MrWhitefolks
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The first ever "easter egg/hidden room" in gaming
« on: June 12, 2006, 07:32:35 AM »
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Courtesy of Gamespy.com
Easter eggs, little hidden tricks. Call them what you will, codes and secrets in games have become a big part of the video-game world. No game these days is released without some type of extra content, whether it's hidden cars in a Need for Speed, or a controller sequence that gives Tommy Vercetti a tank in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. What most gamers may not know is that Easter eggs are the last bit of fallout of one of the most significant decisions in the history of the industry, Atari's decision to deny credit to its programmers.
The roots of the decision lie in the business practices of the mainframe computing world. In the world before the PC revolution, computing giant IBM viewed programmers as jobbers, interchangeable cogs working on a digital assembly line. The concept of giving programmers credit for developing a VAX or DEC application was laughable. Atari and many early computer companies, looking for a business model, imitated IBM's, meaning no credits, low salaries, and no royalties for game developers. Besides, to Atari's way of thinking, putting credits on video games for the 2600 would just invite headhunters to poach its most talented employees.
That decision eventually came back to bite Atari in the butt. Warren Robinett, who programmed the original Adventure for the 2600, rebelled against his bosses by placing a secret room within the game that could only be found by getting a hidden dot from the blue maze. If you managed to make it to the secret room, you could see "Created by Warren Robinnett" running vertically down your screen -- the very first Easter egg. Others, even more disenchanted with Atari management, left the company altogether to develop their own games for the Atari 2600. These were the first third-party developers, Activision and Imagic.
Atari was less than thrilled by renegade programmers making money off of its system. Over the next several years, it took many of them to court, alleging things like non-disclosure violations and copyright infringements in an attempt to shut them down. It failed, and the Atari 2600 was opened up to anyone who wanted to make a game for it. The result was that anyone did. Consumers, confused by a glut of truly horrible Atari 2600 software and unable to separate the good from the bad, responded by not buying anything. Many third-party companies went out of business, leading to heavy discounts at retail. Those developers who were still in business couldn't compete against the cheap games and they ended up going out of business. By 1984, video games were in free fall, and the resultant crash nearly destroyed the American side of the industry.
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