The Best Retro Easter Eggs in Windows and Microsoft Office – How-To Geek

Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft developers were in a race of one-upmanship to produce the most elaborate secret Easter eggs. These included games of pinball, racing, and even flight simulators, all hidden within Office and Windows. Lets take a look back at some of the best.

Easter eggs are developer credits, silly features, or inside jokes hidden in software. Because you can only access these through a series of arcane steps resembling an Easter egg hunt, thats how they got their name.

Easter eggs were a sly, fun way for authors to secretly immortalize themselves in their work, even if individual programmer credits were discouraged for the sake of company unity.

Microsofts history with software Easter eggs began as far back as theCommodore PET BASIC in the 1970s. Over the decades, it grew dramatically, continuing through MS-DOS and reaching peak complexity during the late 90s in Microsoft Office applications.

Microsoft Management officially put the kibosh on the practice in the early 00s, citing security and customer trust concerns.

For a while there, however, the eggs were on a rolland they got pretty wild!

In the 90s, Excel attracted a large share of elaborate Easter eggs. For example, in Excel 95, if you follow a series of complex steps, a window called the Hall of Tortured Souls appears. In this apparent reference to Doom, you can actually roam a 3D, first-person environment. After crossing a zigzag bridge, you discover a room with the names of Excel 95s developers and a low-resolution photo of the team.

During the development of Windows 3.1, one of the programmers carried around a stuffed teddy bear. It became an inside joke and unofficial mascot for the operating system.

When the team hid developer credits in the Program Manager of Windows 3.1, the bear naturally made an appearance. The Easter egg normally shows a man in a yellow suit next to a scrolling list of the developers internal email system names. If you perform the trickrepeatedly, though, you might see the bears head in the yellow suit instead.

Once word got out about the hidden flight simulator Easter egg in Excel 97, it spread quickly in the press because it sounds so sensationally weird.

In truth, though, its not exactly a flight simulator in the sense of gauges and airplane controls. Rather, its more of a surreal 3D, first-person flying experience over a purple landscape. If you fly around enough, you find a black monolith with the scrolling names of Excel 97s developers on it.

Several versions of the Windows NT operating system shipped with a pioneering 3D OpenGL screensaver called Pipes. It displayed endless linkages of pipes, connecting and extending in 3D space.

If you set the joint style to mixed,in the screensavers settings, one of the joints will sometimes be replaced by the famous Utah Teapot. The teapot originated in 1975 at the University of Utah and later became a standard reference model for testing 3D rendering across many platforms.

Not to be outdone by the Excel 97 team, the developers of Word 97 included a simple game of pinball you could accessvia a series of obscure steps. It included a scrolling list of development team credits on a pinball-style, faux LED scoreboard.

Players used the keyboard (Z for the left flipper and M for the right) to control the game. It was simple, but amusing.

Windows 95shipped with a hidden musical tribute to its developers. If you created a new folder on the desktop, renamed it several times, and then opened it, you saw the moving, fading names of the Windows 95 team accompanied by a MIDI musical score. Windows 98 included a similar developer tribute Easter egg.

According to some Microsoft insiders (see the comments on this blog post), Office 2000 was the last version of the software to include Easter eggs as sanctioned by Microsoft management.

However,that might be true for Windows versions only, as a developer did hide a game of Asteroids in Office 2004for Mac.

Excel 2000 made sure Easter eggs went out with a bang!A 3D car racing/shooting game reminiscent of the arcade classic Spy Hunterwas included in the software. You raced down a road with the developers names on it while shooting at other cars.

Imagine how complex the hidden games might have gotten over the next few years if Microsoft hadnt stopped to the practice.

Finally, there was a physical Easter egg! In 2007, a Spanish blogger with the screenname Kwisatz discovered something stunning on the holographic anti-piracy label on the Windows Vista Business DVD. It was atiny (less than 1mm wide) photograph of three men. News of this discovery rattled through the blogosphere until Microsoft responded officially about four days later in a blog post.

It turns out the three men were members of Microsofts anti-piracy team. They hid the photo of themselves and several public domain paintings as part of the labels anti-piracy technique. These details were far too small to copy without specialized equipment, and most pirates duplicating Vista DVDs probably didnt even know they were there.

As more computers started to connect to the Internet in the early 00s, and the worlds infrastructure became more reliant on Microsoft software (voting machines, ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, and U.S. Navy ships have all run a version of Windows at some point), the existence of secret undocumented code in applications took on a new meaning. As a result, Microsofts elaborate Easter eggs fell out of favor.

During the 1980s and 90s, Microsoft developers tucked hundreds of amusing Easter eggs in their products. If youre interested in finding more, check out Wikipedias list of Microsoft Easter eggsand the Easter Egg Archive website. Happy hunting!

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The Best Retro Easter Eggs in Windows and Microsoft Office - How-To Geek