Easter egg (media)

I am a hedgehog, NOT an egg!
An image that reveals an Easter egg when the hedgehog is clicked or tapped. Another Easter egg can be found in a tooltip when a mouse pointer is hovered over the hedgehog.[1]

An Easter egg is a message, image, or feature hidden in software, a video game, a film, or another—usually electronic—medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then-Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt.

The earliest known video game Easter egg is in the 1973 video game Moonlander, in which the player tries to land a Lunar module on the Moon; if the player opts to fly the module horizontally through several of the game's screens, they encounter a McDonald's restaurant, and if they land next to it, the astronaut will visit it instead of standing next to the ship. The earliest known Easter egg in software in general is one placed in the "make" command for PDP-6/PDP-10 computers sometime in October 1967–October 1968, wherein if the user attempts to create a file named "love" by typing "make love", the program responds "not war?" before proceeding.[2][3]

  1. ^ "Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel" ("Two rabbits and a hedgehog") by Carl Oswald Rostosky.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Montfort was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Willaert was invoked but never defined (see the help page).