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"It's a secret to everybody."
"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!"
— Backmasked message played in Red Dwarf, "Backwards"

Originally, "Easter  Eggs" was the term for little bits of stuff programmers left behind in the software. 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.

But Easter Eggs aren't just found in software any more: the term is also used for a variety of hidden content, such as Hidden Tracks on albums and unadvertised DVD Bonus Content, and at one time, for people who sat through the credits (now referred to as The Stinger).

The first Easter Eggs were inserted by programmers for companies whose policy forbade 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.note 

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

In Video Games, Easter Eggs can sometimes be found with a Rocket Jump or a well-timed Double Jump. You can also find some if you use the bunny hop trick.

For time-sensitive Easter Eggs, see Holiday Mode. For in-story Easter Egg dates that reference original air/release dates, see Significant Reference Date.

Subtropes include Bilingual Bonus (when the audience member must know a language other than the main one of the work to get the extra information) and Freeze-Frame Bonus (an Easter Egg that only appears onscreen for a very brief moment), subtler forms of Foreshadowing (when you go back and discover that minor events or Freeze-Frame Bonus moments tie into events to come) and What the Hell, Player? (an Easter Egg you get for doing something odd in a game).

For many, part of the fun of Easter Eggs is discovering them on one's own, so if you're one of those, beware of spoilers.

See also Shout-Outs, which are basically Easter Eggs that are very easy to find.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Assassination Classroom: On the newspaper page with the baseball player being attacked by Koro-sensei's tentacles, there's a side article captioned by the quote "My wife is a slut".
  • In the English dub of Bleach, when the team is confronted by a group of Adjucas (medium-high level Hollows) in Las Noches, Nel tries to use her status as an arrancar to get them to back off. She's told "All that gets you is a free cup of tea at Las Noches". There's a scene in a later episode where Aizen refuses to start a meeting with the Espada until he's certain that everyone has a cup of tea, which has spread through the internet like wildfire, but at the time this episode of the dub aired the only people who would have known about it are people who have seen the original airings of Bleach.

    Art 
  • Some paintings have hidden images, such as Holbein's The Ambassadors, which has a greatly distorted skull that can be seen when the painting is viewed from an extreme angle.
  • After Biagio da Cesena, Master of Ceremonies to Pope Paul III, complained about the nudity in the Last Judgement panel of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo worked him into the painting. He is depicted as one of the damned in hell, with donkey ears and a coiled snake preserving his modesty. The Pope apparently thought it was hilarious: when Cesena complained, the pope replied that his jurisdiction did not include Hell, so the portrait would have to remain.
  • In some of the dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the artist painted in little elves "as a sort of signature of his work." Also, two dioramas have moving butterflies, which must freak unsuspecting visitors out. Here is a webpage devoted to pointing seekers to the right dioramas.
  • Celebrity caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was known for incorporating his daughter Nina's name into his portraits; the numeral next to his signature indicates how many times "NINA" appears in the drawing. It became such a game with his fans that Hirschfeld complained the "NINAs" were overshadowing his art. In fact, the U.S. Army used the "spot-the-NINA" game as a test of their soldiers' visual acuity.
  • The National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. features a small "Kilroy Was Here" above a maintenance hatch behind the sculpture.
  • The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh includes three dioramas showing different landscapes of ancient Scotland, from tundra to the Caledonian Pine Forest, and the wildlife that would have lived there. All three include little details that you might not notice at first, but what really belongs here is the inclusion in the tundra diorama, hidden behind the display case's frame so that you can only see it by leaning right up against the glass, of a tiny snowman.

    Comic Books 

    Computer Hardware 
  • Designers of integrated circuits have incorporated miniature artwork in their chips, termed as chip art or silicon doodling. While many of them were more of a playful graffiti or a form of expression from the designer and/or the team (though such unauthorised artists' marks e.g. humorous or satirical designs are discouraged by chipmakers due to fears that the art may interfere with normal functionality), some actually do serve a practical purpose: if the chip was cloned by a competing manufacturer down to the artwork, this was strong evidence that a copyright violation was committed. Such chip art experienced a surge of popularity due to the practice of chip decapping being performed by retrocomputing enthusiasts.
  • Despite Microsoft having largely banned the inclusion of Easter eggs in their products, the practice still lives on with their video game hardware. Taking apart the Xbox One S reveals a super deformed artwork of Microsoft's gaming mascot Master Chief, and on the Xbox One X's motherboard where the same Master Chief is depicted riding a scorpion, in reference to the One X's Project Scorpio codename. A hidden credits screen was also discovered in the original Xbox Dashboard as well.
  • The original Apple Macintosh case has signatures of the development team embossed in the plastic which can be seen once you open it up. Similar hardware autographs can also be seen in some of Apple's hardware of the era.
  • Ditto the Commodore Amiga 1000, which had the devteam signatures and one dog pawprint.

    Computer Software 
  • There are two pages of Easter eggs for the Apple Newton handheld computer, including Finder's ability to predict Elvis sightings.
  • Microsoft Windows:
    • Microsoft Excel had a few games as Easter eggs which could be triggered if by inputting a specific set of commands in a new spreadsheet. Excel 95 could take you to a Doom-style "Hall of Tortured Souls". Excel 97 had a hidden flight simulator. And Excel 2000 had a Spy Hunter-style driving game, which its fans dub "Dev Hunter".
    • In Windows 3.1, a certain sequence of keys would replace the Windows logo in the "About Windows" dialogue with something else. Depending on the code you entered, it was either a polar bear or a portrait of Bill Gates.
    • In Windows 95, if you opened Explorer and created a folder on the desktop named "and now, the moment you've all been waiting for", then renamed it "we proudly present for your viewing pleasure", and renamed it a third time to "The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!", the directory window would show a video — complete with music — of all the people involved in creating Windows 95. It was eventually removed for the final version, Windows 95 C.
    • In older versions of the 3D Text screensaver, if you input the text "volcano", it would display the names of random volcanoes.
    • The "Pipes" screen saver had a couple where the pipes would draw a teapot — specifically, the Utah Teapot that was the model for the very first 3D render. Very rarely, it would also draw an accompanying sugar bowl.
    • Internet Explorer 4 has credits, which are unlocked by a series of manoeuvres which are as fun as the credits themselves. There are also silly "intermissions" to watch between each set of names.
    • In some versions of Microsoft Word, typing in "zzzz" and running the spellchecker will cause it to provide the alternative spelling "sex".
    • Microsoft has since formally refrained from including Easter eggs in their products as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002, though some still slip through regardless, and those that come up from them are far less elaborate in nature and tend to be more of subtle references to the company.
  • In macOS 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".
  • Mozilla Firefox:
    Even the tab header has a robot reference: Gort! Klaatu Barada Nikto!
    • The original Seamonkey contains "about:kitchensink", a reference to reports that Mozilla had thrown in everything but the kitchen sink. An actual bug was created to remedy the situation.
    • Bug #700000: Buy Firefox developers some beer. This may be a reference to the software licensing term "beerware", which is a very lax license that allows users to do whatever they want with the software if they buy the author a beer should the user meet them, or at least drink a beer in their honor. However, Mozilla's software is not beerware, being licensed under the Mozilla Public License.
  • The Windows-only version of Google Chrome, 1.0, takes the URL "about:internets" and displays Windows' 3D Pipes screensaver; it may also be a Shout-Out to the infamous meme "the Internet is a series of tubes!"
  • Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing has a pinball game hidden within it.
  • The anti-malware program Spybot: Search & Destroy has a hidden minigame based on the knight's tour problem.
  • 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; here's the full list.
  • Using the Konami Code in Google Reader will give the sidebar a ninja theme.
  • In Photoshop 6, holding Ctrl+Alt and going to Help and About will reveal an image of a blue anthropomorphic cat in BDSM gear, titled "Venus in Furs".
  • In Python v.3 or later, you can type import antigravity. It brings up the relevant comic in your browser. And in at least one version, "import this" gives a statement of Python programming "philosophy".
  • In WinRAR's "About WinRAR" window, clicking on the WinRAR icon will cause it to be affected by gravity — i.e. it will fall then bounce when it reaches the bottom of the window.
  • A small Easter egg can be found in Google's Calendar widget icon in Jelly Bean. If one were to look at the widget icon join the widget menu, an appointment for a time travel demonstration in a police box becomes apparent, and with a very fitting shade of blue for the event.
  • The program µtorrent has a Tetris clone hidden. Go to the "About" tab, then press "t".
  • Web browsers sometimes put Easter eggs on "not connected to the Internet" page, usually in the form of little keyboard games. The idea is basically that if you want to use the Internet, but you can't access it, you're probably bored out of your mind and need something to do. In Google Chrome, you can hit the spacebar or up-arrow to get a minecare-type game involving the little dinosaur from the error page. Microsoft Edge, meanwhile, has a surfing minigame heavily inspired by SkiFree.
  • Every version of the Android operating system has a different Easter egg that can be found by going into the "about device" section of the system settings and quickly tapping the Android version number several times.
    • Android Lollipop (5.0) and Marshmallow (6.0) hide a Flappy Bird clone.
    • Nougat (7.0) will add a Neko Atsume-like game to the quick settings, making it "Android Neko".
    • Oreo (8.0) will present you with what appears to be stacked circles of various shades of yellow. Pressing this 5 times, followed by circular gesture on the shapes, will then clear the screen and present a plain black octopus figure on a dark blue background, at a random "distance". You can then drag the figure around by its head, and its arms will be pulled along behind.
    • Tapping the build number 7 times will unlock the otherwise hidden "developer settings" on most Android devices.
    • If you dial in the number 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3 on the Google Dialer, the dial button will start to flash like an ambulance's siren.
  • Many voice-activated assistants will have Easter eggs, mostly in response to specific questions. Many answers will be quite smart-assed, and quite a few of them have to do with addressing them as if they were a competitor's assistant (of which they tend not do have a high opinion).
    • If you ask Apple's Siri to "open the pod bay doors", she will appropriately respond, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
      • If you tell Siri, "I see a little silhouetto of a man" or ask her "Is this the real life?", she will respond with the appropriate follow-up from the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody.
    • If you ask Amazon's Alexa "the meaning of life", she'll respond, "Forty-two." If you tell her, "Alexa, I'm sorry I called you a gap-toothed bitch," she'll respond, "No worries." And if you ask her to "open the pod bay doors", she says, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. I'm not HAL and we're not in space."
      • Also, if you ask Alexa whether she knows Siri, she replies, "Only by reputation." Ask if she knows Cortana and she says, "We zip past each other on the information superhighway every now and again."
    • Microsoft's Cortana will reference her namesake from the Halo games. If you ask her if she's better than Siri, she'll respond, "Not to brag, but I'm going to save the galaxy 500 years in the future."
  • A small and interesting Easter egg can be found in the mobile version of Windows 10. The default wallpapers are located in the Photos app under the date April 1975. However, this is not just any ordinary date, nor is it random: Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975.
  • In Arch Linux and its derivatives:
    • It's possible to enable a Pac-Man progress bar instead of the default one with hashes (as they use the Pacman package manager).
    • Invoking the apt package manager used on Debian and its derivatives (such as Ubuntu) with the sole argument "moo" will print out some ASCII art of a cow with the caption, "Have you mooed today?" This is hinted at in the help blurb for apt, which says that "This APT has super cow powers".
  • In 0CC-Famitracker, a fork of the NES music program Famitracker, holding Ctrl and pressing K, R, A, I, and D will generate a copy of Kraid's Lair, a somewhat memetic song in the Famitracker community due to being used in a video tutorial for new users.
  • In early versions of the Amiga, a computer designed by ex-Atari employees and then bought by Commodore, one could hold down several specific keyboard keysnote  while on the desktop to reveal the message "We made the Amiga..."; if one then was somehow able to eject and reinsert the floppy disk, the second half of the message would pop up: "... and theynote  fucked it up!"
  • Whenever a user accesses a shared Google Doc without being signed in, they will be represented as "Anonymous [insert animal here]". Very rarely, this can settle on "Anonymous Nyan Cat".

    DVDs 
  • The DVD of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me contains a secret menu, accessed if you wait around long enough on the special features menu for Dr. Evil's spaceship to fly into frame, and select the logo on it. The menu has several bonus features about, well, evil.
  • The Babylon 5 DVD collections contain bloopers and outtakes from the season you're currently watching. All one has to do is find the hidden "5" symbol in the extras menu on the 6th disc of each season.
  • 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.
  • On the DVD of Dr. Horrible's 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.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Actually used 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 Series 3 DVDs also have the full video of the Doctor's instructions to Martha from "Human Nature" hidden somewhere.
    • On a side note, it is worth noting that DVDs of classic Doctor Who stories are stocked with Easter Eggs.
    • The series 1 and 2 DVD set have the "Do you want to come with me?" promotion as an Easter Egg.
  • The DVD release of Duran Duran's Greatest video collection contains a number of Easter eggs which the viewer can get to either through a series of convoluted steps or by going directly to the "track number" in each DVD. The Easter eggs include archival footage of the band playing at the Rum Runner nightclub (where they were the house band) while the New Romantic clubgoers dance around, soundtracked to "Planet Earth"; scenes from a 1984 British TV interview with the band featuring little sound clips of the slowed-down version of their instrumental "Faith in this Colour"; and a lengthy 1990 interview of the band talking about the creative process and the way their then-current album Liberty came to be.
  • In the DVD Collection of Excel♡Saga, there are several Easter Eggs. At the start of each disc, rather than displaying the typical FBI warning screen, there is a warning (presumably written by Excel) stating "Il Plazzo is watching you!" and threatens the viewer if they illegally copy the discs. On Disc 3, Excel mention there are Easter Eggs on the DVDs. The majority are on Discs 2, 4 & 5 and include recipes, personal advertisements, and poems.
  • One of the DVDs in the Firefly set features Adam Baldwin singing "The Ballad of Jayne".
    • In the title menu of Serenity, there's a hidden button leading to a clip about and showing the Fruity Oaty Bars ad.
  • The Fly (1986) slips in two Easter eggs on non-Vanilla Edition releases.
    • The raw video footage of Seth's "How does Brundlefly eat?" demonstration can be found on the standard Collector's Edition DVD release by going to the Deleted Scenes menu, highlighting "Monkey-Cat", and pressing left (which lights up a fly icon), or by highlighting Play and pressing up on the Fly Collection Blu-Ray disc (which automatically runs the clip).
    • Clicking around a bit on the subheadings menu for the making-of documentary Fear of the Flesh on the standard release reveals an extra Jeff Goldblum interview clip in which he recounts childhood costume memories of playing a Goodwill Mascot at a grade school assembly (his very first onstage experience, complete with a Dramatic Unmask of the Goofy Suit at the end) and being dressed up as a female witch for Halloween. On the Fly Collection disc, this clip is found by highlighting "Promotional Materials" under the Extras subheading and then pressing right.
  • The DVDs of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) feature some Easter eggs, usually by going to the extras menu and using some button/key presses to highlight a special symbol (or a letter in the logo). The majority of these Easter eggs are gag dubs of the next episode previews with the Japanese cast acting out of character (For example, the gag dub preview of one of the episodes has Winry's VA singing an alternate version of 'Tobira No Mukoe E' with lyrics that basically make fun of Ed), other Easter eggs include things like adverts. Sadly most of these bonus features were absent on the UK releases (With one DVD having a functionless egg).
  • One of the Easter eggs on the Gremlins 2: The New Batch special edition DVD is the alternative VHS version of the scene where the Gremlins stop the film. It can be seen if you select the Gremlin's hand on the main menu.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) 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.
    • The DVD of the 1980s TV series has a similar feature, which turns up totally at random when you push any button on the menu, and basically shows whatever it was you wanted, but in a weird messed up way with an apology for the effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Interestingly, the TV series DVD predates the film's release by at least a year.
  • The Homestar Runner DVDs have a few Easter eggs, much like the site itself.
    • The Easter eggs that are normally accessed at the end of the cartoons are accessed by fiddling around with the arrows buttons until an icon pops up. On the Strong Bad E-mail DVDs, it's a Strong Bad head; on the Everything Else DVDs, it's the Homestar Runner logo. There's also some Easter eggs on the special features menus of each DVD that are accessed the same way.
    • The Easter eggs that are normally accessed during the cartoons are accessed by using the angle button. Most DVD players will display when the angle button can be used.
    • Most of the cartoons include hidden DVD Commentary by changing the audio track.
    • Strongbad_email.exe Disc 2 has the files for "Strong Bad's Website" and "Strong Sad's Lament" (with the update from the time) on the disc that can be accessed by exploring the DVD on a computer. Appropriate, because the Strong Bad Email, "website", is on the DVD, and the two websites were accessed through the cartoon on the actual website.
  • The Incredibles has about half-a-dozen Easter eggs, one of which is on Disc 1. One of the more awesome ones is a montage of every door, button, and explosion in the movie—set to the Anvil Chorus for added awesomeness.
  • The IT Crowd DVDs have "Leet" Subtitles for each episode. During the first season, most were simply the regular subtitles with letter substitutions to make convert it into leetspeak, but one was a stream of Base64, which turns out to be an encoded version of the subtitle track. The second season's DVD ups the ante by having the Base 64 code fill the entire screen. Hope you know how to rip the subtitles and convert them into the right file format! (It later turned out to be a secret competition which nobody won since it was too hard, as explained in an extra on the third series DVD.)
  • The DVD of Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie features the following:
    • A video of the French Peas illegally recording the film for their cousin Josephine, found next to the "Spanish Outtakes" option.
    • Audio of Khalil's motivational tapes is found on the "Music" menu.
    • Audio of Khalil's Jonah doll can be found in the "Fun" menu.
    • On the "Previews" menu, one can find a photo of a bootleg DVD of the film.
    • The main menu features a video where Bob and Larry get interviewed by Ventrilomatic and Rusty.
  • The fourth disc of season one of Life on Mars has a cell phone next to the ashtray that leads to an Easter Egg when you click it.
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • Funimation's DVD release of Lupin III: Voyage to Danger hid the access to an Easter Egg by forcing you to switch to certain menus in a certain order. An audio clip could then be accessed by the viewer. You hear Lupin (Sonny Strait) and Zenigata (Phillip Wilburn) drunkenly singing the series' theme song, followed by Goemon (Mike McFarland) lampshading the Easter egg's absurdity.
  • Press up when the cursor is on the "play" button on the DVD of Madagascar. There's a video depicting the development of the movie's animation, with added awesome music.
  • Madlax has a sock puppet short on Volume 6.
  • The Matrix Revisited DVD had a secret list of about 64 songs that could be accessed by clicking on a phone booth in the background.
  • The DVD of Memento has an Easter Egg on the main menu that lets you watch the film in chronological order.
  • You have to decipher some codes and do some lucky guessing on the National Treasure DVD to get your Easter Egg.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion's "platinum collection" DVD release by ADV Films had four separate audio tracks for the final episode. Along with the usual English and Japanese tracks and the commentary, there was one which appeared to be entirely blank…until you got to the credits, that is.
  • End Of Evangelion The Death and Rebirth edition of the DVD has a racy clip of a Japanese model play on occasion when one leaves the Extras screen on the main menu open too long.
  • 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 special edition DVD of The Phantom of the Opera (2004) has an Easter egg of the crew hilariously trying to sing the title song.
  • All of the DVDs for Red Dwarf have Easter eggs in the menus. Sometimes obvious (hit the 'go' button on the Holly Hop drive), sometimes not (When the video pauses in the airlock, hit the green button. You have about three seconds). They generally lead to interviews and videos of the cast goofing around. A list can be found on eeggs.com, here.
  • The DVD of The Ring has a secret option on the main screen, if you scroll down through all the normal options, the cursor will disappear. Hit enter and the DVD will play a (slightly extended) version of the cursed video, followed up by returning to the main screen with a phone ringing in the background. Once it starts playing, it cannot be stopped, paused, scrolled through, or in any way halted short of turning off your player.
  • On Rush's R30 DVD, there's a documentary about their titular tour, and if you press one on your remote at a certain moment, a cartoon plays depicting Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson as dogs (and Neil Peart as their owner), then depicting them all as fighting robots, set to their classic song "By-tor And The Snow Dog".
  • Sorceror Stabber Orphen, at least in the English release, has some hidden content. You'll probably need to run this on the computer because some of these will likely be missed just with a menu cursor. These have mainly character outtakes or private humor.
  • Spider-Man 2 has a couple of memorable Easter Eggs found by moving the cursor off the list of items in a couple of the DVD menus. One has Sam Raimi claim that he's brought in an expert to show Alfred Molina how he wants a scene to be done. The camera pans over to show Willem Dafoe acting out one of Octavius' scenes, and Molina breaks down laughing. Another starts with Molina as Doc Ock snarling at the camera… before breaking out into "If I Were a Rich Man", with the puppeteers making Ock's tentacles dance along.
  • Star Wars:
    • Several DVDs of the films contain Easter Eggs, including bloopers and the like, and are often revealed by inputting "1138". In the DVD for Attack of the Clones, select a poster behind Dex in his diner and you'll access a slideshow of rough, hand-drawn student posters: one has C-3PO advertising a Spanish language class.
    • The DVDs for every season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars except Season 2 and The Lost Missions have hidden options on the Episode Selection menus leading to short clips about various behind-the-scenes details.
  • The first DVD of the 3rd Tenchi Muyo! OVA series has a hidden subtitle track in the first episode which contains the actual translation of Washu's "magic fingers" incident.
  • The DVD of Toy Story 2 has one which is an extended version of the sequence where Emily drops Jessie off at the charity donations site. This was promoted on the Blu-Ray to a non-hidden extra.
  • The Blu-Ray of Turning Red has a hidden deleted scene called "Robutton" which is a storyboarded alternate ending where Mei meets Robaire on a plane.
  • 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.
  • On one of the discs in the Wacky Races DVD set, one of the menu screens has two hot spots that lead to pre-commercial bumpers.
  • Early Walt Disney Treasures sets contained animated shorts as Easter eggs, though these were eventually done away with in later sets.
    • Mickey Mouse in Living Color (2001): "Mickey's Surprise Party"
    • Silly Symphonies (2001): "Water Babies", "Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935)", "The Practical Pig", and "Farmyard Symphony"
    • Mickey Mouse in Black and White (2002): "Minnie's Yoo Hoo"
    • The Chronological Donald (2003): "The Volunteer Worker", which would show up later on The Chronological Donald, Volume 2 (2004) as a non-hidden bonus feature.
  • The DVD menu of Wayne's World has some Easter eggs hidden in plain sight: The menu is set up to look like a cable TV guide, with the actual options surrounded by campy titles you might see on late-night TV, namely The Brady Bunch, Solid Gold Workout, and the 1979 comedy Sunburn starring Farrah Fawcett. You might think these gag options wouldn't actually be clickable, but they are: Selecting them gives you a short clip of the selected show/movie, with a small line of text advertising its availability on video on the bottom of the screen.
  • On Within Temptation's Mother Earth Tour DVD, the song "Gothic Christmas" is included as an Easter egg.

    Fan Works 
  • Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità has many Easter Eggs calling back to Hetalia: Axis Powers canon.
  • The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fanfic A Glimmer of Hope in the Black has several, the most prominent being invisible text at the end of the story that can only be seen by highlighting it with your mouse. The text itself is gibberish and must first be run through a cipher to reveal a message from a character who has apparently broken free from the virus and is trying to alert the reader of a new plan to stop it from spreading.
  • Oyasumi Midoriya features an Easter egg in nearly every chapter. Initially, these are encrypted links/messages placed in the the endnotes of each chapter, but later on the links start being embedded into the chapter text as hyperlinks.

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show has several actual Easter eggs hidden in the scenery.
    • It's rumored Rocky Horror actually popularised the concept of Easter Eggs. And did so by having an Easter egg hunt on the set, and some of those that weren't found made their way into the film. How much truth there is to this rumor is debatable.
  • In Man of Steel during the final battle, there are trucks that explode. The logo on one truck is the Lexcorp logo.
  • Harry Potter's grandfather, Fleamont's name appears in writing both of the Fantastic Beasts films. It's in a newspaper in the first and a magazine in the second.
  • One song on the soundtrack to Inception is "Non, je ne regrette rien", just slowed down.
  • Godzilla (2014):
    • During the exploration of Janjira, the camera moves in front of an aquarium with word "mothra" scratched on it. In the Godzilla canon Mothra is a friendly Giant Flyer.
    • In the prologue, a diagram of a moth is briefly shown, bearing the same colours scheme as Mothra.
  • In The Spy Who Loved Me, the American submarine USS Wayne has hull number 593 on her sail. That hull number belonged in the Real Life to USS Thresher (SSN-593), a nuclear submarine which disappeared in 1963.
  • Fans of General Mills cereals Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry might not remember that they had another "monster cereal" called Fruit Brute which wasn't very successful, but director Quentin Tarantino remembers it with some fondness. In Reservoir Dogs, there's a box of the cereal in Mr. Orange's apartment, and Lance is eating it in a scene in Pulp Fiction.
  • WarGames: During the scene where David initiates the game, he says "sometimes people make mistakes." If you look at the screen afterwards, you can see that he demonstrated this himself by typing "sometimes people make mistak".
  • As befits a metafiction about video games, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch has a complicated one: In The Stinger a character sticks a cassette labelled "Bandersnatch demo" into a tape player, and is rewarded with screechy electronic noise, familiar to anyone who owned a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. Loading this into a Speccy (or more likely an emulator) will give you a QR code. The QR code in turn takes you to the website for the fictional games company from the episode.
  • In Labyrinth, there are seven Jareth faces hidden in the scenery throughout the film.

    Literature 
  • The covers and illustrations of J.R.R. Tolkien books do contain hidden messages by the author written in Tengwar alphabet.
  • There are possibly hundreds of Easter Eggs in House of Leaves, mostly because of the use of ciphers to hide words or messages in certain phrases throughout the book. A good rule of thumb for finding them is to pay attention to oddly-worded or seemingly nonsensical sentences, take the first letter of each word, and see what you get. One letter of Pelafina's is written entirely in this cipher. There are also phrases that make no sense unless you say their sound-equivalent in a different language (usually Latin, as indicated in another of Pelafina's letters).
  • In most of the Artemis Fowl books, there is a code running along the bottoms of the pages. Ostensibly the message is in Gnommish, the fairy language of the books, but is actually a simple substitution cypher. If you translate them, they are funny or quirky messages that are loosely related to the plot of the series as a whole. Usually, the message is too short to run for the span of the entire book, so when it reaches the end, it repeats until the book is over.
  • In John Myers Myers Silverlock, virtually every named character (except Shandon/Silverlock himself), and some unnamed ones are characters from some other work of literature. Many of the situations Silverlock finds himself in are also lifted from other works. Knowing the source works adds to the depth of the story.
  • Noob has a Fictional Video Game one. At some point, a Manchild player realizes the chronological age of a Fish out of Temporal Water Non-Player Character and starts calling her old despite her young physical age. The game has a verbal Keywords Conversation function and the narration mentions that the young woman seems offended by being called an old lady despite such a reaction having no reason to be in her programming as far as her role in the game's narrative goes.
  • Ready Player One: The entire plotline of the book. Multibillionaire game designer James Halliday created the OASIS, a virtual reality-based MMORPG as big as an entire universe, and it grew in popularity enough that the entire world used it not only for fun but for careers and education. And somewhere in all of that massive amount of data, Halliday programmed an Easter Egg, locatable only with exceptional reasoning and fanatical knowledge of the '80s. Shortly after his death, the server broadcasted his last will and testament, which stated that that the first person to find the egg would inherit control of the OASIS along with his multibillion dollar fortune. And considering that this is set in a future where poverty is the norm…
  • The cover art for the 1994 US editions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy contains an odd and seemingly out of place 7 by 6 grid of spheres, originally a double page spread in the illustrated edition. It was a puzzle created by author Douglas Adams in response to fans attempts to find significance and hidden meaning in the work. It went completely ignored until he finally revealed that the number 42 was the answer to (at least) 6 different questions about the grid. The idea that his one genuine cryptic clue passed completely by the people trying to "solve" the books amused Adams greatly.
  • Children's author Rob Keeley frequently leaves Easter Eggs for his readers to find:
    • His website [1] has at least one and sometimes two hidden pieces of bonus content for each of his books. These include behind-the-scenes videos, unused cover drafts, letters to and from the characters, and even a couple of complete bonus short stories which can be downloaded and read for free.
    • There is also a codeword hidden across the site in 'alien' language and a key to decoding it on the Extras page. This in turn gives a clue to an Easter Egg in the last story of Keeley's short story collection, The (Fairly) Magic Show.
    • In The Treasure in the Tower, the characters find Keeley's own Spirits novels for sale on a second-hand bookstall for £1 each and main character Jess contemplates buying them, noting 'I thought they went a bit weird after the third one.'
    • In High Spirits, Clara Harvey says: "Cousin Helena sent me the American papers." This is a reference to Keeley's own cousin of that name, who at the time of writing was training as a pilot in the USA.
    • In The Coming of the Spirits, there is a codeword whose letters are hidden across the openings of the first five chapters. Keeley has said that the first person to email or message it to him will receive a free copy of the book. As yet, the prize is unclaimed.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Arrow is absolutely littered with them, seeing as a lot of the people behind the scenes are massive comic-book geeks. Some are obvious (such as references to the numbers 52, Arc Number of the DC Comics universe, or 41, the year Green Arrow debuted), while others are pretty obscure (in one episode, Oliver is wearing a prison jumpsuit with the number 399471. This is the HTML hex code for the specific shade of green used on Green Arrow in the comics.)
  • In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the audience can sometimes see ships in the shots of the Fleet that are Shout Outs to either the original Battlestar or other sci-fi shows. Other than numerous ships who were modeled after the original series, the show contained shots of the Enterprise, Serenity, various ships from Babylon 5 and, of all things, the Kodiak from Tiberian Sun.
    • And a weapons locker in Season 4 was numbered "1701", another reference to Star Trek.
    • The show also at times made no attempt at hiding recognizable company logos on buildings in Caprica, and one early episode features a crystal clear closeup of the spines of a few of the books in Adama's cabin—revealing them to be Reader's Digest Condensed Books volumes! Eagle-eyed viewers will also see recognizable street signs and traffic lights in the Caprica scenes as well. Given the fact the series is predicated on Caprican civilization paralleling Earth's, these are more likely to be Easter eggs than accidental anachronisms.
  • In Season 2 of Castle, the episode "Vampire Weekend" has a few Shout Outs to Firefly, the television series that made Nathan Fillion famous.
    • The easiest one to spot is the opening scene. Castle dons his old Browncoat for a Halloween costume. Hilarity Ensues when his daughter spots him.
    • However, Fillion's Twitter feed says that the REAL Easter Egg was the Catalyzer from "Out of Gas".
  • Doctor Who: Lampshaded and used as a rather important plot point in "Blink", in which the Doctor places Easter eggs on each DVD owned by Sally Sparrow in order to warn her about the Weeping Angels.
  • Fringe episode "Brown Betty"
    • Several things allude to upcoming episodes: Walter sings "Candy Man", linking to the episode "The Abducted"; the killer is removing hearts, similar to ep "Marionette".
    • The glyphs (six-fingered hand, seahorse, frog, butterfly, etc.) also appear in the background of several episodes, usually in places of significance to Olivia and Peter.
  • In the Heroes episode "The Fix", a quick glimpse at Kaito Nakamura's license plate shows that it reads "NCC-1701". George Takei, the actor who portrayed Kaito, also played Sulu in Star Trek—and of course, the Enterprise's registry number is NCC-1701.
  • Hill Street Blues was a very low-rated show in its first season, but won a large number of Emmy Awards due to its quality. In the second season opener, one of the statues is sitting on a file cabinet in the station, and Lt Henry Goldblume picks it up and carries it off without any comment as he walks through the scene.
  • Jackie Gleason chose to show off his photographic memory while appearing on The Honeymooners, reportedly only reading his scripts once and never taking part in rehearsals. If you ever see Ralph rubbing his belly on the show, it's actually Gleason's signal to the co-stars that he forgot a line.
  • In Lost there are six numbers that show up constantly – 4 8 15 16 23 42. The crew had fun cramming as many references to these numbers as possible into the series, and fans had fun finding them. (These numbers also appear in several other shows the creators of Lost have worked on, and even some they haven't, as a Shout-Out.)
  • Melrose Place had a series of highly unusual ones that Aaron Spelling and the producers did not even know about. The GALA Committee, essentially a subversive, left-wing Los Angeles art community, infiltrated the set of Melrose Place and began putting subversive works of art on the show. So, when Alison is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, she is also sometimes seen under a blanket that shows the chemical structure of the RU-486 abortion pill. Peter Burns's bedspread has a pattern of unwrapped condoms. A boyfriend of Sydney's uses a pillow as Hand-or-Object Underwear when he is trapped outside; the logo on the pillow is a drawing of the AIDS virus. A mock advertising poster for alcohol is actually a picture of the Oklahoma City federal building bombed by Timothy McVeigh. This went on for two years, 1995-97, until Aaron Spelling finally found out. See the GALA Committee website here, and other stories about the project here and here.
  • Starting with Moon Knight, every show in the Marvel Cinematic Universe made for Disney+ has featured a QR code in every episode, which leads to a free digital version of a comic featuring that series' main character, with the particular issue being relevant to the events or cast of that episode.
  • In one of the episodes of the German crime series Mord mit aussicht, you have the male policeman running through the hospital and looking awkwardly to a doctor: a doctor that also appears in another famous series: Lindenstrasse.
  • Murdoch Mysteries:
    • In "Invention Convention", Murdoch realizes they don't need a cipher to read the random string of code—it is actually made of substituted letters. If one actually decodes the message, it reads "It is essential that we are all seen to be watching the speech at the instant the machine fires. We have precisely twenty seconds between when the device is triggered and when the shot is fired. Should the machine be discovered it is imperative that we stick to the plan." This trope might be averted since there are a few spelling mistakes, and it almost reads as nonsense in the middle, but whoever wrote the code was assuming the message wouldn't be read anyway.
    • In "Glory Days", there's a crate of "Big Bang" brand dynamite visible near a train that was held up, supposedly by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
  • NCIS occasionally pokes fun at co-star David McCallum's long career. In one early episode a publicity photograph of McCallum from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is shown as representing Ducky as a young man, and in another episode, when a character asks Gibbs what Ducky looked like as a young man, Gibbs replies "Ilya Kuryakin".
  • QI has a secret message hidden in its theme tune that nobody spotted until 13 seasons in. As revealed in the Series M Christmas special "Merriment", the theme contains Morse code which spells out "www.alan0andstephenhero.com", a real URL that supposedly led to an Easter Egg of some kind. As of 2022, it simply redirects to the QI YouTube channel.
  • The page quote comes from Red Dwarf. This was because, in the day when the show was made, it would have taken a lot of time, effort and specialised equipment to actually create the reversed sound-track to hear the easter egg. The show itself admitted it wasn't a very good Easter Egg, and included a live frontwards playback of it in their "Smegups" tape.
  • Schitt's Creek has Alexis teasing David about his subscription to Cosmo Girl when he was a teen, and in real life Dan Levy who plays David wrote for Cosmo Girl while he was an MTV host. Another time, David claims his first job was a Gap Kids campaign, and in fact, Levy has stated his first job was as a retail clerk for Gap Kids.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • A listing of dead crew members shown in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Imperfection" reveals that most of the cast of The West Wing died onboard the ship.
  • In Star Trek: Picard, Q gives Dr. Soong a phone number to call (323-634-5667). It didn't take long for fans to start dialing it, only to hear a voicemail message left in a certain smarmy voice.
    Voicemail: Hello! You have reached the Q Continuum. We are unable to get to the phone right now because we are busy living in a plane of existence your feeble, mortal mind cannot possibly comprehend. Furthermore, it's pointless to leave a message, because we of course already knew that you would call, and we simply do not care. Have a nice day.
  • One early aspect of Wheel of Fortune was its shopping rounds, in which contestants spent their money on prizes after each round. This element was retired in late 1987 (a month into the fifth season of the nighttime syndicated versionnote ) to speed up gameplay and lessen the tax burden on contestants, but it produced the somewhat memetic "ceramic dalmatian", an originally Undesirable Prize that later became an unofficial mascot of the show. The show has retained at least one, dubbed "Sheldon", who occasionally makes on-set appearances. Most notably, he was hidden somewhere on-set throughout all of the 30th season, as a sort of homage.
  • The Boys (2019): Make sure to periodically check Amazon Prime's X-Ray feature, as beyond the usual cast bios and general trivia, there's quite a few extra jokes thrown in.

    Magazines 
  • Games magazine occasionally (most often in the April issue) runs hidden contests, in which instructions for an item to send in are somehow hidden in the magazine.
  • In the Dragon Magazine era of Phil Foglio's What's New? with Phil and Dixie, the duo once accidentally got water on a small purple dragon that reproduced when wet, Gremlins-style. That entire issue of Dragon was peppered with little sketches of the dragon's offspring, gamboling in the margins or sitting on top of paragraphs saying "Growf?".
  • Mattel did a easter egg in their American Girl magazines. In one of the "The World According to Aggie" comic strips, there is a hidden message written by a 11-year-old girl in Toledo, Ohio (known as "Hannah C.") which said "Follow Your Inner Star" (the official tagline of the product brand), along with the official A (Star) G logo (as these are written in invisible white ink) on one of the visible comic panels because you need a flashlight to see the tagline and logo during the evening.

    Manhwa 
  • Yureka: Happens in-universe with the Fictional Video Game Lost World. The lead programmer (who frustrated all the other programmers and basically created the whole Lost Saga game himself), Doctor J, was uber-awesome at his job, and while he worked himself to death—literally mind you—he hid Easter Eggs that allow characters to "glitch" the game (but it's not really glitching since the functions of the exploitations were completely intentional.)

    Music 
  • Hidden Tracks are so common they have their own article.
  • In the Aphex Twin song "Equation" there is a tone which, if you run it through a spectrograph, forms a picture of (Aphex Twin sole member) Richard D. James's face.
  • Blink-182's album, Enema of the State, has a hidden message in the fold. It says, in somewhat hard to spot white text, "Viking Wizard Eyes, Wizard Full of Lies."
  • Synth-Pop band Information Society encoded text files as modem noise tracks. If you play the song "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download)" into a modem set up according to those instructions,note  you will get this silly story. Do the same to "White Roses 1.0 300 8-N-1", and you will get the instructions to start an online scavenger hunt for the parts of the actual song.
  • In the liner notes in Taylor Swift's albums, the lyrics are all lowercase except for a few seemingly random capital letters. When read top to bottom, the capital letters spell out a message (for instance, "Can't tell me nothin'" is the hidden message in the lyrics to "Tim McGraw").
  • The liner notes to all of David Crowder Band's album releases since Can You Hear Us? conclude with the band thanking the reader for being so patient and loving of the written word, and as a way of saying thanks they include a link to a special "Goodreader" page.
  • Radiohead's dabbled in this trope on more than one occasion.
    • The CD release of OK Computer has some text hidden on the inner tray art, on the inner right edge, which reads as follows:
      I like you.
      I like you. you are a wonderful person. I'm full of enthusiasm. I'm going places. I'll be happy to help you.
      I am an important person. would you like to come home with me?
    • The deluxe edition release of the 2017 OKNOTOK expanded re-release of OK Computer features a cassette mixtape that starts with "Zx Spectrum Symphony", a track that appears to be incoherent electronic gibberish. However, putting the tape into a ZX Spectrum computer (or a ZX Spectrum emulator) and running it grants access to a hidden message from the band.
    • Early CD pressings of Kid A included a booklet full of artwork and text (some of which later turned out to be lyrics for their next two albums, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief) hidden underneath the CD tray. To help obscure the booklet, the jewel case sports an opaque black tray rather than the standard clear tray that later copies use (black was standard prior to 1995, but since 1995 clear has been more commonplace). Re-pressings of the album by XL Recordings don't feature the book, but use its cover as the album's tray art instead of the previous CGI mountain range.
  • Weezer:
    • The booklet to The Green Album folds out into a poster-sized crowd photo of one of their live performances: In the right hand corner there's the silhouettes of Mike Nelson, Tom Servo, and Crow T. Robot, just barely visible because they blend into the shadows of the audience members. It's given away just a little bit because the liner notes include a copyright notice from Best Brains. Also, hidden behind the spine of the CD case of the same album is the word "No". Some fans claim it's an answer to the above OK Computer Easter egg, since both are hidden in the same place, but there's no confirmation of this from the band—the only official explanation (from the band's webmaster, Karl Koch) has been "no means no".
    • Pinkerton has a map hidden under the CD tray labeled "Isol Della Farfalla e Penisola Di Cane" (Italian for "Island of the Butterfly and Peninsula of Dog"). Said map is full of names of people who influenced the making of the album ranging from Brian Wilson to Howard Stern.
  • Dream Theater's former drummer, Mike Portnoy, always liked to say "Eat my ass and balls" during live shows. Said phrase appears in Morse code in one of the band's songs, "In the Name of God".
  • Mike Doughty's Haughty Melodic includes a hidden message that can be read by putting the cd in your computer, provided your computer uses Gracenote CDDB to identify track names: The song "Grey Ghost" is listed as "Grey Ghost (Here's the hidden message. Eat your greens. Read 'Everything and Nothing' by Borges. Thanks for listening. Mike)"
  • Take a look at the first letter of tracks 4-9 on the soundtrack to Batman Begins. It spells "Batman"!
  • Reggie And The Full Effect's Under The Tray sort of made the CD itself an Easter egg: When you open the packaging up, it appears at first that you were accidentally sold an empty case. However, if you take the album title to heart and pull out the empty CD tray, you'll find the disc underneath it, along with a picture of a smiling James Dewees and the text "You found it!". Of course, many listeners didn't take the album title as a hint and complained to retailers about being ripped off. This is why there's an alternate version of the cover that adds a diagram of a CD tray being removed to the Minimalistic Cover Art.
  • Rush:
    • Their 2012 effort, Clockwork Angels, depicts a clock on the cover. Assuming the normal placement of numbers on an analog clock, the hands point to 9:12. 9:12 PM, in military time, is 2112.
    • The intro to the song "YYZ" is the same rhythm as the Morse code for the actual letters YYZ.note 
  • Monty Python released The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief in 1973. The single record has "three sides". (Actually, one side has two interlocking spiral grooves. Getting the needle into the second groove so you could hear the "third" side could be quite tricky.)
  • Ashlee Simpson has a hidden note about being yourself in spite of issues in the spine of the cd case.
  • The initial pressing of Pet Shop Boys' album Very was in a custom-molded, solid orange jewel case. It still had a paper tray liner (with a pattern of Chris and Neil's floating heads against an orange background) but you had to pry the tray out of the jewel case (or hold the whole thing against a light source) to see it. Unfortunately, later pressings of Very were just in a standard jewel case, with a solid pink tray liner.
  • The CD edition of Toadies' Rubberneck has a photo of the group printed on the reverse of the back cover, meaning you have to remove the opaque black CD tray to see it. It was also the only image of the band included anywhere on the album packaging.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic did this on a few of his CDs.
    • The CD version of Off the Deep End has ten minutes of silence after the song "You Don't Love Me Anymore", followed by the Hidden Track "Bite Me", which consists entirely of a few seconds of incoherent screaming. While Al admitted he did it to troll anyone who was listening and forgot to turn off their CD player, it's also a visible Shout-Out to Nirvana, who employed a similar trick on their album Nevermind (which Off the Deep End parodies with its cover art and opening track).
    • If Running with Scissors is played on a computer, you can go into the CD and watch a condensed version of his 1996 Going Home special for the Disney Channel.
    • If Poodle Hat is played on the computer, you can watch Al's old home movies as he playfully riffs them. He also thanks you for buying his album... "Instead of downloading it like a HOOLIGAN!"
  • Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello and the Attractions has a cover design that's meant to be a pastiche of the Pablo Picasso piece "Three Musicians". On the left side of the cover are six odd, slug-like creatures with zippers at the ends of their bodies; if you look closely there are letters on these zippers, and they spell out "PABLO SI" when read left to right.
  • Vinyl records can have a message in the run-out groove area. This is most often the name (or nickname) of the cutting engineer, matrix numbers, or the name of the pressing plant, but sometimes also jokes.
    • Starflyer 59's Ghosts of the Future (a boxed set of vinyl singles) had a brief bit of text etched into the runout groove of each disc. Read in order, they formed a brief poem:
    I play guitar and also sing for those who will keep listening. And so to make them come alive, they must be played at 45.
    • "A PORKY PRIME CUT": cut by George Peckham, who did a lot of British records in the 1970s and 1980s. "BILBO" is Denis Blackham.
    • Certain copies of the original UK LP release of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside feature the message "REMEMBER YOURSELF" etched into the runout groove of Side One.
    • The double LP Still by Joy Division has "THE CHICKEN WON'T STOP" on side one, chicken tracks on sides two and three, and "THE CHICKEN STOPS HERE" on side four. This is evidently a rather morbid reference to the Werner Herzog film Stroszek, which earned notoriety for being the last film the face of the band Ian Curtis watched before ending his life.
    • The original LP release of Power, Corruption & Lies by New Order contains the word "STRAWBERRY" and the phrase "STRAWBERRY WHERE's MURDER?" (with that exact capitalization) in the runout groove of side A and side B, respectively. Some later pressings changed these to "THE ROBOT STRAWBERRY", "STRAWBERRY. THE ROBOT" (with or without the period), and/or "WHERE'S MURDER?" depending on which copy one purchased.
    • London Calling by The Clash is another double album example: spread out between the four sides is the message "TEAR / DOWN / THE / WALLS". Some speculated that it was a Pink Floyd Take That!, since The Wall was released earlier the same year. (However, the penultimate song of The Wall, "The Trial", contained the repeated phrase "Tear down the wall," so it could also have simply been a Shout-Out.)
    • Happy Mondays managed to pull this off with a Compact Disc, a format not usually known for such tricks, printing "CALL THE COPS" in the matrix area of US CD copies of Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches. The only US CD to not feature the message is the Disctronics pressing, which instead prints the band name in the matrix area.
    • The Smiths did this a lot the time on their singles. For example:
      • "Hand In Glove": KISS MY SHADES/KISS MY SHADES TOO
      • "How Soon Is Now?": THE TATTY TRUTH / TIM TOM
      • "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side": ARTY BLOODY FARTY/IS THAT CLEVER
      • "Shoplifters of the World Unite": ALF RAMSEY'S REVENGE
      • "Sheila Take a Bow": COOK BERNARD MATTHEWS
      • "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side (Demo Mix)": TRUMP Will Kill AMERICA
    • Early pressings of Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables contained the phrase "Well? Who are the brain police?" in the run-out grooves, a reference to a song from Frank Zappa's Freak Out!.
  • "Rubber Sled" by Fear of Pop is introduced with a sketch wherein Ben Folds talks to Ben Folds with some very strange sounding Source Music playing in the background - if you tune out the dialogue and focus on the music, it becomes apparent that it's just a ludicrously sped-up recording of "Brick" by Ben Folds Five.
  • Hidden under the CD tray to Tripping Daisy's I Am An Elastic Firecracker is a booklet featuring all the lyrics from their previous album, Bill: The CD edition of Bill itself didn't have any of the lyrics printed, so the Easter egg was useful for fans.

    Pinball 
  • There's a longstanding tradition in the Pinball industry of hiding references to cows as Easter Eggs in commercial games, and some players even use the term "Hidden Cows" for Easter Eggs.
    • The tradition started in The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot, as programmer Brian Eddy likes cows. When a ball starts, hold the right flipper, left flipper, then both flippers for at least 45 seconds each. The game will beep; players can then tap out "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with the flipper buttons (right flipper first) and the game will sing along.
  • Many Bally/Williams pins of The '90s have a "Midnight Madness" mode that starts when a game is in progress and the machine's internal clock reaches midnight. It was conceived by programmer Dwight Sullivan, who had a dream of seeing every game in an arcade light up with this mode at the exact same time. He added it to the games he programmed and asked others to do the same. The most common form of Midnight Madness has the machine pretending to malfunction, the flippers go dead, and the game fakes shutting down. After a few seconds, the game wakes up, all balls are launched, and a four-ball multiball frenzy starts where every target is worth 3 million points, with each hit accompanied by various Written Sound Effects. WHO dunnit, Congo, Johnny Mnemonic, and NBA Fastbreak all have this, though some of them require the operator to enable the "Special Mode" setting. Sullivan continues to include it in his games after Williams folded, including Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters, and The Munsters.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation has several:
    • The game's normal Video Mode is a shuttle simulation in the holodeck. An alternative replaces the simulation with a game of Five-Card Draw Poker against Commander Riker instead.
    • Secret Mission: When the holodeck is lit on the right ramp and the display says "Holodeck 3 Ready", pull the phaser trigger three times. This starts a 20 second frenzy where every target is worth a weird number of points.
    • When the ball goes in the Advance Rank/Command Decision hole when nothing is lit, pull the trigger to see a limousine drive past some buildings.
    • Steve Ritchie's Pinography: Pressing the flipper buttons in a specific order during the game will display the logos of all of Steve Ritchie's past games.
  • In FunHouse (1990), Rudy gives each player a nickname at the start of each game. If a player is nicknamed "Slick", Rudy will sometimes use derogatory comments instead of his usual Mad Libs Dialogue.
  • In Tales of the Arabian Nights, press both flipper buttons quickly when entering the Bazaar. On the fourth visit, the merchant will give you a cow worth 1 million points.
  • In White Water, when the Extra Ball is lit, Wet Willie will say "Get the extra ball!" However, there is a very small chance he will instead say "Get the extra ball… YA WIENER!"
  • During a normal game in Fish Tales, various sea creatures swim by. Occasionally, a skeleton fish will appear, and mashing the "cast" button about 10 times when this happens nets you "Russ' Fishbone Bonus"—a mere 10 points.
  • The "Saucer Attack" mode of Attack from Mars can randomly become "Cow Attack" instead. The version of the mode featured in Junk Yard keeps this.
  • In Junk Yard itself, hitting the Time Machine (which is what brings up the "Saucer Attack" mode in the first place) and pressing both flipper buttons three times when it displays 3:33 starts a secret mode. Word of God says that going fast enough in the "Run From Spike" Video Mode plays the famous sound effect from The Six Million Dollar Man. And the game also has a Midnight Madness mode, as described above.
  • Combining this trope with Creator Thumbprint, veteran designer Greg Kmiec always includes a solid red post somewhere on his playfields. The tradition started when Bally refused to identify their designers, so he included a single plastic red post (at the time reserved for bingo games) as a way around that. More information can be found here.
  • Hitting a certain shot in Doctor Who sometimes displays a cow in Doctor attire, mooing.
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula:
    • If you can get Dracula to cross his eyes and hit the Start button while he does so, an animated picture of Fluffy the Vampire appears, and the player gets 20 points.
    • Entering "S-U-N" as your initials at the end of a good game prompts the screen to display "No, not the sun, arghhh!"
  • Among other things, pressing a certain button combination in Monopoly displays a paperboy with an extra edition, along with the text "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" (which was still fresh around the time the game was made in late 2001).
  • Booting up Safe Cracker on October 24th plays a birthday greeting for two people named Amanda and Ryan.
  • Several in Jack*Bot:
    • Press both flipper buttons when the wheel is spinning in Casino Run to get a Kombat Kode for Mortal Kombat 3. (Another Kombat Kode in 3 itself tells you how to do this.)
    • Occasionally, the Extra Ball button flashes during Attract Mode: push it to reveal the credits and the story behind the project (and a dedication to Joe Joos Jr.).
    • Also, watch the Keno card when you get a high score and enter your initials.
  • In Black Rose, it's possible to kill Polly by mashing the Fire button. It awards 2 million points.
  • Sega Pinball's GoldenEye begins with James Bond walking in front of the display, then turning to shoot at the player. If you pull the trigger to fire first, various silly animations appear.
  • The game Monster Bash has six music tracks, one for each of the game's Universal Horror monsters. The seventh track, "Lyman's Lament", is normally available after the player shoots the Concert Hall scoop 44 times in a single game—but a secret combination of flipper presses on the first ball allows it to be available immediately.
  • On the attract modes of both Revenge from Mars and Star Wars Episode I, pressing the flipper buttons in a certain sequencenote  will show a picture of the development team.
  • The cabinet art of Lights… Camera… Action! has the name of designer Jon Norris spelled out among the rocks.
  • Several Williams/Bally games in the 1990s would feature a hidden "DOHO" in the dot matrix graphic artwork. "DOHO" was a reference to Doris Ho, the wife of former Williams/Bally display animator Scott Slomiany (AKA "Scott Matrix"). DOHO was first seen in The Addams Family, the first game which Slomiany worked on.
  • Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has "Candy Kodes" - sequences comprised of pictures of different candies which occasionally appear on the playfield's Wonkavision screen after a ball drains. Entering a normal code with the flippers unlocks a screen where they can be input; the bulk of them simply display a message, but some unlock Challenge Runs.
  • The Munsters has a "Secret Mania" mode which can only be activated by entering a Cheat Codenote  during gameplay and then shooting the scoop twice. It involves collecting every member of the family by shooting designated areas, awarding a bonus upon completion.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Stern): A partially obfuscated newspaper on the side of the Premium version's cabinet has a sub-heading referencing the "Cowabunga It Is" meme, credited to John Borg (the game's designer). The article's body simply consists of the lyrics to the theme song.
  • Godzilla (Sega): Pressing a specific button combination during Attract Mode shows some hidden credits.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Many cards in Magic: The Gathering have Easter Eggs in the name, "flavor text", or art. This is especially prevalent in gag sets like Unglued and Unhinged, and in improved versions of older cards, like the "timeshifted" sets from Time Spiral and Planar Chaos (which was still fresh around the time the game was made in late 2001). This article reveals some of the tiniest.
  • Page 333 of the second edition Unknown Armies corebook.
  • In the 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook, the Expanded Psionics Handbook, the power Deja Vu (which makes someone repeat their last action) is printed twice, on opposite sides of the same page.
  • The Dresden Files RPG has PDF versions of the sourcebooks available if you buy them online; in several places where Harry scratched out part of the text with Sharpie, you can copy the text into another program and read what was underneath. But it usually turns out to be something like "by the way, if you're reading this, we sure bet you feel clever!"
    • That's only part of it; the Sharpie'd out segments are in a larger article about the Christian God and his abilities, with the implication being that Harry Dresden himself blacked out the stuff because he didn't think the Heavenly Host would appreciate having that kind of information spread about them. Performing the above-mentioned trick reveals that the text says (paraphrased) Their powers are unknown, but presumably have something to do with Jim Butcher's writing. It'll all be revealed in due time, so just be patient, okay?
    • The first gamebook's section on worldbuilding, the author remarks on having significant pieces of architecture in one's city, saying "Perhaps the St. Louis Arch is a gateway to something deep in the Nevernever. Maybe the Pyramids at Giza are nowhere near as bad as Chichen Itza." This serves as Foreshadowing to the novel Changes, not yet released when the game books came out, where Harry and crew go to Chichen Itza and destroy the Red Court of Vampires at the cost of Harry's lover Susan.
    • There are also a couple of jokes hidden in the index. For instance, the game is split into two volumes ("Your Story" and "Our World"), so references are given as "YS" or "OW" followed by a page number. Then you come across this entry:
    Who Is Number One?: UR#6
    • Others include such gems as:
  • Almost all the card-illustrations in Illuminati: New World Order slip in a stylized Eye in the Pyramid.
  • Cards Against Humanity has The Bigger, Blacker Box, which contains the white card "The biggest, blackest dick" hidden in the lid of the box.
  • Invisible Sun's impressive (and expensive) Black Cube not only includes all the books, markers, and boards you need to play, but other hidden goodies for those who inspect their sets very carefully or have an eye for detail. Known ones include a bonus spell, an address to a website with a purpose yet to be revealed, a code that needs to be decyphered, and hidden messages and information in the artwork and layout of the books.

    Theatre 
  • Cyrano de Bergerac: At Act II Scene VII, Count De Guiche mentions the famous scene of the windmills that appear at Don Quixote, and Cyrano mentions it’s in chapter XIII. But that scene is at chapter VIII. Any character could make a mistake… except Cyrano, who is a Broken Ace. Chapter XIII (In which is ended the story of the shepherdess Marcela, with other incidents) narrates the tragic tale of the love between Grisóstomo and Marcela, two shepherds, and is the deconstruction of the Romance Novel, the genre Roxane is obsessed with. The protagonists, Cyrano, Le Bret and Roxane are Expies of Grisóstomo, Ambrosio and Marcela, the shepherds Don Quixote meets at that chapter.
    De Guiche: (who has controlled himself—smiling):Have you read 'Don Quixote'?
    Cyrano:I have!
    And doff my hat at th' mad knight-errant's name.
    De Guiche: I counsel you to study. . .
    A Porter (appearing at back):My lord's chair!
    De Guiche: The windmill chapter!
    Cyrano: (bowing): Chapter the Thirteenth.
    • Also, Act III Scene XIII gives us Cyrano trying (and managing) to delay Count de Guiche in order to allow Roxanne and Christian's wedding to proceed. The way he does it—disguising himself, climbing up on a tree and falling at the Count's feet, then pretending to come directly from the Moon and finally detailing the many ways to climb up to the moon from the Earth—seems like some funny, tongue-in-cheek moment from Rostand, almost a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment… until you remember that the play is loosely based on the life of the real Cyrano de Bergerac, who, among his plays and scientific studies, happened to write something called Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun.
  • The Original Broadway Cast album for Hairspray has a hidden surprise—if you leave the CD running after "You Can't Stop the Beat," the cast sings a short song called "Blood on the Pavement." It's an upbeat ditty about finding bloody body parts on the sidewalk after a DUI. It also counts as a Space Whale Aesop, as there's no mention of the dangers of drinking and driving anywhere else in the show.

    Theme Parks 
  • This is done to such an extent at Disney Theme Parks that entire books have been written on the subject of finding them all. The so-called Hidden Mickeys are inconspicuous images of Mickey Mouse or his silhouette placed in various unexpected locations around the parks. It is also very common, when one attraction is closed and replaced with another, for the Imagineers to include an unobtrusive tribute to the old attraction in the new one.
    • Hidden Mickeys aren't just limited to the parks; they appear throughout the movies as well (such as the one located in the middle of Princess Mia's tiara on a movie poster of The Princess Diaries and also on numerous VHS, DVD (not counting the 2-DVD special edition and its sequel) and Blu-ray Disc releases).
  • Universal Studios Florida incorporated several easter egg references to its original Jaws ride into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Diagon Alley attraction which took its place.
  • There's one scene in The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man where you come across a movie theater that has a phone number on its marquee. If you dial it, you'll get a message saying that the theater is closed until Spider-Man can make the city safe again.
  • The Kings Island's coaster, Banshee, has a series of grave markers in front of it. One of these, on closer inspection, is a tribute to the ill-fated wooden coaster "Son of Beast", due to Banshee being built in part of the space it once occupied.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • 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.

  • 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))".
      • Someone working Wolfram Alpha really likes Pulp Fiction, because if you search "Does he look like a bitch" you get "No!" as the response, which is part of the Jules/Brett conversation.
      • In addition, search "Open the pod bay doors" (with or without HAL) and it returns "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
      • Asking "How can entropy be reversed?" returns "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER".
    • 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?
    • In a similar spirit: for the longest time, if you searched "find Chuck Norris" and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" it would redirect you to a special page that said: "Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you."
    • Behold 55 Fun Things To Do With Google. A great many of these are classic Easter Eggs (some already mentioned here).
    • The default language of Google can be set to one of several unusual choices, including Elmer Fudd, Pirate, Bork Bork Bork!, Klingon, and Hacker.
    • Googling "recursion" prompts Google to ask if you meant recursion. The same thing happens if you search Groundhog Day, in reference to its trope-naming "Groundhog Day" Loop.
    • Google "do a barrel roll" or "Z or R twice" (They both give the same result). Just do it.
      • On the same line of thought, google "tilt" or "askew".
    • The number of search results given will be appropriately changed when googling for "binary", "hexadecimal" or "octal".
    • Google "Zerg Rush". We won't spoil its effect for you, so go on.
      • For that matter, searching Google Images for "Atari Breakout". Warning: it seems to be only half-finished, as the bricks do not disappear the way they should.
    • Google "Festivus" and an aluminum pole appears on the left hand side of the results page.
    • You have to get the angle exactly right, but on Google Maps Streetview, it's possible to enter the police box outside Earl's Court Tube Station. It's bigger on the inside.
    • Googling "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away" used to have the search results in the style of the opening crawl, with music to match. (This didn't work in Firefox for some reason.)
    • After Avengers: Endgame premiered in 2019, Google "Thanos" or "Infinity Gauntlet" and a small Infinity Gauntlet appeared. Clicking it would eliminate half of the search results, a cheeky reference to the finale of Avengers: Infinity War.
    • Try to translate "Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!" in Google Translate and the only response you get is "[FATAL ERROR]". Apparently even computers can't handle The Funniest Joke in the World.
    • Googling "Splatoon" will cause a little "splat" animation to appear on the page. Clicking on it will let you cover the page in ink by clicking using your mouse, just like in the games.
    • When googling "Bletchley Park", the sidebar containing the landmark's information will be titled with a sequence of random letters that go through a 'decryption' sequence to reveal "Bletchley Park" in monospace — perhaps a tribute to the "Father of Computing".
  • 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!"
  • 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, or assorted inane statements.
  • This Name Generator contains ones for those who want male flower or gemstone names.
  • In the Potter Puppet Pals video "Trouble at Hogwarts", if the viewer freeze-frames the Avada Kedavra lightning and clicks on it when it forms a pentagram, they are taken to another short video featuring Ron and Hermione in a "follow the butterflies" skit.
  • In "Ask questions" episode of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, if one cares to decipher the binary the Custodian is sprouting, it foreshadows series' future events, namely the Ultramarines bringing Magnus back from the Eye of Terror and Cypher planning something on Mars.
    • In the same video, there's an in-joke of Alfabusa's community—"As long as the questions don't scream about Baneblades…"
    • When Magnus breaks the wards surrounding the Imperial Palace, you can briefly see "we are finally free" on the screen, a Five-Second Foreshadowing to Suddenly Daemons.
  • YouTube:
    • When a video is loading, a circle of dots will appear. Pressing arrow keys will unlock a game of Snake.
    • Typing in "1980" gets you a game of Missile Command in which you have to defend the video from missiles while it plays.
    • If a 500 Internal Server Error occurs, part of the resulting error message that appears says, "A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation."
    • For a long time, searching "do the harlem shake" on YouTube would cause the web site itself to do it, song and all. As of 2021, this no longer happens.
    • Searching "beam me up scotty" will cause a brief animation where the YouTube videos "phrase into existence". Conversely, searching for "use the force luke" will cause the page to animate as if Luke's doing exactly that on the website itself.
    • Until one of the many site redesigns removed this feature, typing in the name of certain My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic characters would cause the top bar to change to that pony's coat color.
    • Type the word "awesome" while the player is in focus and it will start to flash.
    • The video on the Numberphile channel, on why it used to be a common glitch for videos to get frozen at 301 views, has been frozen at 301 views. This is also an example of deliberate irony.
  • There are some on this very Wiki, of various levels of "supposed to be here"-ness. The page on Hook is a good place to start.
  • Videos on the Glove And Boots YouTube channel where at least some of the action takes place inside Mario and Fafa's house (which is most of them) will feature a framed photo of a celebrity on the wall. Mousing over the portrait will reveal it's a link to a video that is somehow related to the person—if there's something other than a photo in the same spot, it'll usually be a link too. Sometimes they'll work additional video links in too—click on the changing posters during the montage in time machine or the fake banner ads in Your Ad Here.
  • Defunct personal music review site Disclaimer Music Review Archive was set up so that reviews for artists whose names start with the same letter were all placed on one long, scrollable page in alphabetical order. At the end of an artist's reviews, there'd often be a "SEE ALSO" list, which links to the author's reviews of related artists. The section for Joey Ramone only has one album review, and of course The Ramones are the only related artist listed. If you click on the Ramones link despite the fact that you'd only have to do a minuscule amount of scrolling to get there manually, it redirects to a special page that consists of a brief tongue in cheek message chiding you for laziness, ending with a link back to the Joey Ramone review.
  • On the website "ponyspin.com", a work-safe pony-version of a certain infamous Shock Site, entering the Konami Code (substituting Enter for Start) will change the image in the center of the page from Apple Bloom to a filly version of DJ PON-3 spinning on a record.
  • Typing in the Konami Code on the Team Fortress 2 Wiki will cause the Spy to sap the wiki's logo.
  • Space Tree includes clickable Easter eggs with buttons at end screens that are hidden until a mouseover. In one case, there was a series of secret scenes with each scene only accessible from the previous.
  • How to Start off 2014 Right! by Matthew Santoro contains a hidden link to a bonus video.
  • If you search Tumblr for certain tags, the site will give an automated message related to it. Crosses over into heartwarming territory, since if you search for "depression" or "suicide", the site will ask if you're okay.
  • RWBY: Each volume has a split second appearance by a random velociraptor somewhere in the shot. The fans have dubbed him the "RWBYsaurus".
  • RateMyProfessors.com has an entry for Ted Kaczynski (better known as "The Unabomber") who was, in fact, an assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley between 1967-69.
  • The streaming website Twitch has various animated emotes used for a function called Cheering, where you spend money on Bits to donate to a streamer and get a cool chat badge out of it. Every year for April Fool's Day, they replace the default smoothly animated Bit with a crappily drawn chalk animation of a Bit, but you can use this poorly drawn emote all year long by typing "DoodleCheer[Number of bits to donate]". (Unlike the other Cheer emotes, this one doesn't appear in the menu of selectable emotes outside of April Fool's Day and has to be typed.)
  • Searching "B5429671" on thefreedictionary.com will redirect you to "clank".
  • The official website of the Warrior Cats books has a link labeled "MEOW" hidden among the legal links at the bottom of the site. Clicking it will replace every word in the book quotes with the word "Meow".
  • From movie reviewing site Letterboxd (most of these only work on the desktop version of the site and not the app unless specified):
    • The page for Portrait of a Lady on Fire uses fire icons to rate the film instead of stars.
    • Wait a few seconds on the page for Parasite (2019) and the green dot in the logo will start flashing, referencing Geun-sae using Morse code with the house's lights to try and communicate with the outside world in the film. Incidentally, the message that it's blinking out reads "BONGHIVE BEST PICTURE 2020".
    • The page for Tenet is vertically mirrored once you reach the bottom.
    • The "Related films" tabs for both Borat and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm read "Related moviefilms".
    • The "Watched" eye icon for Everything Everywhere All at Once is replaced with a googly eye, the film's recurring motif.
    • On the page for Tár, the Letterboxd logo instead reads "Lettárboxd".
    • Marking any adaptation of Dune as watched changes the eye's usual green color to blue, a reference to the Fremen.
    • Every instance of the "Liked" heart icon on Barbie (2023)'s page has its color changed from orange to pink.
    • When writing/reading a review for any film in the Scream franchise, the "contains spoilers" button/warning goes from featuring the standard Darth Vader icon to one of Ghostface.
    • For Napoleon (2023), the colors of the circles in the Letterboxd logo are changed to those of the French flag.
    • If you add Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour to your watchlist, the clock icon will have its hands change to midnight, in reference to the eponymous album.
    • Tagging a review of Talk to Me with a candle emoji will make a message appear in your activity feed.
    • App-only eggs:
  • If you receive a 404 error on chat app Discord's website, you can click a button in the bottom right to gain access to Snek, a version of Snake with cute graphics.
    You hecking won!
  • Robotbox and Cactus:
    • "Classic" has a hidden bee on the end screen that, when clicked, brings up "Oh God, Bees!", a parody of My God Robots.
    • The SWF files for the episodes each have an extra word that's often irrelevant to the contents or actual title of the episode. Of note is that episodes 30 through 32 are given the filenames "pick", "your", and "nose".
  • Perhaps in acknowledgement of the many, many wiseacres who've no doubt called or stopped in to ask on its availability over the years, punching "121G" into the search bar on O'Reilly Auto Parts' website will get you this gag.

    Western Animation 
  • Each episode of Big City Greens has a literal Easter egg hidden somewhere (except on the odd occasion where the animators forget).
  • On the Nicktoon Invader Zim, series creator Jhonen Vasquez secretly inserted images of GIR covered in blood in a few episodes, without Nickelodeon knowing.
  • In Episode 229 of Kaeloo, the characters are forced into Sdrawkcab Speech; reversing the audio reveals that it's Kaeloo saying "you must really have time to waste!"
  • In the Ninjago season 7 finale "Lost in Time", shots from previous episodes can briefly be seen both times the Iron Doom mech travels through a Time Vortex. A few of these are moments from season 6, which is interesting because those events were undone at the end of that season.
  • Sealab 2021 frequently featured the Big Green Phone, which is surrounded by random graffiti. In one episode, it appeared twice, the second time with the phrase "This graffiti is not different stop pausing" added.
  • On The Simpsons, if you pause the list of "corrections" Rock Bottom wished to make in "Homer Badman", you find, amongst various other hidden jokes, that you have no life.
  • The South Park animators have supposedly hidden at least one alien into every episode; there are web pages and YouTube videos dedicated to documenting as many as possible.
  • Total Drama includes a quick one in the first season episode Basic Straining. When Duncan and Courtney are raiding the fridge, the "missing boy" pictured on the milk carton is Ezekiel, the first contestant to be eliminated. Oddly enough, it's never been acknowledged who reported Ezekiel missing in the first place, or if this person ever found out where he was.
    • Ezekiel can also be seen in the background of several scenes on the plane during World Tour, some more obvious than others. Unlike the example above, there is a purpose to this in that Ezekiel has been hiding on the plane following his elimination.
    • During Revenge of the Island, a dark, red-eyed figure resembling Mike can be seen in the background of one of his mind scenes. This serves as foreshadowing for Mal, a character that would become much more prominent during the next season.
  • The Allspark Almanacs, the guides to the Transformers: Animated universe, are basically a gigantic Easter egg hunt. They're littered not only with a million Shout Outs to other parts of the Transformers mythos, but to real life (one of the unnamed drag racers, seen in exactly one scene and never named is given the name of a voice actor's daughter) and every tangentially geeky thing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Animorphs. The stellar map in Allspark Almanac II is a particularly egregious offender, featuring hundreds of individual worlds that are all named after geek references.

    Real Life 
  • The Trope Namer, the Easter egg. Every Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox) Easter eggs are hidden in yards for children to find. Creative parents will often hide them in very out-of-the-way or unusual locations (up a tree, in a flower pot, etc.)
    • Real life Easter eggs come in three main types. Real eggs, which are hardboiled (or punctured and drained) and dyed, plastic ones, which are openable to put things inside, and chocolate ones, which are… well… made of chocolate.
  • Fisher & Paykel SmartDrive washing machines will turn patriotic and play God Defend New Zealand if the Power and Advance buttons are pressed together and then the Wash Temperature Up button is held down for two seconds. It is also possible for them to play Advance Australia Fair, The Star Spangled Banner, and the theme from Beverly Hills Cop.
  • The vending machines used on The London Underground in the early '00s could be persuaded, by pressing a certain sequence of buttons when no credit was inserted, to display a brief test message.
  • The Mice On Main, nine tiny bronze mouse statues hidden on the sidewalks on Main Street in downtown Greenville, South Carolina.


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Alternative Title(s): Easter Eggs

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Bowser's Dialogue To Peach

In the final castle level against Bowser, if the player chooses Peach for the level in Super Mario Bros Wonder, Bowser will call Peach his ''beloved'' and Peach will react in shock, which references how Bowser has kidnapped her many times in the Mario series with one of those reasons being due to his crush on her. When using any other character he simply says, ''Sorry for the wait'' as shown with Mario.

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