Searching For The Very First Easter Egg In Video Games

This Easter week, I wanted to share a fascinating story of the search for the very first Easter Egg in video game history. Steve Wright, director of software development for Atari's Consumer Division coined the term to describe hidden undocumented features in a video game, like hidden programmer credits or power ups or in-jokes. Atari had a policy of not crediting programmers that worked on their games, developers from their products, as the company believed doing so would prevent competitors from identifying and luring away Atari's best programmers.

In protest against this policy, programmer Warren Robinett devised an obscure series of circumstances in the1979 Atari game Adventure that, when executed correctly would take the player to an otherwise-inaccessible room that displayed the text "Programmed by Warren Robinett". When a curious teenager stumbled upon the hidden credit in the game and notified Atari, the company found that going back and changing the code and issuing new game cartridges would be prohibitively expensive, so the credit stayed. Wright dubbed it an Easter Egg, and Atari turned the act of rebellion into a company feature, making programmer credit Easter Eggs a de-facto company standard.

While Adventure has arguably the most well-known video game Easter Egg, it is not the very first Easter Egg in a video game. That particular honor went to the video game Video Whizball released in 1978 for the Fairchild Channel F home gaming system. Or so it was thought.

Enter video game historian Ed Fries and pioneering Atari employee Ron Milner. During the course of an interview Fries was conduction with Milner about the very first racing car video games, Milner's work on the video game Starship 1 came up. And what Milner said was mind-blower and history-changing. As Fries relates:

“That was the first and only game that I ever programmed and I think it was maybe one of the first games with a backdoor in it," [said Milner]. "I didn’t tell people about this, even within Atari, for at least 30 years, but I had some code in there that if you did a certain sequence of controls it would say ‘Hi Ron!‘ and give you 10 free games.”
I was kind of stunned. If this was true it would certainly predate the earliest video game Easter egg that I knew of and the one that is most often cited as being the first: “Adventure” for the Atari 2600 from 1979. I did a little searching online and found that there was an even earlier Easter egg in the game “Video Whizball” which was released in 1978 for the Fairchild Channel F game console.
But there was a problem. Ron didn’t remember exactly how to bring up the Easter egg. He remembered showing it off to some buddies at a county fair when the game first came out, but that was 40 years ago!

The story of the research into finding and rediscovering this hidden part of gaming history is a super fascinating read, so read the whole thing!

[VIDEO] Holy Crap! Atari 2600 Emulator Runs In Minecraft

Description: Screenshot of aerial view of  a grass field in Minecraft
with grooves carved out to spell "Holy Crap!!!"

We interrupt your whatever you are doing to bring you this amazing video from user SethBling showing all of the work that went into getting the popular sandbox-construction Minecraft to run an Atari 2600 emulator INSIDE the game using nothing but the existing tools and blocks available in Minecraft itself. Seriously, like, he has a memory cache built out of blocks of dirt and stone.

Anyhow, the video below shows the emulator in action as well as goes into the fascinating technical explanations of how he worked to pull it off. It also doubles as a clear technical explanation of how early cartridge based systems and consoles worked.

Now You're Printing With Power: 3D Printer Retro Portable

Friend of the blog Drew of Drew's Robots has done some pretty awesome things with his custom designed and built 3-D printer-- a TARDIS that transforms into Optimus Prime, remote controlled walker robots, and his latest upload to Thingaverse: a little retro portable handheld console he calls the PiSP, for PiStation Portable.

My main design goal was to have good ergonomics. This design fits nicely with my large hands, with an analog joystick that I find more comfortable than a D-pad, and large illuminated buttons with nice mechanical action instead of small membrane buttons. 

The mechanical assembly is fairly simple, only two printed pieces, with nearly all the electrical parts attached to the front half. It has an internal battery charger, and can be played while charging - although you will discharge faster than you charge, so you still need to shut down to recharge fully. The second USB port on the PI is accessible, so you can plug in a USB drive to transfer roms, or an external keyboard for configuration or emulating systems needing a keyboard.

If you want to make this for yourself, you can download the files and print them out for free by visiting his Thingaverse page.

Inaugural Video Game Hall Of Fame Inductees Announced

The Nation Museum of Play announced the formal formation of the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, NY last year. This week, they announced the first inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and the games chosen for the very first inductees are certainly trail-blazers each in their own way.

At left are the games chosen: Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., DOOM, and World of Warcraft. These games beat out others in a finalists' field of 15 video games.

I think the Museum picked a great series of games to start out with. All of these had a significant impact on the industry, and were all game-changers (pardon the pun). However, I really feel like they should have allowed more than 6 for the inaugural session-- if for no other reason than help shore up the displays in the hall a little, and then fall back to six for every year after that. The pulled froma lot of history, especially for an inaugural year. I think that of the other announced finalists-- Angry Birds, FIFA, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, The Oregon Trail, Pokémon, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog and Space Invaders-- will be future inductees to the Hall of Fame.

What do you think, readers?

Jump Up And Get Down: 5 Critical Moments in Platform Game History

Jeremy Parish has a long history of insightful writing and analysis of video games, especially action-platformers. His work as editor at USGamer.net's continues this tradition with a fascinating article examining five of what he calls "Critical Moments In Platform Game History". For example, here is an excerpt from that article talking about Pitfall! and what it brought to the genre:

Pitfall! feels admittedly primitive compared to latter-day platformers, with flip-screen scrolling and simple two-level world design, yet it marked an important moment not only for the genre but for the medium at large. It introduced the idea that fast-paced action games could take place in settings rather than simply exist as isolated scenarios. Pitfall!'s quest dropped players into a jungle maze, one whose simple visuals belied structural complexity (traveling underground took you along a different route than going overland) and required both twitch skill and mental discipline to master.

The entire article is a fascinating read and traces the crucial moments of the platform genre of video games, from Donkey Kong to the debt that Super Mario Brothers owes Pac-Land! Check it out!

A Very Weird And Blocky Future: Video Game Nostalgia From Todd Levin

Todd Levin, best known for his monthly comedy reading series, How To Kick People, began a retrospective on the various home video game console systems he has known and loved. From the article:

In 1979, my father brought home a beige-colored box made of industrial plastic. There were a few metal toggles and dials on the face, and a tangle of black electrical cords hanging from it, attached to a pair of smaller plastic boxes outfitted with small, sliding dimmer switches. It looked like something hospitals use to test blood glucose levels, or jump-start a patient’s heart. But, instead of squirting conductive jelly on its two electric paddles, my father hooked the device up to our 13-inch black-and-white television set, gathered up his children, and said, “Here is your new toy.

This looks like a promising series, so you'll want to get in on the ground floor.