Did anyone ever discover the purpose of the little crystal or gem that’s in the Diablo 2 chatroom interface? :)
If you pick up the basketball before you enter the building with the tutorials and where you pick your career, you can score with it when you (much later) find the basketball court. You then get a hillarious voice e-mail from a bunch of monkies asking you to join them in their fight against SHODAN (bananas and coconuts included).
I would have to say the characters in blizzard RTS games when you click them over and over.
I do not recall JeffK from IWD, and I played it 3 times over.
The first easter egg I ever found was in one of the Crusader games. I was stuck at one point because I couldn’t find a key, so I started launching grenades in frustration. I accidentally opened a room with a computer that contained a picture of the folks who worked on the game.
I don’t think I’ve ever found an easter egg after that, though. :(
Hey, no fair. You gotta tell us what it is now! After all, isn’t there a like a statute of limitations after which you can assume no one is going to find it? Spill the beans for us, Charles!
Are you saying it actually had a purpose? What? Do tell.
-Tom
I’d be willing to bet that no other two-minute programming job ever produced such substantial results.
[size=2]No, I don’t know what it does. My guess is “arouse curiosity”. :)[/size]
I think it’s like a stress ball. Click it when someone annoys you on B.net. Legend has it that if you click it fast enough their head will explode.
RRRRRAAAAAARGH!!! Whre si my magic hatt??!!! I AM VARY DIPSLLEASED SIR!!! Ph34R M3!!!
To be fair, it’s a cheat code more than a traditional “go into this secret area and do X and Y, and then Z will happen!” easter egg, but in my mind useless-yet-fun cheat codes count. I forget the exact code, but you can summon JeffK either as an ally or an enemy.
In accordance with his wishes when he interviewed the game devs, they portrayed him as a gargantuan cyclops with predictably bad grammar.
You would replay a game just to hear a joke? Wow, that’s commitment. ;-) Is SH3 that game with the awful camera?
I’m now playing PsiOps and I’m pleased to report I found an Eastern Egg. In the docks. That probably means everybody found it.
Bye,
Steven
If you pick up the basketball before you enter the building with the tutorials and where you pick your career, you can score with it when you (much later) find the basketball court. You then get a hillarious voice e-mail from a bunch of monkies asking you to join them in their fight against SHODAN (bananas and coconuts included).[/quote]
I was partially responsible for that easter egg! I was on QA at the time. Ken Levine (chumpface) had entered a bug in the bug database for himself along the lines of “write monkey email”. What he meant by that was “write some emails explaining why there are psychic monkeys on the ship”. But when QA saw that bug, we thought he was talking about email from the monkeys, and immediately started building the legend of Admiral Bananas. Eventually, word got back to the design team, and they decided to put it in as an easter egg :-)
Three reasons why Q23 is 8)
I’ll second that one. Bonus points because it got someone fired.
Someone upthread mentioned Anachronox, but didn’t mention the guy you talk to 500 times. Somewhere in the game, there’s an NPC named Mawn you can talk to that plays with the convention of most NPCs in games saying the same thing, or a few different things but then repeating if you talk to them repeatedly. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but the first time through his “typical” conversation cycle, he mentions something about that, something about how everyone repeats themselves. It was enough to make me think “ok, maybe he doesn’t repeat himself.” If you keep talking to him, he’ll eventually say something to throw you off. A new line of dialogue, but something like “I’ll bet you’re expecting a reward for being clever enough to keep talking to me, well too bad” and then he briefly goes back into the stuff he was repeating initially. But if you keep talking to him even longer, he finally says something about how persistent you are and how he bets you won’t talk to him another 400 times. For the next 400 times you talk to him, his dialogue is just him counting. Well, I kept going of course, and sure enough, at 400, he remarks how rude you are, thinking you can get a reward just for pestering you. He steals 500 loonies and disappears. I almost reloaded my save game at that point, but decided against it and later on found him again somewhere else. I remember when I found him the second time, he gave back the money he stole, but I can’t remember if he actually gave me any additional reward.
One of my other favorite easter eggs was the mace in Ico.
There is a unique Zombie in Diablo II, Act 2, named “Creeping Feature.”
The crashed Kilrathi ship in Ultima 7.
“Bee Cave.” Also in Ultima 7. Named for a town just outside of Austin. :)
The Developer Quotes in Ultima 7. (Spankamiah?)
My personal favorite is the level select in the Atari computer version of Miner 2049er that me and my friend discovered as kids.
He had the cartridge version of the game and the publisher’s phone number was printed on the cartridge. As a young kid I figured, hey, maybe typing in the phone number will make something cool happen. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to happen. My friend suggests that maybe we need to hold shift (or was it control?) when typing the number. He holds shift (or control), types the first digit of the phone number and, poof, we’re warped to that level.
A little extra experimentation and we discover that we do need to type the phone number normally and then hold shift (or maybe control) and press the number of the level we wanted to jump to.
It was just one of those times that being a naive kid actually paid off. These days, I’m too cynical to try anything “dumb” like that and expect results.
Click the chat gem enough times and it eventually becomes a perfect gem.
The function of the chat gem was to be the one thing that had any forethought put into it, the one thing Blizzard could safely say “Yep, that feature functions properly” about. Which is nice, seeing as it does absolutely nothing.
You would replay a game just to hear a joke? Wow, that’s commitment. ;-) Is SH3 that game with the awful camera?[/quote]
The UFO endings always have such requirements that you don’t need to play through the entire game to see them. And yes, the one in SH3 was particularly worth seeing, especially if you’ve seen the other 2 UFO endings. Those guys know screwed-up-HAHA as well as they know screwed-up-oh-dear-god.
ST: Elite Force 2 is chock full of easter eggs (no, not talking about the “golden starships”)
one of my favorites is the “Crate monster”.