In on the Secret

In Resident Evil 2, players could obtain a hidden roll of film by searching Albert Wesker’s desk in the S.T.A.R.S. office fifty times in a row. When developed in the darkroom, it revealed a photo of rookie officer Rebecca Chambers in a basketball uniform for some reason. The Easter egg was carried over into the 2019 remake, but it required an additional step. In this outing, you had to first find another roll of film before you could access the roll in Wesker’s desk. This required extensive backtracking through the sewers. Thankfully, you only had to interact with the desk twice instead of fifty times. A similar photo of Rebecca is used, but the resolution is obviously much higher in the remake. Albert Wesker is the team leader, and it makes sense for him to have photos of potential recruits. I see no reason why he would need images of Rebecca in her gym clothes, however, and the fact that the image is hidden so well suggests that something creepy is going on. Wesker’s desk in the first Resident Evil is described as “perfectly organized” aside from a single, out-of-place item. He clearly goes to great lengths to hide Rebecca’s photo, and this makes the entire scenario seem voyeuristic and predatory. The image itself isn’t especially lewd, but its still feels inappropriate in context.

For the sake of variety, countdowns on this site usually adhere to a “one entry per franchise” rule. That being said, the Grand Theft Auto series has many Easter eggs that deserve to be mentioned in some capacity. In San Andreas, there’s a sign atop a bridge spire that reads, “There are no Easter Eggs up here. Go away.” In Grand Theft Auto IV, you enter a door at the Statue of Liberty Happiness in order to find a beating heart inside. This door is only accessible by helicopter and is flanked by signs that read, “No Hidden Content This Way.” The most literal example of a GTA Easter egg can be found in Vice City. If you head to top of the VCN building and perform a precise jump through a seemingly solid section, you can gain access to a hidden room containing a giant chocolate Easter egg on a pedestal. This is a rare example of an Easter egg in the form of an Easter egg. It’s a direct parody of the trope itself and a surreal nod to the absurdity of open-world secrets.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is filled with hidden passageways, but one room went undiscovered for nearly a year despite being scoured by millions of players. In the warden’s office, you could use explosive gel on an unmarked wall in order to gain access to a hidden room. This room served as the ultimate teaser for the upcoming sequel, and contained blueprints of Arkham City and concept art of characters like Two-Face who would later appear in the 2011 sequel. The folks at Rocksteady Studios eventually realized no one was going to find the Easter egg, so they “leaked” the secret themselves in a 2010 Game Informer exclusive. Arkham City was officially announced shortly thereafter, and the developers obviously felt that the hidden room wouldn’t have the intended impact unless it was accessed before the sequel hit store shelves. It’s not unusual for Easter eggs to remain hidden for years, but Rocksteady wanted their secret to be found in a (relatively) timely fashion. In this capacity, it’s like a real-life Easter egg hunt. The eggs should be well-hidden, but they shouldn’t be so hard to find that they go unclaimed.

The original Xbox version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent featured a surreal developer joke that took years to uncover. To find it, players must perform a highly specific (and nonsensical) series of actions in the Ellsworth Penitentiary level. You have to shoot a fire valve, place it on a specific wall, and use a metal detector on sewer junk to find a bomb. This bomb can then be use to blow open a grate in order to access a room that contains… five crying baby alien seals? These seals are named Cookie, Buddy, Pepperoni, Vanilla, and Muffin, and they eventually return to their “Princess” before departing for their home planet. (The game makes a point to mention that the princess is not in another castle.) The aptly-titled “Splinter Seals” mission blends stealth with absurdity, and it breaks the serious tone of the Sam Fisher universe in the process. The Easter egg was finally exposed in August 2010, four years after the game’s release. The mission’s creator at Ubisoft Montreal was disappointed that no one had found it, so he released a walkthrough video himself.

In 1990, Nintendo Power magazine held a contest that would allow the winner to have their name programmed into an upcoming Nintendo game. The contest winner requested that his son’s name be used for the prize, and that’s why Chris Houlihan’s name is hidden within A Link to the Past. The mythical “Chris Houlihan” room contains 45 blue rupees and a telepathic tile that reads, “My name is Chris Houlihan. This is my top secret room. Keep it between us, OK?” Although it seems like the room was created specifically for Chris, it’s technically a safety net. If the game detects an error in Link’s coordinates while he is transitioning between areas, it sends him to a failsafe room to prevent the game from crashing. You can force the room to trigger consistently by various methods, but it’s not likely to happen organically. Although the room was discovered shortly after the game’s release, it was considered an urban legend for years until it could be confirmed on the Internet. It should be noted that Chris Houlihan’s name is only reference in the North American version of the game. In other regions (and on the Game Boy Advance remake), his name is removed from the Top Secret Room.

One of the last Titanfall 2 secrets to be discovered didn’t come into light until six years after the game was released. In the game’s time-manipulating “Effect and Cause” level, players can access a hidden door by time shifting precisely 88 times (yes, eighty-eight) after the flaming hallway. This seems like a random number, but it’s a reference to the 88mph that the DeLorean has to hit in Back to the Future before skipping through time. After entering the door, you’ll find a pile of corpses from timeline overlaps and two skeletons that recreate a gruesome scene from the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Timecop. One of the skeletons is even stuck in Van Damme’s trademark “splits” pose! (Unfortunately, the naked chick on the bed was nowhere to be seen.) The room was finally found after a well-known Respawn lore expert hinted on Twitter that there was still an undiscovered secret in that level. Within 16 hours, members of the Titanfall 2 speedrunning community had cracked the code. They didn’t even need 1.21 gigawatts of electricity!

The DOOM series has been filled with Easter eggs from the very beginning. The buck-toothed dopefish from Commander Keen has a cameo in multiple DOOM games, for example, and the Slayer’s private quarters in DOOM Eternal is filled with references to id Software’s history. (Fully playable versions of the original DOOM and DOOM II could even be accessed on the Slayer’s retro computer!) The most elusive Easter egg involves the severed head of John Romero. Romero’s head resides on a spike, and is hidden inside the final boss. The imposing Icon of Sin is invulnerable unless you damage Romero, in fact. You can beat the boss without even realizing that this severed head exists, since well-plced rockets cause splash damage. The “idclip” cheat allows players to walk through the boss’s face, however, so the community had discovered Romero’s head almost immediately. In 2018, 24 years after the game’s release, a player named Zero Master discovered that if you are pushed by a lost soul at the exact right moment, the knockback can propel you into the hidden room. John Romero confirmed that this was the first time anyone had legitimately triggered the secret without cheating. When the Icon of Sin returned as a boss in DOOM Eternal, a high-def version of Romero’s severed head was tucked away inside the monster’s head. In essence, this Easter egg was a callback to a previous Easter egg.

I consider E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to be the single most magical movie of all time. Spielberg’s 1982 masterpiece has sparked many notorious video game adaptations, but none has surprised me more than E.T.: Interplanetary Mission. The 2002 PS1 game is set after the events of the film, and it follows E.T.’s quest to gather exotic plants from various planets. The game was met with middling reviews and is largely forgettable, but it gained a surge in notoriety after a vulgar Easter egg was discovered decades after its release. To see it for yourself, you have to follow a very specific (and unintuitive) path. After collecting four flowers in the opening level, you’ll need to exit the game and return to the main menu. From there, you can select Options and press R2, R1, L2, L1 in succession. This will unlock a “New Credits” option. This triggers a scroll of developer names and aliases, and it concludes with an image of E.T. holding flowers. Shockingly, this otherwise innocuous image is accompanied by a caption that reads, “FUCK OFF BIN LADEN”. This profanity was understandable in a post 9/11 America, and it serves as a raw time capsule. Nevertheless, it’s remarkably off-brand for E.T., and it’s shocking to see in a game that’s rated “E for Everyone” by the ESRB. Graphics programmer, Diego Link, explained that the message was added as an act of rebellion after Universal vetoed a standard credits sequence. By sneaking in a hidden credits scene, they could deliver any message the wanted to. Incidentally, the message remained undiscovered for over 20 years until a reverse-engineer discovered it in 2025.

Released in 2012, Trials Evolution kicked off the most elaborate Easter egg in gaming history. The riddle not only spans multiple games, but it also spills out into the real world! In Trials Evolution players found cryptic wooden planks that could be decoded using a Vigenère cipher. This ultimately provided instructions to perform a stunt to unlock a hidden song. By performing a spectral analysis on that song’s audio file, players found Morse code leading to a website with GPS coordinates for four real-world locations. Fans traveled to Sydney, Bath, San Francisco, and Helsinki, where they dug up small chests containing metal keys and plaques. The plaques stated that one of five keys would open a box under the Eiffel Tower at midday on the first Saturday of August in 2113. The mystery deepened when Trials Fusion landed in 2014. While four physical keys had been found in the real world, the “Fifth Key” was eventually discovered hidden within the Trials Fusion track editor. This digital key serves no functional purpose in the game, which indicates that it could be the final piece of the 2113 puzzle. Trials Rising took things to another level in 2019 by revealing celestial coordinates that some fans believe could provide further context or clues for the eventual event in 2113. Ubisoft probably won’t be around in 2113 (and I certainly won’t be), so the Trials Easter egg will be forever elusive to me.

In the late ’70s, Atari refrained from crediting developers. Management feared that if talented programmers were publicly known, competitors like would “poach” them by offering higher salaries. Adventure developer Warren Robinett felt he deserved more credit for his contributions, so he secretly programmed a hidden room where his name would be prominently displayed. The room can only be accessed after navigating through a flickering maze, finding a lone gray pixel, and eventually walking through a wall to access the hidden room. Atari only became aware of this after a 15-year-old gamer wrote a letter to the company explaining what he had discovered. Although Atari wasn’t happy, their Director of Software Development, Steve Wright, argued that they should keep the message intact. He likened the message to a virtual Easter egg hunt, and felt that it would encourage fans to replay their games. Wright first publicly used the term in an interview for the debut issue of Electronic Games magazine. This cemented the phrase in the lexicon of the gaming press and the public.