The 12 greatest video game 'Easter eggs'

From hidden programmer credits to movie references and macabre jokes, developers have been stuffing their games with secrets for 30 years

Legend has it that the 1979 Atari 2600 game, Adventure, was the first to include a hidden in-joke buried away in an obscure corner of the code. If players directed a grey dot into a hidden room they got to see the message "Created by Warren Robinett", a self-referential protest by the game's programmer who was annoyed at Atari for not crediting its staff.

Since then, it's been discovered that the Fairchild Channel F console, launched in 1976, boasted several such messages. The demo cartridge that originally came with the machine had one, as did the 1978 title Video Whizball, a Pong derivative that would post the coder's name on the screen (Bradley Reid-Selth) if you carried out a complex sequence of moves at the close of the game.