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The power of Easter Eggs in tech
Spoiler alert: I will talk about some Easter eggs in existing products. Don’t worry tho, you probably read about them before :)
An Easter egg is a purposely well hidden message or feature in a digital or hardware product.
The term stems from the tradition of hiding decorated eggs for Easter and thus creating a game where the participants had to hunt for them.
A brief history
The first time the term Easter egg was used was for the 1979 Atari 2600 game Adventure[1]. At that time, developers that worked on games for Atari were not given any credit to avoid them being recruited by other companies, thus making them essentially unknown to the end user.
A smart and brave developer, Warren Robinett, managed to create a hidden feature where users could enter a new section of the game and see his name as credit (See picture below). This was obviously done without any of the chiefs approval, which was more of a statement towards them than the end users [2].
In Robinett’s own words:
If it had been too easy to get into the secret room, somebody at Atari would have found it. There were internal testers at Atari. It wasn’t formalized, but there were some people that worked there that just liked playing the games under development and they’d give you some feedback. The guy who wrote the manuals played all the games and he thought Adventure was pretty good. He was giving me feedback as I was working on it. If it had been too easy, he would have gotten into the secret room and I was quite clear in my own mind that if anyone found out what I was doing, that secret would spread like a brush fire in Australia. Then it wouldn’t happen. It would get taken out.
Since then, Easter eggs have become more and more common and can be found not only in games, but productivity software, online services and even hardware.
What makes Easter eggs so captivating?
As a user, Easter eggs are to me a human manifestation by a logical and no-nonsense machine. In a time when…
