Fantastic suggestion that deserves it’s own topic!
My favorite IF Easter Egg is one slipped into Space Quest 1 at Ken Williams’ expense: In early versions of Space Quest 1, when you typed “ken” in the opening screen aboard the Arcada, Sierra CEO Ken Williams would walk onto the screen and complain loudly and at length that the game was behind schedule. Ken promptly had it removed from later versions of the game. It’s unclear if it was Scott Murphy or Mark Rowe that slipped this in.
I’m not sure how well-known this is by now, but Zork 1 is playable from within Call of Duty Black Ops 1 as well as CoD Cold War.
(I’m curious if they implemented a Z-Machine interpreter into the game engine, or ported the actual Zork code directly…)
I’m sure they implemented a Z-machine interpreter. Porting the full game would be vastly more effort.
Being overly optimistic(?) it might be possible for the IFTF (cooperating with authors) to reach out to some companies and offer more modern interactive fiction works to be embedded in big blockbuster games, e.g. Superluminal Vagrant Twin, Black Knife Dungeon etc or ChoiceScript games etc. (trying to avoid classic parser at first since that takes practice to learn and console players may not have keyboards etc)
Our “payment” would be more attention to IF. The increased workload on the the software team would be small compared to the huge 3d game it is embedded in.
A wild example I think would be great: In the Fallout games there are lots of unique active terminals in various places. You could e.g. include 10 IF games on such terminals and completing an IF game could give the player an Achievement.
That would actually fit Fallout fairly well, as they’ve already included various retro games you can play on your pipboy and various in-game computer consoles. I would expect they might want to make purpose made IF games, as it would be a great way to fit in pre-war lore and overtures of propaganda and censorship.
Happy Easter all!
Now where can I hide my Easter Eggs…
Surely it’s a Z-Machine interpreter. It prints the normal “Revision 88” banner. Back when that game came out, no one had a working ZIL compiler.
But my question, ever since I first read about this, is what does it look like when you crash the interpreter?
All you have to do is get in the inflated raft (without the sword!) and type EAT RAFT.
I don’t have the game, but I’ve seriously considered trying a pirate copy on a Wii emulator to find out.
For literal easter eggs, there’s this:
Oh wait, I think I really misread this, as it’s about IF in non-IF things…in that case I’d say Homestar Runner’s Get Ye Flask:
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Ye_Flask
Honestly, I meant it as easter eggs the author of any give IF hid in their work, but then @ArdiMaster took it a different direction. Tbh, their contribution, and the others that followed, were just as interesting, so I just rolled with it. Either line of thought is welcome, I just thought discussing Easter Eggs on Easter Sunday might be an appropriately cheesey thread idea.
Ryan Veeder has a hidden “easter egg” in Curse of the Garden Isle. Not sure if I should reveal what it is…
I figured there were so many older IF titles that any expectation of •spoilers•, especially Easter Eggs instead of major plot beats, would be long expired.
Just to pick an arbitrary line, let’s say any Easter Egg that doesn’t constitute a major story spoiler in a game 5 years old and older is fair game.
ETA: If you like, throw it behind a blur blurred or detail dropdown:
Details.
Savoir-Faire has a pretty in-depth Easter egg that made me smile when I came across it. Type XYZZY to get a secret food recipe for eggs. You can actually cook it and eat it with ingredients you can find!
Also, a much smaller one is that you can play a variety of specific songs on the piano and get special responses.
I don’t remember which game I saw it in (I think Cragne Manor?), but I know there’s one where you can interact with a floor rug by typing >CUT RUG to do a dance.
In A Matter of Heist Urgency, there is a special musical response to >LISTEN when fighting llamas in the clearing near the hut. (Very recognizable to those familiar with music of the 1970s.)
(EDIT: Oops, sorry – I had forgotten that this was supposed to be easter eggs in non-IF. Maybe change the title?)
And if you win, apparently you get the badge ‘Eaten by a Grue’!
I wonder what they did though. It would be cool if I can make a 3D game with a text adventure in it.
Heheh. Fatal errors…
