Does Not Illustrate: Easter Egg

The trope Easter Egg is not about literal eggs, but about little details or references that the programmers left in a game. Nevertheless, the illustration is a literal egg. There are so many screenshots we could use to illustrate that better.

Keep Until Better Image Suggested...I'd much prefer an actual example, but the egg isn't actively hurting the page.

Yeah, okay. Here's a suggestion. This is commonly referred to as the first ever easter egg in video games: image◊.

How about the literal Easter Egg in Grand Theft Auto Vice City? Or the sign that says "There are no Easter Eggs here. Go away." from whichever Grand Theft Auto game it was.

edited 21st Apr '12 2:41:06 PM by stickmeister0

Keep Until Better Image Suggested

I do like the Adventure example.

The Adventure one may be too obscure to convey the point.

That does not look secret to me.***

edited 21st Apr '12 5:10:12 PM by rodneyAnonymous

This page has a pretty good image of Ocarina's well-known easter egg.

There's also the famous Houlihan room◊....

I like the Houlihan room. At least the text says it's a secret. While not strictly necessary for the image, it's also one of the absolutely best examples of the trope.

The Zelda emblem on Samus' gunship works, as does Psycho Mantis. They're not as strong, though.

That is a list of references to other games, not Easter Eggs. The gunship thing is definitely not an Easter Egg and I'm pretty sure the Psycho Mantis one isn't either.

I think the literal image+caption is doing a better job than any of these examples.

Depends on your definition of secret.

@Post 3: Much as I'd love having the Ur-Example for Video Game Easter Eggs as the page picture, alas, the screenshot doesn't look like an Easter Egg on its own.

The Houlihan room is a good example.

The Houlihan room works for me.

What about this◊? It's an easter egg in every meaning of the word and it fits the subtitle in the pic already existing.

As it happens, I put the current image there in the first place. My thinking was, it would be a hard concept to convey in just an image, so I went with the Literal-Minded joke.

Some people seem to be more clever than I, then, so we'll see what happens.

Actual easter eggs are occasionally represented by exactly this Visual Pun (in Leisure Suit Larry 7 a rainbow-splashed egg icon pops up in the corner of the screen whenever you find an easter egg), so it's not entirely non-illustrative.

I think if we could get a good screenshot of the hidden Flower in the desert from Journey with a caption like "You see we made this other game called Flower" or "That's one big desert you searched through to find this." That would work pretty well. especially if we could throw in something about secrecy in the caption as well.

The Mario picture from Ocarina Of Time can also work quite well i think.

edited 6th May '12 4:51:44 PM by NorthernDruid

The problem here is that almost all your suggestions are mild cases of Fan myopia. It is difficult to add one of already suggested pictures from a game without making a long descrition, not to mention the many links to the pages of the works if one is referencing the other.

I think the current picutre is good. It is the same sort of picture we got on ´What Happened To The Mouse´, where the page picture is a Mouse.

If you are going to remove the current picture, remove that Mouse too, because both are there for same valid reasons.

Removing one doesn't mean we have to remove the other — Visual Puns are fine. Some tropes aren't picturable easily, so a Visual Pun is a fun way to still have an image. For Easter Egg, however, we think we can do better than a pun.

As it is, I'm not liking many of the suggestions, though the Holuliwhatchyamacallit is alright.

How about the Easter Egg in Microsoft Excel 97? A flight simulator in a spreadsheet program should be pretty clear. Never mind.

edited 9th Jun '12 3:32:49 AM by jkbeta

I vote for the Houlihan room.

edited 21st Jul '12 10:25:10 AM by cfive

Crowner?

A perfect caption for the Houlihan room would have to be "It's a secret to everybody."