Easter Egg

In computer software and media, an easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature deliberately concealed within a work such as a computer program, video game, or DVD or Blu-ray menu screen.¹³ The term evokes the traditional Easter egg hunt: an egg dyed or painted for decoration, or an egg-shaped confection given as a springtime gift, that children search out.¹⁴¹⁵ In its digital sense the word describes any extra feature — a message, an image, or a video — hidden in a program and revealed only through an obscure sequence of keystrokes, clicks, or actions.¹⁴

The defining quality of a software easter egg is that it is a secret: it is never obvious or out in the open, but must be worked for through some deliberate or hidden action.¹³ This distinguishes it from a mere reference, such as a recognizable character glimpsed in the background of a scene, which is placed to be noticed rather than sought out.¹³ A reference is something a viewer sees because it is meant to be there, requiring no work beyond noticing it; an easter egg, by contrast, is something the audience must search for or puzzle through to uncover.¹³

The first video-game easter egg

The convention traces to the 1979 Atari? VCS 2600 game Adventure, programmed by Warren Robinett?.¹⁴¹³ Atari did not credit its programmers individually at the time, so Robinett concealed the words “Created by Warren Robinett” inside a secret room reached by carrying a single gray one-pixel dot, invisible against a gray background, across a barrier that it opened like a key.¹³¹⁴ Reaching the hidden credit was demanding: a player either had to know of the invisible pixel already or be curious enough to try every possibility to find the secret room.¹³

Robinett told no one about the hidden credit, but a dedicated teenaged player discovered it within a year of the game’s release and wrote to Atari about his find.¹⁴ Because correcting the pixel would have cost more than $10,000, Atari executives chose to leave it in.¹⁴ In a 2003 interview, Robinett recounted that Steve Wright, an Atari manager, admired the idea of hidden surprises because they reminded him of “waking up on Easter morning and hunting for Easter eggs” — and so the hidden features came to be called easter eggs.¹⁴

Later forms

A related type of gaming easter egg is the cheat code, the best known being the Konami Code, a fixed sequence of arrow keys and letters that functions as a cheat.¹⁴ It first appeared in 1986 in the Konami game Gradius, where the programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto, finding the game too difficult to play through during testing, created the code to grant the player extra power-ups.¹⁴

Easter eggs spread from games into other media, including DVD extras and heavily trafficked websites.¹⁴ Google has embedded many such surprises: searching for “askew” tilts the results, and asking for the “number of horns on a unicorn” opens the calculator to do the arithmetic.¹⁴ Android devices likewise hide an easter egg in the About section of each version of the operating system, ranging from strange illustrations to small and sometimes frustratingly difficult games.¹⁴ The word entered general usage as a term of the 1980s, keeping the search-and-discovery playfulness of the springtime hunt going year-round inside software.¹⁴

The Easter egg custom

The software sense borrows its name from the decorated egg long associated with the Christian festival of Easter, which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ.¹⁴ Painted eggs have been linked to the celebration since about the 1200s, and the term for the dyed or hollowed egg itself began appearing in the 1500s and 1600s.¹⁴ Britannica dates the first instance of painted Easter eggs to the 13th century.¹⁷ Because eating eggs was originally prohibited during the 40-day fast of Lent? — a period of penitence beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending on Easter Sunday — the egg became a food to be decorated and eaten at the end of the fast.¹⁴¹⁶¹⁸

Early Christians treated the egg as a symbol of the empty tomb of Jesus, the sealed shell standing for the tomb and the cracking open for the resurrection.¹⁶ In early Orthodox churches, priests blessed Easter eggs and distributed them to the congregation at the close of the Paschal vigil, the service held on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.¹⁶ The custom of dyeing eggs is said to have begun with the early Christians of Mesopotamia, who colored them a single shade of red to represent the blood of Christ shed on the cross, a practice that spread through the Eastern Orthodox churches before reaching Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe.¹⁶¹⁷ Early Christian missionaries later expanded the palette, assigning yellow to the resurrection and blue to love, and painted biblical scenes directly onto eggs as a teaching tool.¹⁶¹⁷

Not all authorities accept a purely Christian origin. Several sources hold that eggs carried symbolic meaning in pre-Christian cultures as tokens of fertility and new life, and that these customs were assimilated into Christian practice over the early centuries of the church.¹⁷¹⁸ Some historians trace the egg to an Anglo-Saxon spring festival honoring the goddess Eostre, or Ostara, whose name is connected to the words for Easter in Germanic languages, and note that eggs were eaten and possibly buried to encourage fertility at the vernal equinox.¹⁷¹⁸ Decorated ostrich eggs estimated to be up to 5,000 years old have been found in the tombs of ancient Sumerians and Egyptians.²⁰ The historian Peter Gainsford, writing on the Kiwi Hellenist blog, argues that of the Easter Rabbit, the hot cross bun, and the Easter egg, only one has any reasonable chance of a pagan origin, and cautions against tracing links to ancient imagery for which no connecting evidence survives.⁷

The custom of the Easter egg hunt — from which the digital term takes its imagery — is often traced to Germany around the 1500s.¹⁴ One tradition credits Martin Luther, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, in whose circle men hid eggs for women and children to find, the discovery meant to mirror the joy of the women who found the tomb empty on Easter morning.¹⁶¹⁷ Missionaries are also said to have hidden painted eggs so that children could retell the Gospel scene depicted on each one they found, making the earliest hunts a form of interactive Bible lesson.¹⁶

A separate line of descent runs through the Pennsylvania Dutch of the 1700s, who told of a hare called “Oschter Haws” that laid eggs in the grass for children to gather from nests they had built — a figure that became the Easter Bunny.¹⁷¹⁹ The earliest attestation of the Easter Rabbit itself comes from a 1682 account by Georg Franck von Franckenau of Easter egg traditions in central Germany, in which the eggs were called di Hasen-Eier because folklore held that der Oster-Hase hid them in the grass and bushes for children to find.⁷ Regional variants of the egg-bringing figure abounded: an Easter Fox in northern Germany, an Easter Stork in Franconia, an Easter Cuckoo in Switzerland, an Easter Chicken in the Tirol, and an Easter Rooster in Schleswig-Holstein.⁷

The custom persists in many national forms. The White House hosts an annual Easter Egg Roll, first held in 1878 under Rutherford B. Hayes, in which children roll hard-boiled eggs across the lawn in an act read as a reenactment of the stone rolling away from Christ’s tomb.¹⁶²⁰ In Ukraine, intricately patterned eggs called pysanky, from the word “to write,” are made by a wax-resist method and worked with crosses, fish, wheat, and other Christian imagery.¹⁶ Beginning in 1885, the House of Fabergé crafted jewel-encrusted eggs for Russian nobility.²⁰ The chocolate Easter egg, by contrast, is a comparatively recent development, becoming part of European celebrations around the early 19th century.¹⁸²⁰