Did you see “Hi Ron!” appear? If not, run it again. I’ll wait.

The Final Countdown

All that was left was to show that the Easter egg could be triggered on a real machine, but where was my real machine? I contacted the dealer and was told “A problem developed with the monitor, it won’t sync.” He went on to explain that once he fixed it, he would need to leave it running for several days to make sure the problem didn’t return. Yeah, sure. That’s fine. I want it to work.

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I spent the next few weeks anxiously waiting for the machine to arrive. I was torn between the irrational fear that someone else would stumble on and publish my 40 year old discovery before me, and the very real fear that when I did, no one would care.

Finally the machine was delivered.

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I carefully unwrapped and gave it a close inspection. Everything looked fine. This was going to be easy. I turned it on and it came right up. The screen looked great. I grabbed a quarter, stuck it in one of the two coin slots, and other than some clanking noises as the coin fell through the mechanism, nothing happened.

Okay, no problem. I opened up the coin door and saw that the coin box was installed incorrectly so it didn’t allow the quarter to fall all the way through the mechanism. I fixed that and tried again. This time the coin fell but again, nothing happened. I opened it up again to find that the falling coin had knocked off the wire that triggers the microswitch that tells the game to give a credit. The wire hadn’t been properly attached when the machine was repaired. I fixed that and tried again.

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This time when I turned the machine on the stars were spinning wildly and the message COIN was stuck on the top of the screen. I opened the coin door a third time and saw that one of the electrical wires to the door was broken.

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Wow. I was starting to wonder if I was cursed! I repaired the broken wire and tried yet again.

Will it happen?

The attempts continued for hours. It wasn’t easy. I had to contort my left hand to be able to hold down the button on the yoke and the start button at the same time:

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Meanwhile my right hand had to insert a coin. As it was falling I had to let up the left hand and push down the slow control with my right hand. The timing seemed tricky. I knew from the code that the coin had to go through the mechanism before I let up my left hand but then there would be just a small window of time before I had to push the slow control. No matter how I tried and no matter what I did, I couldn’t make the Easter egg appear. How could this be? I had done all the research. I was sure I knew what I was doing, and yet I couldn’t get the message “Hi Ron!”.

Did it matter which coin slot I was using? I didn’t think so, but just to be safe I was trying both. Still, it made me wonder. I checked the schematic. There were definitely separate signals coming into the board for Coin 1 and Coin 2 but the byte being checked by the Easter egg code was looking at this:

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We wanted the hexadecimal value $76 which would mean Coin plus Phasor plus Start. Just to be sure I started up the MAME version. I had always hit the 5 key when I reproduced it which means Coin 1, but what if I hit the 6 key (Coin 2) ?

When I tried it I couldn’t get the Easter egg to happen. I set a breakpoint in the debugger and sure enough I got a different value than the $76 I expected. Apparently Coin 2 was mapped to one of the other bits labeled “SPARE” on the schematic. Okay, that’s fine. I double checked which coin slot was associated with Coin 1 and I used that from then on, but still no luck. Eventually I decided to give up and call it a night.

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As I lay in bed I thought about what could be wrong. The only thing I could think of was those bits marked “SPARE”. If Coin 2 could be mapped to one of the “spare” bits, maybe something else could be mapped to another one? I pulled up the schematic one more time and tried to see how the bits were mapped into the electronics of the game. I found this:

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The signals going into pins 4 and 12 on chips E6 through J6 seemed to be a perfect match for the bits in the byte the code was testing. If that was correct, then look at the line connected to pin 12 of J6.

Although that line isn’t labeled it doesn’t take a genius to follow the wire to the right and see that it is connected to a Quad DIP Switch and is labeled “Bonus Time”. I was pretty sure I knew what that meant and drifted off to sleep, confident that tomorrow would be a better day.

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A Better Day

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I woke up early and, after dropping the kids off at school, got to work. I pulled the board and found the DIP switch. See how one switch is marked “B.T.” for “Bonus Time” and that it is pushed down on the side marked with the plus sign? That means it is on or closed. Since the schematic shows a closed switch there would be connected to ground that means that it would create a zero bit which is exactly the opposite of what we need to create the Easter egg.

Seeing this gave me even more confidence. I flipped the switch and put everything back together. I was ready to give it one last try. If didn’t work this time, I was out of ideas.

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“Bonus Time” was now off. I contorted my left hand to hold the Phasor and Start buttons down. I held a quarter in the Coin 1 slot with my right hand. I would have crossed my fingers if both my hands weren’t busy. I dropped the coin, and tried to be patient to let it make its way all the way through the mechanism and then I quickly let up the buttons with my left hand and slammed the slow control with my right. “Hi Ron!” appeared on the screen. First try.

I setup my camera and started it recording. Again it only took one take. Here’s that video:

Hallelujah.

Is it the First?

That leaves us with the final question: Is this the first Easter egg? As with most things, the answer is, it depends. Wikipedia defines an Easter egg as “an intentional inside joke, a hidden message, or a secret feature of an interactive work”. The website goes on to give examples in software going all the way back to the TECO text editor from the 1960s. Clearly we aren’t going to beat that.

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So let’s ask if this is the first Easter egg in a video game? July 1977 is well before the release of both Adventure and Video Whizzball in 1978, so we clearly have a contender. As I did more research, though, I found this article which says a rare cartridge for the Fairchild Channel F called “Democart”, presumably released only for use in stores, displays the programmer’s name if three buttons are held down at the end of the demo. As you can see, it has a copyright of 1977:

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Was it made before or after July of 1977? I don’t know. Does a non-interactive store demo meet the criteria for an Easter egg in a video game? I guess that’s up to you.

Maybe we just want to claim that Starship 1 has the first Easter egg in an arcade video game. In that case I only know of one other contender, but it dates all the way back to June of 1975. The game Anti-Aircraft II by Atari, which normally has the player shooting down passing airplanes, can be made to display UFOs instead by modifying the printed circuit board inside the game. Once changed, the screen looks like this:

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Does a different set of graphics that can only be displayed by modifying the hardware count as an Easter egg? Around this time, Atari was doing business using two different names (the other name was Kee Games) and releasing slightly different versions of most of their games under each name. I suspect that the UFOs were meant for a Kee Games version of Anti-Aircraft and not something hidden in the ROM by its creators.

In my opinion, Starship 1 is the earliest arcade game yet known that clearly meets the definition of an Easter egg and the clever young programmer who put it there, Ron Milner, deserves our recognition and respect. Still, there were more than one hundred arcade video games released before Starship 1. Maybe somewhere deep inside one of them lies another even older Easter egg just waiting to be discovered.

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Ed Fries is a former developer on Microsoft Word and Excel who now sits on the board of VREAL, a VR game streaming platform. He’s also an adviser to Emortal Sports, a VR-focused esports team. This post was republished from his Wordpress page with his permission.


Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.