Easter Eggs have a long tradition in games, and it is safe to assume that they were created mainly due to the programmers’ passion for certain topics – and sometimes out of boredom. They can be references to other titles, movies, or other aspects of pop culture. Sometimes they are simply inside jokes, and in others, they hint at hidden machinations in the game world or even tease a sequel.
In short, Easter Eggs are bright and colorful finds that surprise and entertain every time – so they’re perfectly named. Just in time for Easter, this list presents ten of the most surprising Easter Eggs in gaming history, in no particular order.
Diablo 2 and 3 – The Cow Level
How about an absolute classic to start things off? Blizzard’s Diablo series is known for its dark atmosphere, which puts players in a desperate fight against hordes of demonic forces. At the same time, it hosts one of the funniest Easter Eggs in video game history, the so-called cow level.
A certain portal in Diablo 2 doesn’t just lead to the next area, where demons and other horrors await you – no, there you’ll encounter endless hordes of cows armed with battleaxes that want to skin you for your leather. What a twist of fate!
This Easter Egg was created because there have always been rumors among the Diablo community that repeatedly clicking on a certain portal would take users to a secret level. In the second game, the developers actually included this one in response to that. In Diablo 3 this Easter Egg reappeared, but in addition to cows, you are set upon by pink unicorns. Truly diabolical!
Doom 2 – John Romero
Since we’re talking about games, where you fight through demon hordes: in Doom 2, a final Easter Egg appears at the very end of the game. Once you have shot the final boss – an oversized demon skull – using a rocket launcher, followed by entering the cheat code “noclip”, a hole appears in that very head. Go through and you’ll encounter another head – that of John Romero, the creative brain behind the Doom series. He will tell you some nonsense, but it will turn into “To win the game, you have to kill me, John Romero!” when played backward. It actually works, too! Shoot him a few times and you’ll have truly beaten the game.
Battlefield 4 – Megalodon
DICE took some temporal liberties with the development of the water maps of Battlefield 4 by including a gigantic prehistoric shark – a megalodon – on Nansha Strike. The giggly developers gave hints about it for months, triggering hunting fever among players. They eventually found the solution to the riddle: if ten players rally at a certain buoy on Nansha Strike, a huge megalodon will burst out of the waves – once you see it happening, you’ll be happy to avoid any vacation near the sea for a quite while, that’s for sure.
Assassin’s Creed – Historical Correctness
Ubisoft is a bit more historically versed than DICE, because the developers of Assassin’s Creed make sure that any historical persons in the games die at the exact place and time as in reality. Sequel after sequel of the series this is pulled off – most impressive for a series whose very nature is about presenting an alternative viewpoint of our history. Well, there is one half-exception to this streak: Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, actually died two years later than portrayed. The location, though, is still correct. Of course, the cause of death – a certain hooded assassin with hidden blades under their wrists – is not particularly historical… as far as we know, anyway.
The Witcher 2 – Unrewarded Leap of Faith
Assassin’s Creed is the subject of an Easter Egg in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. The programmers at CD Projekt RED took aim at the leaps of faith from the Ubisoft series, which allow the assassins in the games to survive impossible jumps from tall buildings by landing on haystacks and the like. Steer Geralt to the Bastille Gate and you’ll discover a would-be assassin in a white hooded robe with a red cloth on his belt, which does look very familiar indeed, lying in a pool of blood next to a haystack. Safe to say that there are no leaps of faith in fantasy-Poland.
The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 – Ciri’s Cyberpunk Adventure
There are so many Easter Eggs hidden in The Witcher 3 that the final secret wasn’t found until years later. Much earlier, a reference by Ciri, one of the game’s main characters, had caught the eyes of fans. The young princess talks about jumping into a world where people had metal in their heads, used firearms, and traveled in small floating metal boats instead of horses – yes, she’s alluding to Cyberpunk 2077, which was announced all the way back in 2012 and was already in production at CD Projekt RED at the time. The circle then closed in Cyberpunk 2077 itself, where Ciri appears on a magazine cover. Pretty cool.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Jar Jar in Carbonite
The developers of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed don’t seem to have been big fans of Jar Jar Binks, one of the most annoying and unpopular characters in the entire history of cinema. Accordingly, during your exploration of the galaxy in the role of Starkiller, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, you’ll have the satisfaction of discovering Jar Jar Binks frozen in carbonite as a decoration on a wall. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. Did he deserve that fate? “Mesa day starten pitty okeyday witda brisky morning munchen. Den boom! Getten berry scared, and grabben dat Jedi, and pow – mesa here.” Yes, yes he did.
Batman: Arkham Asylum – Arkham City
Of course, it’s never guaranteed that an Easter Egg will actually be found or understood by players. In most cases, that’s not a problem, because they’re just optional quips. It was different in the case of Batman: Arkham Asylum, where an Easter Egg was actually supposed to serve as a marketing stunt for the sequel – for six months the developers waited eagerly every day for players to come across the secret room in the where they had hidden a teaser for Batman: Arkham City. This room contained a large blueprint for an expansion of Arkham towards Gotham City, so it was an exceedingly clear hint at the title and content of the sequel.
Eventually, patience ran out: the developers took matters into their own hands and revealed the Easter Egg themselves. They had simply thought of too good a hiding place for such a marketing measure.
Grand Theft Auto V – X-Files
For a game that is supposedly about crime in the big city, car chases, and shootouts with the police, GTA 5 has a hell of a lot of mysterious and almost scary undertones that are rather reminiscent of The X-Files. Ghosts and Sasquatch cavort in forests, aliens and UFOs are up to no good, and you can even find frozen alien corpses underwater, staring at you creepily.
Rockstar had already included a super weird Easter Egg in GTA 4 with the infamous Heart of Liberty City – literally an enormous, chained, still-beating heart inside a statue. What is going on in that world exactly? One has to wonder what they’ll have in store for GTA 6.
Metal Gear Solid – Mind Reader Psycho Mantis
Rounding things off is a fun classic from Konami, starring Metal Gear Solid’s Psycho Mantis. This rogue boasts that he can read your mind – and to everyone’s amazement, he actually could, listing off a number of games you had saved alongside Metal Gear Solid. The rascal gained access to your memory card and thus incorporated the titles left there into his dialog. If they were Konami games, he even commented on them additionally. A really cool and unnerving surprise once upon a time.
Written by Marco Wutz on behalf of GLHF.
