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Essays 16 January 2021, 11:15

author: Paul Musiolik

Easter Eggs and Secrets Discovered After Years

Developers love hiding secrets in their games, giving their most loyal fans riddles that can sometimes seem unsolvable. Some of these mysteries took many veritable decades to be discovered.

Table of Contents

First easter egg ever found in Adventure

If, Dear Reader, you have at least once wondered where the term "easter egg" came from in video games, we have a brief piece of history for you. When the video game market was in its infancy, companies would not announce who developed a given product. Warren Robinett, creator of 1979's Adventure, decided to leave a mark in the form of a secret room, where he placed the text "Created by Warren Robinett." To discover this room, the player had to take the gray square and use it to go to the other side of the wall.

The secret was revealed after nine months by one gamer who decided to write to the game's publisher, Atari. When Warren's manager learned of the affair, he did not get angry with the programmer. On the contrary, he was amused by this ingenuity. He likened the discovery of the mystery to finding an Reinet Easter egg. The name kind of stuck.

Mortal Kombat – hidden diagnostics menu

The diagnostic menu in the arcade machine versions of the classic Mortal Kombat series waited for a very long time to be discovered. The EJB menu (named after series co-creator, Ed Boon) allowed you to select any warrior, see all endings, activate the game without tokens, and take advantage of many other debug options to test various aspects of this production.

The discovery was made by hackers digging into the code of the slot machines. The special menu was activated by pressing the block button on the first and second player in a specific order (different for each of the three installments).

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Paul Musiolik

Paul Musiolik

Started writing about games on the SquareZone website. Later, he wrote and managed the non-existent PSSite.com, and currently runs his own blog about games. He hasn't yet written a text that he would be 100% satisfied with. He started his adventure with games at the age of 3, when he managed to convince his father to buy a C64 computer. The love for electronic entertainment awakened by Flimbo's Quest blossomed during the first adventures with Heroes of Might & Magic, reaching its peak after purchasing the first PlayStation. As he grew older, he had more encounters with Nintendo portable consoles, and also returned to the PC as an additional gaming platform. He collects games and is a fan of emulation.

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