Walter Robinett

In 1979, Atari released the graphical adventure game, Adventure, programmed by Warren Robinett for the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) home gaming console. A remake of the text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure (1977), Robinett’s Adventure became famous for it’s inclusion of a secret room, containing a message hidden within the game. This form of hidden message soon became known as the Easter egg; rooms, items and areas hidden within games waiting to be discovered by venturous players. While Adventure’s hidden room was not the first instance of the Easter egg created in a game (in 2004, an Easter egg was discovered hidden in a game title for the Fairchild Channel F console, which predated Adventure by several years), it was the first ever discovered by a game player. In time, the Easter egg became commonplace in video games as a means for programmers and designers to place their own embedded authorial markers within a game. Continue Reading →