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Easter Egg Hunt 🥚

Eggs Marks the Spot.

Easter Eggs began as real eggs hidden on holiday mornings, but in tech and media the term has a twist: it means a hidden surprise tucked into the content. In fact, the phrase was coined in 1979 at Atari’s Adventure game. There, developers hid a secret credit (“Created by Warren Robinett”) in an invisible room. Today an Easter egg is any deliberate secret – a concealed feature or message in software, games, movies or websites. In practice this can be anything from a hidden function in an app to a sly visual reference in a film.

Iconic examples include:

  • Atari (Adventure, 1979) Finding a tiny invisible dot in Adventure opens a hidden room that reads “Created by Warren Robinett”. This was one of the first video-game Easter eggs, and Atari loved the idea – it even adopted “Easter egg” as the official term for hidden dev signatures.
  • Google tricks: Google search is full of Easter eggs. For example, typing “do a barrel roll” makes the results page spin 360°. (Try it – in modern browsers the page will flip once.)
  • Video games Beyond Adventure, many classic games hide secrets. Famous examples include Metal Gear Solid’s Psycho Mantis reading your memory card, Hitman 3’s Alien abduction, or Doom 2’s “To win the game you must kill me, John Romero”.
  • Movies and TV Filmmakers pepper Easter eggs throughout their work. Marvel movies famously include clues to future films in almost every scene. Fans also love spotting recurring motifs (like Star Wars homages or Pixar cameos) as “Easter eggs” for the observant.

#EasterEgg-straction

On this site, any page tagged #EasterEgg hides a secret page behind it. These secrets aren’t obvious – you have to sniff them out. For example, the Zero-Width Space page cheekily begins with “Nothing to see here”. In fact, that line (and the tiny translucent dot next to it) is the clue: clicking the invisible bit reveals a hidden page. The key is literally an invisible character (a zero-width space) placed in the HTML. In short, a #EasterEgg tag signals that a playful secret is buried in the code or content, discoverable only by a curious visitor.

Hints

The Zero-Width Space-Place

  1. This is a page about zero-width spaces...
  2. ”Nothing to see here.”
  3. To inspect Right-click anywhere and choose **Inspect** (or press Ctrl + Shift + I) to open the Developer Tools. Hidden elements (like a zero-width space or transparent button) will appear in the DOM.