Game Easter Eggs were popularised as the result of a protest by Warren Robinett in Atari’s Adventure (1980). This was during a time when many game studios didn’t credit developers in their products. Robinett’s inclusion of his name was his way of disagreeing with this policy. Although the original Easter Egg was discovered by accident, their discovery has since evolved into a mark of skills and status among gamers.

Go behind the waterfall. Through the cracked wall. Easter Eggs and their hiding places have become a shared language in video game culture. But Easter Eggs also represent a growing trend in video games: emergent gameplay or ‘making your own fun’. These concepts are particularly noticable in the increasing popularity of sandbox games, survival games, and the rise of 100%-ing & speed running.

Sandbox and survival games allow players to create their own scenarios, buildings, or stories within a world they imagine. Whereas, speed running and 100%-ing are like setting increasingly high goals and letting the struggle to achieve them become the emergent gameplay. Although the concept of emergent gameplay isn’t the same as the concept of Easter Eggs, I’d argue that Easter Eggs represent a feeling, a rush, a ‘high’ that emergent gameplay has evolved to chase.

No game has refined the genre like Minecraft. It gave players a world to explore, enemies to survive, and then let them decide how they wanted to play it. Each discovery of a diamond cave or lava pool in Minecraft is, in some ways, an unintentional Easter Egg. The developers didn’t specifically hide them there to be discovered like a traditional Easter Egg but the player ascribes their own value to the discovery according to the world they’re building in their imagination. This means the discovery elicits very similar emotions to a traditional Easter Egg.

In the days before the rise of the internet, rumours of Easter Eggs, cheats, and secrets in games would spread like Chicken Pox from primary school to primary school. Sometimes the rumours would turn out to be true, and the secrets you uncover would fuel your school yard stories for weeks. But, other times, the more elusive rumours would stay with you for months, even years. I’ve come to think of these as Urban Legend Easter Eggs. For example: the rumour that you could save Portal’s companion cube or find Mew under the truck, the latter still frustrates my colleague to this day. But, now, the internet has made all but the most difficult Easter Eggs accessible to everyone through the power of community. This means developers can afford to make Easter Eggs more difficult to uncover. And, we get games built almost entirely around the concept, like 2022’s Tunic, developed by Isometricorp Games and published by Finji (a personal favourite of mine).

Tunic brings us back to a time when instruction manuals came with physical copies of the game and may even contain hidden clues to help you in your journey. I won’t spoil anything else about the game but, trust me, it’s a masterpiece.

Easter Eggs offer a powerful way to extend the playable lifespan of your game. Adding Easter Eggs is like adding a whole new game mode for players to enjoy: ‘The Hunt’. The search for well-hidden secrets like Easter Eggs will enable players to continue hanging out in a world they’ve likely fallen in love with, and allow them to use the skills they’ve painstakingly learned and refined. But, even more than joy, players will feel that they’ve truly got ‘value for money’ from their experience. Easter Eggs continue to be a great outlet for developers to express themselves in fun, unexpected, and outlandish ways. They embolden players to explore new depths in their favourite games, hone skills to a keener edge, and create whole new games in their mind as they search behind rocks, under trap doors, and through waterfalls.