The Easter egg in software: where the term comes from

A name signed in a hidden room

The term comes from Adventure, a 1980 game for the Atari 2600 console programmed by Warren Robinett. At the time Atari did not include programmers’ names in its games’ credits (Wikipedia). Robinett built a secret room, reached only through an elaborate series of steps, that held the game’s only text: “Created by Warren Robinett” (WIRED, March 13, 2015). He told no one, and left Atari soon after finishing the game. WIRED reports that the room was first found by a 15-year-old in Salt Lake City, who wrote to Atari about it, and that it is generally considered gaming’s first Easter egg.

According to Wikipedia’s article “Easter egg (media)”, Atari’s management first wanted to remove the message and release the game again, and decided that would cost too much. Steve Wright, then director of software development in Atari’s consumer division, suggested keeping it and encouraging more such messages in later games, describing them as Easter eggs for players to find. The same article dates the coinage to around 1980 and ties it to the Easter egg hunt.

Older than the name

Hidden things in programs are older than the word for them. Kate Willaert traces several in video games that came before Adventure (“The True First Easter Egg”, A Critical Hit!, April 4, 2021):

• Moonlander, written by Jack Burness for DEC’s GT40 terminal at the start of 1973. Land next to a certain object on the moon’s surface and the astronaut walks over to it: a McDonald’s.
• Starship 1, an Atari arcade game. A sequence on the cabinet’s controls brings up the message “Hi Ron”, for programmer Ron Milner, who kept it secret for over 30 years. Wikipedia gives the game’s year as 1977.
• Spitfire and Video Whizball, cartridge games for the Fairchild Channel F, each hiding its programmer’s name: Michael Glass and Brad Reid-Selth. Willaert calls the one in Spitfire almost certainly the first Easter egg in a cartridge game.

The oldest known in any software is not in a game. On DEC’s PDP-6 and later machines, typing make love to create a file with the TECO editor drew the reply not war?. Willaert found its author, William F. Weiher, who confirmed writing it at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project; from dated source code she places it between October 1967 and October 1968 (“Make Love Not War”, A Critical Hit!, May 23, 2021). Weiher told her he had never imagined anyone would call it the first Easter egg.

What this page leaves out

Lists of Easter eggs in particular films, programs and websites are long, change often and are hard to verify; none is repeated here. Every statement above was read at the source named beside it on September 28, 2026. Where the sources are secondary, as Wikipedia is for the Atari account, this page says so rather than presenting it as first-hand.

And the first meaning

The feast the eggs are named for moves every year. The Easter date calculator gives the Western and Orthodox dates for any year from 1583, Easter dates by year lists 1900 to 2100, and how the date of Easter is calculated shows the arithmetic. Observance varies by church and by country.