Easter Egg - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Easter Eggs

...No. Nice try, though.

You are a stupid, square-headed bald git, aren't you? And you, I'm pointing at you, I'm pointing at you, but I'm not actually addressing you. I'm addressing the one prat in the whole country who's bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I'm saying. What a poor, sad life he's got!

— Red Dwarf, "Backwards"

Easter Eggs are little bits of stuff programmers left behind in the game. They're secrets, intended to tickle the fancy of those who discover them. Programs far too numerous to mention have included Easter eggs — everything from Microsoft Office to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Sadly, Microsoft has disallowed Easter Eggs entirely as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative, under the simple rationale that a user should be able to trust that the computer he's using is reliable and reasonably error-free.

Originally, Easter Eggs were inserted by programmers for companies whose policy forbid them from receiving individual credit for their work. The earliest Easter Eggs were mostly credits pages, possibly to allow the programmers themselves to prove authorship to friends. For security reasons (and concerns about malicious programmers inserting undocumented and destructive code), most companies don't allow Easter Eggs to appear in their software anymore, but as individual programmers now receive full credit for their work, it's a moot point.

Easter Eggs aren't just found in games anymore: the term is also used for a variety of hidden content, such as unadvertised DVD Bonus Content.

An article on why Easter Eggs exist (focusing on Magic The Gathering, but applicable to all games) is available here

For time-sensitive Easter Eggs, see Christmas Mode. Compare Bilingual Bonus and Freeze Frame Bonus.

Examples:

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Video Games

Action-Adventure

Ur Example: The original Easter Egg in a video game was Warren Robinett's famous hidden signature room in the Adventure cartridge for the Atari 2600. By combining several unlikely objects (one hidden deep in a maze of the same color), one could move though a previously impenetrable barrier, where the text "Created by Warren Robinett" could be found. This was in an era when Atari refused to put the names of game creators on any of its game packaging, and it neatly took up the leftover memory on the 4K ROM comprising the cartridge.
- An Atari executive coined the term when he compared finding the hidden room to "hunting for Easter eggs". While Atari hired a programmer to find where Robinett's name was in the code, they let it slide; Robinett later asked the programmer what he would have done if told to delete the code, and was told that he would have switched it to "Replaced by (programmer's name)".
The Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past contains one of the most unusual Easter eggs in gaming history. Nintendo Power magazine held a contest and the winner, Chris Houlihan, had a secret room named in his honor placed in the game. "The Chris Houlihan Room" is filled with Rupees (the monetary unit of the game) and a small plaque identifying it. Many players are still unaware of its existance, due to the difficulty it takes to get there: outside of cheating, it can only be accessed if the game fails to load an area.
One of the doors in a hallway on Kamino in Lego Star Wars leads to a room where there is a puzzle to be completed. If you solve the puzzle, the floor becomes a disco and a disco version of the Star Wars theme plays.
- The Lego games in general are filled with Easter Eggs, most of them necessary for One Hundred Percent Completion. Lego Indiana Jones even has several Star Wars characters hidden in various levels.

Adventure

Riven: The Sequel To Myst had a series of "Spyder's riddles" on its website (and those of the associated companies), leading to the discovery of the five Easter Eggs in that game. (By far the best is the one where the actor playing Gehn bursts into song. He's actually quite good.)
The Quest For Glory series is one huge collection of Easter Eggs.
Back in the days when Lucas Arts still made some of the best adventure games on the planet, they had Steve Purcell's Sam And Max as mascots. Max has appeared in some form or other in every single adventure game they ever made, usually as the design of a room, or as graffitti on a wall. Look for a oval with two rabbit ears on it — that's Max.
- Futhermore: Dying counts as an Easter Egg in Lucas Arts games because it is almost impossible to do so. But when it does happen, it frequently happens as Crowning Moment Of Funny.
- In Abraham Lincoln Must Die!, Max becomes President and has the power to change the date. Try changing it to Easter and checking the golf hole. You find a nice lampshade and an achievement for the 360 version.
A lesser known Sierra game, Shivers, involves the player traversing a deserted museum to capture elemental monsters that killed three people in the past. As the museum is dedicated to the "strange and unusual", and the player is constantly afraid of bumping into these monsters, it's surprising that the Easter eggs are the scariest parts of the game. There are funny eggs, but also disembodied shadows and glowing red eyes in cramped, dark spaces. Their appearances are randomised, and all the more pants-wetting.
Other Sierra games contained numerous eggs as well. One in Kings Quest II was actually an advertisment for the then-new Space Quest series.
- Another involved a note pinned to the back of a tree where you wouldn't be expected to go to read a note. A third involved the Batmobile occasionally coming out of Hagatha's cave instead of Hagatha. If you type in "LOOK BATMAN" the message responding to you will say, "He looks lost. I don't think he belongs in this game." And there are easter eggs galore in the other KQ games. I believe sierraplanet.com has pretty complete lists.
- And then some depend on the player doing silly stuff. (see 1:42 into the video)
Uru has a secret egg quest which starts out in a room with a giant Easter egg floating in the center of it, and ends with you being allowed to drive a Zamboni around outside the starting area.
The recent Interactive Fiction offerings (created by the fandom) have some kind of response to the command XYZZY available in the original Adventure game.
- Not just in recent interactive fiction, either — "xyzzy" has been a secret command or veiled reference in hundreds of programs (games and otherwise) over the decades since Colossal Cavern first appeared.

Eastern RPG

Persona3 has some unusual Easter Eggs found when using a Game Shark or other devices. Most notably, it has Mitsuru or Fuuka scolding you for cheating — using several differently lines, and fully voiced, too boot.
The first four .hack games came with DVDs detailing what happened in the real world during the events of the game. Watching these with the subtitles on would reveal area keywords for the game where you could find rare items.

Fighting Game

The now freeware DOS fighter Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport allows you to beat up Barney if you fiddle around with the config files. And yes, the game does mock you if you lose to him (which is pretty much impossible to do involuntarily.).

First Person Shooter

Duke Nukem 3D map makers also loved to sign their names, often creating whole rooms that could only be seen by entering the "show map" cheat. However, a few were signed in-game along with messages asking the player how they got to the location… ironic, considering that two of the messages were easy to find with no cheats at all!
- The Duke Nukem 3 D Plutonium Pak CD, which patches Registered v1.3D to v1.4 and adds a fourth episode, contains a CD audio track of the finished version of "Grab Bag", the game's title music. A little-known fact about the tune is that the MIDI version included in Duke Nukem 3D is actually incomplete.
The Halo games have lots of these, most notably the skulls in Halo 2, which had effects in-game.
- There's the secret "Siege of Madrigal" music from Myth, which is heard as a "source music" in hard-to-reach locations, and also appears as an Easter egg on the soundtrack CD.
- A developer left a surprise for his girlfriend in the room the Unkillable Marines came from. It was her name, Megg, written in human blood. I believe they broke up.
The Gold edition of Thief: The Dark Project featured a hidden joke stage, accessible by altering the configuration file, that intentionally exposed things the players weren't supposed to see, such as bugs that were killed before final release and the placeholder texture, along with notes giving insights into the design process and some out-and-out gags.
Many of the older Counter-Strike maps featured credit sections or rooms. Notable examples are rooms in Aztec and Italy, and a breakable section of wall in Office. These have since been removed.
The final boss of Doom2 was an Easter Egg. You were forced to shoot rockets into the exposed brain of a demon's head which takes up most of the wall. If you cheat through, you can see that the demon's brain is designer John Romero's head on a pike. And the demonic-sounding sound file at the beginning is just the phrase "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero" played backwards.
In a women's locker room in Geist there are a few lockers that can be opened to reveal a Gamecube and Samus' suit.
The Marathon series is infamous for hiding terminals in out of the way places, but they sometimes used them to hide "credit terminals" towards the end of the game. Marathon Infinity takes this one step further, hiding an entire multiplayer map (that was used to make screenshots for terminal pictures that showed up elsewhere in the game), in hex format, in two terminals: one in the first level, and one in the final level. The trick was, turning this hex code into plain text. From there, a couple runs of the text (in a text file) though Stuffit Expander would result in the final, usable level. Full details can be found here.
Played straight in the co-op mode of Resistance 2, there is a broken bridge in Chicago's Garfield Park that when you stand on the edge of it and look down, you see a nice blue and purple easter egg.

Misc

On the QWERTY type key arrangement the word "Typewriter" is contained in the top row. Whether or not this is coincidence is debatable.
If you're playing the Macintosh version of any shareware game made by Ambrosia Software, press 'X' on that game's title screen for an Easter Egg.
A particularly common form of Easter egg is a "programmers' room". Well-known examples are found in Chrono Trigger and the original Pokemon games.
Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka is notorious for hiding a short, 19-note melody in most of the games he's worked on… sometimes so well-hidden that fans are still trying to find it in various games, years after their release. The usual method seems to involve pausing the game at some certain place and then waiting a few minutes.
- Link's Awakening even contains three distinct versions: wait in Prince Richard's house for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, enter とたけけ as your name in the Japanese version (ZELDA in the US version plays a remixed Zelda overworld theme instead), and a third version that exists in the game code but can't be accessed in-game (or at least no one knows how).
Somewhat of a visual version of the Totaka tune is the Dopefish, first found in Commander Keen 4 and afterwards spread to countless games.
All Dreamcast game discs have an audio track stating that the disc is for Dreamcast. Sometimes, this track was generic; other times, it was performed in character ("We can't save the world from a CD player, so just… put us back in a Dreamcast, so we can do our jobs!").
- Obscure Dreamcast game Seventh Cross: Evolution had a truly unique twist on this practice; the audio from what could only have been cutscenes removed from the game proper.
- Shenmue spanned three discs; each disk's audio track was performed by a different character.
Hold down the Start and Select buttons as you start up a Game Boy Advance; the Nintendo logo under the Game Boy Advance logo will disappear with a four note jingle reminiscent of some sound effects in Mario games. The A button will make the logo reappear and make the game continue booting.
- Isn't that how you prepare your GBA for Gamecube connectivity?
- Yes. It's actually just a method of overriding the cartridge slot so that downloads from other systems (including not just GCN connection but also single-cart multiplayer GBA games) will work without you having to pull out the game that's already in there.
Similarly, try holding down the Z button as you start up a Game Cube. Now try holding down the Z buttons on all four controllers at once as you start it up.
- This also works for holding Z on the first two controllers, but not the first three, sadly.
In Professor Layton, if you try to touch Flora's breast when you're supposed to find the mark of the Golden Apple in her painting, the Professor will say "Now Luke, be a gentleman."

MMORPG

The redesign of the Faultline zone in Issue 8 of City Of Heroes included a well-hidden "lounge room"; entering earns you the "Egg Hunter" exploration badge.
Warhammer Online has an Easter egg zone — a player in the Inevitable City who manages to successfully navigate a battle-filled arena and do some careful jumping across a series of floating rock islands can find a Chaos gateway. Jumping thought it lands one in an area identified by the loading screen as the Winds of Chaos, which consists of a random location filled with eye-candy. Possibilities include an icy crater filled with frozen daemons and one very cold high elf, a beautiful elven beach, a bird's nest on a mountain next to fleets of ships hanging in the sky, the moon, and the starting village from Mythic's Dark Age Of Camelot. Sadly, you only remain in these areas for a few seconds before being teleported back to the Chaos capital, allowing only brief exploration.

Party Game

If you installed the original You Don't Know Jack on December 25th, the first thing the game's host would say is "Hello. You got me as a present today, didn't you?"
- The host would also mock you if you were playing on holidays, Friday or Saturday night, and so on.
- "F*ck me? No, f*uck you. No, wait, I didn't say f*ck you, I said F*CK YOU."

Platform Game

Metroid Fusion is more linear than most games in the series, but it still rewards would-be sequence breakers with an Easter egg — a short cutscene which hints at the game's big Reveal and ends with one character musing "I wonder how many players will see this message…?" The answer is very few — legitimately, anyway. The sequence break is incredibly difficult and accomplishing it is a badge of honour among Metroid fans.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns for the Atari 8-bit and 5200 had an entirely new level after you beat the game that was longer than the actual game itself. This may be the largest relative Easter egg in any game.
Later games in the Jak And Daxter series scattered (coincidentally egg-shaped) Precursor Orbs around the levels for players to find, which could be spent on various cheats and Easter eggs (found under Cheats in the pause menu), ranging from game breakers such as infinite ammunition and invulnerability to more trivial stuff like mirroring the game world and toggling the protagonist's goatee on and off. The in-world explaination is that since the game takes place in the future, the formerly abundant Orbs have now become increasingly rare, and extremely valuable in the process.
If you managed to get your hands on a copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, you could put it into a CD player and set it to track 2 to get a cool remix of one of the games main themes. Topping it off were the opening moments of it, when Alucard says "As you can see, this is a Play Station black disk. Cut number one contains computer data, so please, don't play it. But you probably won't listen to me anyway, will you?" He was being honest, nothing is there to listen to.
- The PC Engine version of Rondo of Blood had two classic Easter eggs. The first one, like the above, requires you to play it in the CD player, which started up something like a miniature Drama CD track explaining that you can't play the game in a CD player, ending with Richter exclaiming "By the way, turn the volume down," which was shortly followed by massive screeching as the CD player tries to play the game's data and programming tracks. The second shows up if you play the game with a version 1 system card instead of the required version 2 card; you play a game that is an absolute mockery of a game, with horrifyingly cutesy renditions of Richter and Maria. The name of the level is "Stage X — The System Card 1 Level."
  - The cool thing about PC-Engine discs in general was that they also served as soundtrack discs, due to how the PC-Engine handled music data. Any standard CD player can handle PCE music tracks. You have to watch out for when the non-music data cues up, though…
In the DOS platformer Stix World, bottomless pits are usually marked with a "Danger!" sign. However, if you fall past a certain one that says, "Banger!" instead of "Danger!" while possessing a blue key, you can find a room with a giant actual easter egg. Collecting this egg causes a message to pop up informing you to "check in the game directory." Doing so reveals a rather bizarre easter egg: a text file containing the entirety of Alice In Wonderland!

Real-Time Strategy

Blizzard Entertainment's games are rife with various Easter eggs. In the RTS games, clicking on a unit often enough results into them uttering various funny lines (or, if it's a critter, they explode), and exploring the map in great detail may result in finding Easter egg units. For instance, zerglings, hydralisks and marines from Starcraft can be found in Warcraft III. And let's not get started on World Of Warcraft...
- In addition, with the exception of the first Warcraft, every Blizzard RTS (Usually the expansion packs) to date has had a hidden music track. Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal had 'I'm a Medieval Man' earned by typing disco or putting the game disc into a CD player, Typing Medieval Man in Warcraft II (Battle.net Edition) also yielded this music, Starcraft: Brood War had Radio Free Zerg, a semi-subliminal Stupid Statement Dance Mix featuring the Overmind, earned of course by typing Radio Free Zerg while playing Zerg, and finally Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne'' has 'Power of the Horde' by either typing in Tenth Level Tauren Chieftain or by beating the campaign (Which accompanied the song with a nice ingame engine music video).
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds has several Easter egg characters hidden in the corners of maps, such as Mara Jade. There are also cheats that will give you absurdly overpowered joke super-units such as the Death Star, a Star Destroyer, and Simon the Killer Ewok.

Simulation

Naming sims in The Sims after Greek gods or old Hollywood stars sometimes gives special benefits and gifts to those characters.
- Ditto with Roller Coaster Tycoon.
- Zoo Tycoon too. Naming guests "Mr. Blue" or "Mr. Pink" after Reservoir Dogs will change the colour of all the guests' clothes.
  - Other names will result in far more dramatic results, such as the men in the park becoming violently ill, and birds inexplicably menacing the guests, causing widespread terror.
- And Theme Park World. Naming customers after certain production team members causes them to stay longer or spend more money.
- Sim Copter has one of the most famous Easter Eggs of all. In the finale, you are greeted by a throng of adoring citizens. Allegedly, the producer told one of the artists to include a bunch of bikini babes in the scene, without knowing that the artist was homosexual. Annoyed at the request, the artist included several speedo-wearing men, some of whom were kissing. Maxis fired him and was forced to recall early editions of the game.
- Also should note that in Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, many of the office buildings were named after a person who helped develop the game (like Wren Insurance). And let's not forget the biggest Easter Egg of them all; The California Plaza, where the Maxis studios is located, is a landmark players can build in their cities (actually quite snazzy looking too).
Drakengard has an Easter egg to obtain after seeing all of the game's Multiple Endings. It involves doing a free mission in Tokyo and shooting down three or five jets of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, which is much harder than it sounds. After you accomplish this, you can choose to fly either your dragon or an SU-47 in free missions. This is a Shout Out to cavia inc., who develop the Ace Combat series of games and developed the Flight Sim half of the game. Did I mention that the protagonist is still mounted on the outside of the jet?
In the third level of Battletanx 2: Global Assault are many cars accessible only careful blasting or a remote control rocket. One of these, upon destruction, will cue a whole series of messages from various game creators. The theme is 'We want to work hard on making a good game'.
Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter has literal Easter Eggs hidden in the Mount Merakan level.
Creatures had many, but the most famous was a Bustr.txt, a file which read: Hunting scuba cows (A Poem) / Pebbles are not edible. It is fruitless to try eating them. / I have not eaten a sandwhich in many days. / Despair not for Wednesdays. / Salmon unite. / Boo hoo. / Bye. / Thankyou.
Star Wars: Starfighter had a force-field cube with silly pictures in picture frames accessible by turning around at the beginning of the first level. Also, one mission features a missile frigate that launches two "Chris Corrpedoes", named for lead programmer Chris Corry.
In Wing Commander IV, typing "animal" when the shipboard computer terminal text is scrolling, before it gets to the prompt for a callsign, results in a text based "20 questions" type game called "Animal Gump". Replacing "animal" with "chicken" gives an alternate version of the credits, with strange comments.
If you play X Wing when your system clock says it is December 25, a tiny Santa Claus is visible in the background on the menu screen.

Sports

"Uh, don't tell the other kids, but, uh, I speak English. I learn Spanish in school." (Pablo in the original Backyard Baseball when you hold Shift while clicking on his player card.)

Stealth

Metal Gear. The whole series. The early ones had a few, but the Solid games contain more than you could possibly ever find — to the point where it's almost closer to The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything. They vary from bonus conversations, to lewd posters and jokes, to Konami Easter Island heads, to RunningGags, to strange bonus items and scenes. You can get so much Video Game Cruelty Punishment it's unreal, get enough Fan Service to last you the night, and even make the main character shave off his beard for the finale of the second game, if you decide you don't like it.

Turn-Based Strategy

Shining Force has two items which, when held by the appropriate (female) character, change that character's field sprites to ones with a little more Fanservice. In the English-language release, their names have been romanized, but not translated.
Eschalon: Book 1 contains three items called Easter Eggs. If all three are found they can be traded in to make the character advance a level.
You have to be incredibly lucky or very persistent to see it, but in Phantom Brave, you can generate anthromorphic owl Player Mooks. One of the possible names assigned to them is Orly.

Western RPG

Fallout. Enough said.
- In an example of this perhaps being taken too far, the Expansion Pack Mothership Zeta for Fallout 3 is based entirely around one particular easter egg.
In Ultima V on the Commodore, yelling FLIPFLOP would flip the screen upside down.
The Gothic series has the Mighty Alien Dwarf, who leaves signed messages to the player, either in areas of the game that can't be reached without cheating or in places that there's no real reason to explore. One message not from the Dwarf was a rusted-out old car hidden deep in an uninhabited corner of the map, with a note from the game developer saying, "Well, I always wanted to make a game with cars, you know."

Wide Open Sandbox

In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, if you get to the top of one of the towers on the Gant Bridge in San Fierro, you will see a sign that says "There are no Easter Eggs here. Go away." The Grand Theft Auto series is as a whole rife with Easter Eggs.
- Furthermore, if you go to the Bridge's tourist gift shop, you will see a section of the bridge itself, and a plaque that tells you how much bits of data was needed for the developers of the game to make and design it.
- Grand Theft Auto Vice City lampshades this with a chocolate egg and a "Happy Easter" sign in a secret room.
Saints Row 2 has an actual Easter Bunny that rises from the water.
Endless Ocean has a lot of these, but they're either very small, inobtrusive, and possibly not intentional (the holes in the rock at Comb Reef, the various findable items, the out-of-season fish) or huge enough to stretch the definition of "egg" (the Ship's Rest area, some of the aforementioned items). The only true Easter Egg is the secret cutscene unlockable by sitting on the deckchair at sunset.
- There are a few other ones that are almost definitely intentional. Kat can be spoken to on deck, and usually provides information as to what you should do next. However, once story mode has been completed, she says random, sometimes navel-contemplative, sometimes funny things. There's also another secret cutscene unlocked by achieving One Hundred Per Cent Completion.

A common Easter Egg on music C Ds is bonus tracks not listed on the official track list (sometimes included only on the first run of discs). Of course, older easter-eggs become painfully obviously when the last track happens to be 20 minutes long when you import it into Itunes.
- Averted by Frenzal Rhomb in their album "Not So Tough Now" which featured 35 "secret tracks" that played for 4 seconds each and were listed on the back of the cover. If they were played in consecutive order made a song calling their guitarist, Ben Costello, a cunt.
- They Might Be Giants did something a bit different on their Factory Showroom album — they put a bonus track ("Token Back To Brooklyn") before the first track of the CD. It can only be listened to on a CD player that allows you to play Track 0. John Flansburg used the technique again for the second album of his side project, Mono Puff.
- The very first X-Files soundtrack (for the TV show) had a track 0. Since no CD players at the time could read track 0, the only way to access it was to rewind the first track beyond the beginning.
- Some Robbie Williams albums have secret tracks which are only accessible by leaving the CD running for a full ten minutes of silence after the last track finishes playing. (Or using a player with a 'skip to time' feature, but where's the fun in that?)
  - Nirvana also did this with their album Nevermind.
  - Incubus did this on S.C.I.E.N.C.E.
  - The Digimon the Movie soundtrack, of all C Ds, did this too. There was a small clue in the CD booklet about these hidden tracks to give the kiddies a chance to figure it out.
- Another track 0 type example can be found on the Final Fantasy VII Reunion Files soundtrack — rewinding the first track allows you to hear the iconic "One Winged Angel" without the Ominous Latin Chanting.
If you were to play Weird Al Yankovic's "Running with Scissors" CD on a PC, you might find a rather enlightening documentary of what it's like to grow up as a polka-obssessed white accordion player in an all-black family.
- "You're not Barney!"
- Also by Weird Al, the track "You Don't Love Me Anymore" on his "Off the Deep End" CD is 14:13 in length, though the song ends after only 4 minutes. The next few minutes are silence, ending in six seconds of ear-splitting cacophony officially titled "Bite Me." Al has stated that it is intended "to scare people to death" (it does, even without coming unexpectedly after 10 minutes of silence) and also is meant as a direct parody of the track "Endless, Nameless" on Nirvana's "Nevermind" album (of which Off the Deep End's cover art and first track were also parodies). The hidden track is not included on the cassette version of the album, for obvious reasons.
  - If that's not enough, that Easter egg track contains a backmasking Easter egg of its own (believed by some to be the result of a mastering error and not intentional): reversing and slowing down the song will reveal a snippet of "Tears of the Earth" by David Hallyday, also released by the same record label as Off the Deep End.
Rascal Flatts' album Feels Like Today had a hidden track called "Skin" which was actually released as a single after some radio stations began playing it as an album cut. Supposedly, it was made a hidden track because the label wouldn't let them put more than twelve songs on the CD. Later presses of the album list it as an official track.
Gary Allan's CD It Would Be You also features a hidden track which was hidden presumably to subvert his label's track limit.
Counting Crows is fond of putting hidden tracks on their albums, usually by placing a long period of silence after the last song followed by the hidden one. This means that the track won't show up as an option when viewing the tracks on the CD — the only way to hear it is to wait through or fast forward through the silent portion of the last track.
When you put The Dillinger Escape Plan And Mike Patton's Irony Is A Dead Scene in your computer's cd player, a video file appears in the directory — it's a short montage of behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the album, mainly Patton recording vocal tracks.
Adam Sandler's "The Chanukkah Song 3" from the soundtrack CD for Eight Crazy Nights is the last track on the disc... and if you let it keep playing after it "finishes" you suddenly find that it starts up again with a radio-edit version (which replaces the lines "Jennifer Connelly is half-Jewish, too, and I'd like to put some more in her" with something a little safer for airplay).
Nox Arcana also tends to hide bonus tracks in their albums. While they're usually just short jingles or narrations associated with the story of the album, the very last bonus track of Carnival of Lost Souls (yes, there are multiple) is an extended, rock version of their song "Spellbound."

Computer Software

There are two pages of Easter eggs for the Apple Newton handheld computer, including Finder's ability to predict Elvis sightings...
Microsoft Excel 97 had a hidden Flight Simulator mode that could be triggered by inputting a specific set of commands while in a brand new spreadsheet.
- Similarly, users of Microsoft Excel 95 could reach a Doom-style "Hall of Tortured Souls".
  - Finally, Excel 2000 featured a Spy Hunter style driving game dubbed "Dev Hunter" by its fans.
- In Windows 3.1, a certain sequence of keys would replace the Windows logo in the "About Windows" dialogue with a portrait of Bill Gates or (depending on what code was entered), a polar bear.
- Windows 95 had a feature — and I'm not sure of the exact wording — but if, in Explorer, you created a folder on the desktop named "and now for your entertainment" then renamed it "we now present" then finally renamed it "the Microsoft Windows 95 team" the directory window would do a display of all the people involved in creating Windows 95.
  - Unsurprisingly, any form of Easter Egg in Microsoft products has been banned by Executive Veto ever since…
- Older versions of the 3D Text screensaver, upon having "volcano" input as the text, would display the names of random volcanoes.
- The "Pipes" screensaver would sometimes manifest a teapot at one of the angles in the pipes it drew.
  - And not just any teapot either, but the original Utah Teapot that was the model for the very first 3D render.
  - There's also a sugar bowl that appears very rarely.
  - Ahah! Microsoft is tied to V.F.D.!
- There is the Internet Explorer 4 credits. The series of manoeuvres that unlocks them is as fun to do as the credits, which feature silly "intermissions" between sets of names, are to watch.
- There is a notorious Easter Egg in Microsoft's Wingdings and Webdings fonts. Type "NYC" in MS Word and change the font to Webdings and you get three pictures: an eye, a heart, and a city skyline (I love New York). Change the font to Wingdings however, and you get a skull and crossbones, the Star of David, and a thumbs up sign (kill Jews = good??).
In Mac OS 7.5, making a text clipping of the words "secret about box" and double-clicking it would reward you with a game of Breakout, with developers' names printed on the blocks.
Most versions of Borland Delphi will display information about and photos of its development team in its About box if you hold down the Alt key and type in words like "TEAM" or "DEVELOPERS".
The Mozilla and Firefox browsers have a special response to typing "about:mozilla" in the URL input. Doing this in some versions of Internet Explorer, meanwhile, gets you a (false) Blue Screen of Death.
- Firefox 3 includes additional about: pages, including about:robots.
- The original Seamonkey contains "about:kitchensink", due to reports that Mozilla had everything but the kitchen sink. An actual bug was created to remedy the situation.
The Windows-only version of Google Chrome, 1.0, takes the URL "about:internets" and displays Windows's 3D Pipes screensaver; a Shout Out to the infamous "it's a series of tubes" Hammerhead Snark / Memetic Mutation.
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing has a pinball game hidden within it.
When asked for a certain set of directions, Google Maps advises you to "swim across the Atlantic Ocean." This is a reference to Benoît Lecomte.
- Another insists at step 46 that you need to cross the Pacific in a kayak.
  - And then takes 27 toll roads in a row going through Japan. And then it makes you kayak across the Pacific again.
  - And if you do the math, it gets even better. Given the distance traveled vs. time spent, it's actually assuming you go at a very reasonable speed in a kayak...for 15 days straight...without sleeping...and no equipment or supplies to weigh you down... It sounds like they expect you to do the oceanic trips with only a fishing rod, a filet knife, and a plastic jug with a water filter.
- Then there's the one with about nine hundred U-turns.
- Google Moon used to turn the map into cheese on the closest zoom-in.
Try to find a version of Flash that does not have goodies hidden behind a tiny button in the about window.
Matlab, despite being a serious program for mathematics has quite a few Easter Eggs, see the full list.

DV Ds

The DVD set of Broken Saints contains several, the crown jewel of which is a hilarious alternate commentary track on Chapter 19, Act 1, which is practically a Gag Dub of the chapter.
Most of the DVDs from the ADV Films release of Noir contain Easter Eggs, including four anime music videos on disk 7, and a live-action mini-film featuring sock puppet versions of the main characters on disk 6 (called "Noir: The Unsoled Story").
The English subtitled version of Urusei Yatsura has Easter eggs in the subtitle text. Lum's mother only speaks an untranslated alien language. The subtitle, to show that even in the original language the dialog is unintelligible, is written in the "Symbol" font (The Greek letter font). By matching the characters to a regular font yields hidden messages. One message was "the star wars parody was pretty cool", which is not what she would be saying, but instead referred to an earlier bit in that episode.
Doctor Who actually uses them as a plot point; in "Blink", the Doctor hides a message for the future in Easter Eggs in 17 unrelated DVDs. Appropriately, the message became a real-life Easter Egg on the Series 3 boxset.
The DVD version of The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers contains a hidden video clip of Gollum accepting a MTV award for Best Animated Character.
- The Return of the King has an interview between Hans Jensen (as played by Dominic Monaghan) and Elijah Woods. Something of a Crowning Moment Of Funny.
  - The Fellowship of the Ring Extended DVD has a remake of the Council of Elrond scene featuring Jack Black.
Not unlike the Noir example above, Madlax also has a sock puppet short on Volume 6.
And so does The Incredibles on the second disc of the DVD release.
On the DVD of Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog, when the standard FBI warning changes to the ELE screen, there is an intercut shot of three actual eggs, representative of the DVD's three hidden Easter eggs. Watching the first scene with the subtitle language set to "Wiccan" gives a coded hint to finding them.
The DVD of Memento has an Easter Egg on the main menu that lets you watch the film in chronological order.
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy DVD has a rather odd Easter Egg when you use the Infinite Improbability Drive. It shows a rather... strange cartoon.
- In fact, it's the same cartoon that Deep Thought is watching within the movie.

Literature

Film

Tabletop Games

Television

Web Sites / Web Originals

Homestar Runner is well known for including Easter Eggs in cartoons on the site. In an inversion of this fact, Macromedia Central has an exclusive Homestar Runner toon hidden inside.
The webcomic Narbonic has an entirely separate text story, written in two-word segments, hidden in the filenames of each strip (of all places). The story continues into the Directors Cut version.
The webcomic Bitmap World has a number of Easter Eggs hidden around the site, which can be discovered by searching for images of one of the characters, Mike.
Google "Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything". Just do it.
- This also works on WolframAlpha.
  - Also on Wolfram Alpha, if you input "Easter Egg" it returns "Interpretation: What are your easter eggs?" "Seek diligently and ye shall find. (In fact, you just did.)"
  - Also also on Wolfram Alpha, if you input "do they speak English in What" it returns "Interpretation: "What" ain't no country I've ever heard of. They speak English in What?" "What? (English, [expletive deleted], do you speak it? (According to Jules, as played by Samuel L Jackson, in his one-sided conversation with Brett in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction))".
- Likewise, there was a time when you googled "failure" and got George W. Bush's biography. (Although to be fair that was less a case of an Easter Egg and more a result of Google bombing. Google may be one of the few pieces of software that allows its users to embed — however temporarily — their own Easter eggs in its output.)
- Very few of them work any more, but there were a number of great "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google hits involving fake 404s or search result pages, including "French military victories" which led to "Do you mean 'French military defeats'?" and a misspelling of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" which led to a fake 404 for said weapons…
- Not to mention the Chuck Norris page…
- Behold 55 Fun Things To Do With Google. A great many of these are classic Easter Eggs (some already mentioned here).
In Linkara's Atop The Fourth Wall video of New Guardians #2, he plays a clip of Adolf Hitler giving a speech (It Makes Sense In Context). Towards the end, there is a message that is onscreen for only a frame or two which says: "Yeah, I can see why Germany would want to follow this shouting, drug-crazed lunatic. ZOMG Easter Egg! Hi TV Tropes!"
Sister Claire: Known for its hidden Easter Eggs and homages, Sister Claire is definitely a Shout-Out Web-comic.
When composing a new mail in Yahoo! Mail. Pressing the text "Subject:" at the top will yield any number of random phrases that refer to either internet memes, TV catchphrases, and assorted inane statements.
This Name Generator contains ones for those who like flower names.
- As well as gemstones.
In the Potter Puppet Pals video "Bothering Snape", if the viewer freeze-frames the Avada Kadavara lightning and clicks on it when it forms a star, they are taken to another short video featuring Ron and Hermione in a "follow the butterflies" skit.
- Actually, that's in Trouble at Hogwarts, not Bothering Snape.