard took note of how widespread the rumour became, and added a secret cow level to Diablo II. To access the Secret Cow Level, one must have defeated Baal and possess a Horadric Cube, a Tome of Town Port, and the leg of that cheeky little git Wirt. Just be wary that there is a heck of a lot of cows there. In the early days of disc-based games, many games would have a warning message if players put the disc into a CD player (many earlier games used Redbook Audio, which would allow you to listen to the soundtrack by popping the game disc in a regular player). Normally this message would be fairly standard, but often-times developers would record the message in theme with the game. A notable one is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where Alucard will tell you not to play the first track on a CD player, before treating you to a remix of the Dracula’s Castle theme. Not all Easter Eggs are software based. Owners of the original Sega Master System model can gain access to a simple maze game (often referred to as Snail Maze) by holding Up and buttons 1 and 2 without a cartridge inserted. GameCube owners can change the G Cube start up tone by holding the Z button during boot. There’s one tone for a single player holding the button, and another if it is done by four players. Ratchet & Clank 2: Locked and Loaded and Ratchet and Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal each featured a secret location called the Insomniac Museum, which contained all sorts of neat stuff which didn’t make it into the final product. The museum is mapped out exactly like the Insomniac offices. One can only access the museum between the hours of 3 and 4AM if they have achieved 100% completion. Of course, you can tinker with the internal clock of the PS2, but that’s just naughty. As mentioned earlier, normally it’s Kojima Productions who does the homage-paying in video games, but Bethesda included a nod to the Japanese developer’s cult-classic Snatcher in Fallout 3. In a Megaton quest where one must find a mine in a minefield, you’ll stumble upon a small cluster of houses. In one of these houses you’ll find the decapitated body of a man named Gibson. Gillian Seed finds the body of fellow JUNKER agent Jean Jack Gibson in the same shape at the start of Snatcher. If you jump into the memory card screen on the PlayStation 2, you’ll notice that every game has its own unique icon. Some of these icons actually change when you’re prompted to confirm whether you want to delete game data – some little character icons will start to cry, while others will express anger. Many developers rely on internal clocks to reveal Easter Eggs in their games. Rise of the Triad has about a half a dozen holiday screens, including the crew wearing Christmas hats for a few days over the Holiday Season, Animal Crossing has a number of holidays tied to real world events, and something always happens on a holiday in World of Warcraft.		Dopefish lives!
		Anyone for steak?
		Don’t lose your head
		Deck the halls with lots of giblets