Let the kids have their pretty baskets and chocolate bunnies tomorrow.
You want grown-up “Easter Eggs” … yet with all the childlike wonder that made the hunts of your youth such a pleasant memory. So you want to spend some time at “The Easter Egg Archive,” which since launching in 1995 has become the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) of eggs.
For the uninitiated, here’s how the archive’s FAQ defines Easter Egg:
“In the context of software (get that Cadbury Bunny out of your head!), an Easter Egg is a hidden feature or novelty that the programmers have put in their software. In general, it is any hidden, entertaining thing that a creator hides in their creation only for their own personal reasons. This can be anything from a hidden list of the developers, to hidden commands, to jokes, to funny animations.”
The archive boast more than 10,000 items and is a living, breathing bunny, too, with new entries added on an almost daily basis and from a breathtakingly varied roster of volunteer egg hunters, such as this Thai fan’s offering about an egg in Windows XP Notepad – Thai version.
By no means are we talking only software eggs, either, as there are categories for DVDs, computers, movies, music, television, books and art.
You can scan the “Eggs With Pictures” and “The Top 25 Eggs” as voted by the site’s visitors. (No. 1 with an average rating of 9.8 out of 10 from 11,485 voters is “Red Dwarf series 4 – Comic Relief Red Nose Cast.”) There’s a discussion board and should you get hooked on these things you can get e-mail updates.
Browsing the archive you can see:
That developers use Easter Eggs to snipe at one another, as in “Firefox’s Revenge for IE5’s Joke” and AMD 4400+ – Pin 939.
That egg writers like to show off their linguistic stills, as in “Latin Message Inside Google Toolbar.”
They sometimes simply crave recognition, as in “Team Pic in Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition” and “Notes (Lotus) – List of Employees.”
That Photoshop, as might be expected, has long been a hotbed of this kind of tomfoolery.
Same for Winamp.
As for practical applications, the archive will even show you an egg that’ll let you win instantly at Solitaire in Windows XP.
Keepers of the archive are David and Annette Wolf, who have literally written the book on the subject of Easter Eggs.
Happy hunting.
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