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Sheltons Organic Turkey

if I empty out all the unimportant stuff here, maybe there'll be more room in my head for important things


name: shelton brett
location: western u.s.

Monday, July 03, 2006

Easter egg classic

So I enjoy, from time to time, checking out the "hidden" items on DVDs and seeing all the special features that others tend to overlook. I believe the whole thing started with some items found in early programs, mostly games, that had a "secret room" or feature that only the programmers knew about, and somehow slipped it in the final version of the program under the radar of the execs, as sort of an inside joke amongst themselves. The first one I remember discovering was a little room in the original Atari 2600 game Adventure--some people say it was the first such thing of the sort, the one that got it all started. The idea has since blossomed to refer to secret items in TV shows, movies/DVDs, all sorts of business software and of course, video games. Special websites such as this one are dedicated to forums for people to post discoveries and discuss the merits of Easter eggs (or even if they qualify as such) and I get the impression that some people just sit in front of their Star Wars Episode X DVD and watch it over and over, waiting to be the first to discover a reference to the number 1138. (And if you don't know that phenomena, then have fun finding all of the effort dedicated to that little item...)

Which brings me to this, a sign way atop one of the giant bridges in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is in one of those hard-to-reach places but also one that the programmers knew people would try to navigate with the hope of finding something special. Classic programmer humor. Of course, there actually are tons of eggs in the game so it's almost taunting the player to search similar kinds of locations.