In the spirit of the holiday (or Ready Player One — take your pick) I’ve gotten together a list of some of my personal favorite Easter Eggs in gaming. For those unfamiliar with the term in Gaming, an Easter Egg is typically a nice little surprise that developers like to hide for players to find. From nods to other games or pop culture, to more nefarious hidden treats, here are just a few of my personal favorites!
5. Sonic the Hedgehog’s Credits Screen
In the early ages of gaming, a lot of publishers didn’t like their developers having credit in their games. Like many other credits of games of this age, some more gruesome than others, the team behind Sonic decided they wanted to give credit where credit was due. So as the game starts up, they hid their names in black text on a black background, allowing to make it past Sega’s approval and into player’s hands.
4. Far Cry 3’s Head in the Sand
Before the release of Ubisoft’s Ambitious Open World Sandbox, Far Cry 3, they worked with McLovin himself, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, to create a web series really showing off the game’s antagonist, Vaas. Chris gets captured by Vaas and buried in the sand to be left alive and toyed with. When the game finally came out, player’s could find this area in the game and unlock the “Say Hi to the Internet” Trophy, a reference to the line in the web series.
3. San Andreas’ (Not an) Easter Egg
From “The Heart to Liberty City” to Vice City’s Biggest Easter Egg, the devs at Rockstar really love hiding plenty of easter eggs in their Grand Theft Auto Series. So when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out, easter egg hunters started tearing the game’s world apart looking for where the next great secret was hidden. Unfortunately for them, however, Rockstar is always one step ahead…
2. Borderlands 2’s Hidden World
With a game the involves around Treasure Hunters, Borderlands has always been a series chock full of easter eggs. However, my personal favorite one of the series is hidden in Borderlands 2’s Caustic Caverns. After traveling to the area for the first time you can slip behind some rocks into a secret cave where things tend to get a bit more, blocky.
1. Naughty Dog’s Worst, Best Kept Secret
Gamers were stunned at the 2011 Video Game Awards when Uncharted and Crash Bandicoot creators Naughty Dog unveiled that they were working on a new post-apocalyptic adventure game called The Last of Us. The studio, which only was thought to have one team at the time, almost spilled the beans in their last game Uncharted 3, which came out a month prior to the announcement. Kotaku has an amazing interview with the developers about the easter egg, with an amazing story that helped to push this newspaper to number one for me.
So what are some of your favorite easter eggs in gaming? How did you find out about them? Let’s talk about them in the comments below!
