“The First Easter egg”
Photo of a letter written to Atari by Adam Clayton, in early 1980. A few months after the release of the game.
By Scott Hamilton
I saw an advertisement earlier this week for the 50th anniversary edition Atari retro game mix and it brought back memories of one of my favorite games. I started in home video games with a home-made pong game that my father built from instructions in a book. That led on to the Atari and later the Commodore 64 computer. Most people think of Easter eggs as the colorful eggs that we hide for children to hunt on Easter, but video game fans know of a different kind of Easter egg.
An Easter egg in a video game is a secret room, object or task that reveals something only the programmer knows about the game. Sometimes these hidden little gems in a game go undiscovered for years. The first Easter egg was in the Atari game Adventure, published in late 1979. At the time Atari had a policy that no developer could take public credit for their work. This left game developer Warren Robinett upset with the company, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Robinett decided to hide his name in the game. A 13-year-old boy, Adam Clayton, was the first to notify Atari of Robinett’s secret. He sent a hand-written letter to the company in early 1980. Clayton’s letter included a drawing of the discovery of a secret room. “I have the Atari T.V. games, and the Adventure game program, and I have found something strange.” He goes on to describe the discovery of a “dot” in the maze room of the black castle.
Steve Wright is believed to be the Atari employee who came up with the label “Easter egg” for these secret messages, after Robinett’s message was discovered. Wright brought a positive spin to the idea stating they were “like Easter eggs for players to find.” The amount of positive press following the discovery increased the sales of Adventure dramatically and hiding Easter eggs became common practice at Atari and across the industry.
It’s not too hard to find out about all the known Easter eggs today, but back in the 1980s the main communication for gamers was PC Gamer magazine. If you were lucky you had a subscription, and information about Easter eggs were usually revealed in letters to the editor. I can remember looking forward to the monthly release of PC Gamer. I was not a subscriber, but would skim the magazine each month and buy a copy if I owned any of the games discussed in the issue.
I will never forget my disappointment with a little known Atari game, “Mouse Trap.” One month in PC Gamer magazine, there was a letter to the editor stating that something special happened when you reached 100,000 points in “Mouse Trap.” I played the game constantly that month.One night after playing for over an hour I reached 100,000. The only thing that happened was the score reset to zero. I almost cried. Not all Easter eggs are fun, but they are still fun to find.
Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
