Easter Eggs Have Been a Part of Gaming for Longer Than You Think

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Video game Easter eggs are hidden surprises – items or areas – that can be easy or really hard to discover. Finding one feels like a little reward! These hidden treats have been a part of gaming for decades. If you’re familiar with the book or movie Ready Player One, you might remember the first known Easter egg, hidden in the 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure. By completing a specific sequence of actions, players could unlock a secret room that was otherwise almost impossible to find.

When players discovered a hidden room in the game, they found the message, “Created by Warren Robinett.” Robinett secretly added this area because games at the time didn’t usually credit their creators. This hidden message is where the term “Easter egg” originated in the world of video games. While many know Adventure’s importance in gaming history, it wasn’t actually the first game to include a hidden surprise – that happened seven years prior.

Video Game Easter Eggs Date Back to 1973

Although the term “Easter egg” wasn’t used in video games until 1980 with the game Adventure, the first hidden surprise appeared in 1973’s Moonlander. Several games with similar moon landing themes, like Lunar Lander, came out during the 1970s. Moonlander was included with DEC computers, meaning fewer people played it than later, commercially released games. However, it contains the very first Easter egg – and it’s tricky to discover, requiring a precise landing spot.

In the game, if the player successfully landed their spacecraft, the astronaut would exit and head to a giant McDonald’s logo to order “Two cheeseburgers and a Big Mac to go.” This was a playful comment on how quickly McDonald’s restaurants were appearing everywhere – the joke being they’d soon be on the Moon! Today, you might say the same about Starbucks. However, back in 1973, McDonald’s was the brand everyone was talking about. If the landing went wrong and the spacecraft crashed into the McDonald’s, the game would scold the player with the message, “You clod. You’ve destroyed the only McDonald’s on the Moon.”

Following the hidden surprise in Moonlander, game developers kept including secret features, though they weren’t yet called “Easter eggs.” One early example appeared in 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure, the first game where you typed commands to play. This game inspired another called Adventure and contained hidden words that worked as secret commands. Typing “xyzzy” would allow your character to teleport to different locations within the game. In 1977, Starship 1, created by Ron Milner, included an Easter egg triggered by a specific button combination. Entering this sequence displayed the message, “Hi Ron!”

Easter Eggs Predate the Term by Seven Years

Easter eggs – hidden features in games – have been around for a long time, but they didn’t always have that name. Programmers liked including them as a fun challenge for players, and it became a common practice. Though Warren Robinett’s hidden message in his game is considered the first named Easter egg in 1980, the idea itself wasn’t new. It simply became the most well-known example, helping to popularize the term. Today, developers still hide all sorts of Easter eggs in their games, and players still enjoy the thrill of discovering them, just like they did decades ago.

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2026-01-02 17:42