There are few things in gaming that are as exciting as finding an easter egg. For those of you who think I’m talking about giant rabbits giving away free chocolate, an easter egg is something in a game that’s hidden, just like the aforementioned chocolate version (except not by giant rabbits, which are much more terrifying).
Unlike what old school gamers will know as “secrets”, easter eggs generally have zero impact on the game, and while they are intended to be found, they’re usually not as easy to locate as a room full of rocket launchers behind a stone slab that’s a markedly different colour to the rest.
This is what makes them so exciting – the rarity of them. It’s like you’re sharing a little inside joke with the game developers, you’re sharing in something special no one else knows about. Well, that’s how I feel anyway, but I probably need to get out of the house more.
Below is a list of the most awesome easter eggs ever uncovered. They’re all on here for a reason, whether they were impossibly difficult to find, or just hilarious. So then, in order of awesomeness…
#5 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – The Irony Egg
Rockstar, unsurprisingly due to the nature of the games they develop, love to sneak easter eggs into almost all of their games. My favourite of the lot can be found in San Andreas, on the top of the Gant Bridge.
Poke around up there a little bit and you’ll be rewarded with this:
The irony of course being that the sign declaring there are no easter eggs, is in fact itself an easter egg. If you’re having an “OHHHH!” moment right now, you probably need to get out more as well.
#4 LoZ: A Link to the Past – The Chris Houlihan Room
This would be a little higher on the list if it didn’t have such a depressing history behind it. It makes this list’s choice one of the most impossibly difficult easter eggs to find. The eponymous Chris Houlihan is a kid that in 1991 won a competition to have his own “secret room” included in the game. Unfortunately, in the North American version of the game, the entrance to the room was removed – the problem with this being that the North American version was the only version that actually had the room at all.
Thus this particular easter egg was mostly unheard of until 2002; a full 11 years after people were even playing the game. There are five different entrances, all of them involving implausible combinations of super-speed, explosions and being in exactly the right spot. For a hell of a lot of effort, you got a pretty unexciting reward, in the form of this:
Not quite worth the 11-year hunt for a room few people even knew existed.
#3 Modern Warfare 2 – The Airport and the Blowup Doll
Who would have thought Bobby Kotick has a sense of humour? Well, actually, this could be the reason Vince Zampella and Jason West were fired; as it turns out MW2 is full of easter eggs.
I couldn’t decide which of these two I liked the most, so I just went ahead and included them both. Near the end of the game, when you invade Makarov’s safehouse, if you poke around a little (see what I did thar) you’ll come across this:
If you did the prone-stand-prone-stand thing well, shame on you. The other awesome-in-a-somewhat-disturbing-way easter egg is in the infamous airport scene where you run around mindlessly shooting hordes of civilians (or ignoring them, but who did that?). If you look closely at the flights listing, you’ll see this:
After all the shooting begins, all the flights flip over to “delayed”. The reason it’s so disturbing is that some poor employee felt the need to update the schedule in the midst of a massacre. Guess he’s another one to add to the list of “people who need to get out more”.
#2 Diablo 2 – The Cow Level
If you have a nostalgic smile on your face right now, congratulations, you, like me, are an awesome human being. If you’ve never played Diablo 2, or have never been to the Cow level, you need to get out less.
The Cow level came about after rumours of there being a Cow level in the first Diablo game, where you could fight hordes of hellspawned bovine. That turned out not to be true but Blizzard, being the awesome people they are, decided to include it in Diablo 2 for the fans.
The level can only be found after you’ve finished the game at least once. You need to use your Horadric cube to transmute Wirt’s leg, an item you picked up while rescuing the impossibly annoying Deckard Cain (no I won’t stay awhile and listen, will you shut the hell up and identify my items ktnxbi), as well as a Town Portal scroll (while standing near a cow). This will open an orange portal to the hallowed Cow level.
The Cow level isn’t a walk in the park though, anyone who’s played it has died countless times at the hands of angry mobs of burger factories. You are however rewarded with tons of gold, and a boss battle in the form of the Cow king.
That’s a lot of angry cows.
#1 Just Cause 2
This deserves the #1 spot if for nothing else, the amount of effort that actually went into this. This isn’t a slyly placed graphic somewhere hard to get, this is an entire chunk of development man-hours dedicated to an easter egg.
If you take a plane and fly it to the far North-West, you’ll find an island. Upon careful inspection, it becomes apparent that this island is an exact copy of the one in the hit TV-show Lost. As soon as your plane flies over the island, it will burst into flames, forcing you to parachute to safety, and watch your plane crash in a rather impressive fireball. This is, of course, another reference to Lost.
As you walk around the island, you can find tons of familiar things. Near the beach is the wreckage of another plane, no doubt intended to be Oceanic 815 from the show. Scour the island for long enough and you’ll even find the famous hatch, which an entire season of the show centered around. You can also see the word “SEARCH” written in sand on the beach, and some gamers have even reported hearing the rumblings of the smoke monster as they explore the island.
Hidden easter eggs are fun, but Just Cause 2 has really taken it to the next level with this one. Stuff like this is just great, and hopefully we can see a lot more of it in the future. Here’s a video of the island and the hatch, it also shows you how to get there.
Do you have any cool stories of finding your own easter eggs? Your favourite missing from the list? Tell us about it in the forums, or comment below!
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