Easter eggs can be those colorful eggs in Easter, but it also means a secret message, a hint. To understand where the term comes from, let’s read to find out!
1. The story of Easter
Easter is a big holiday for many countries around the world. Easter is originally a religious event to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus after being crucified to death on the cross. However, it has become a festival for everyone to welcome the spring. This is similar to Christmas, as the occasion of family to gather after a whole year, not nesscessarily only for religious people.
Unlike other holidays, Easter does not have an annual fixed day, it usually falls between March 22 and April 25, based on a complicated calculation involving the lunar calendar.
On Easter day, parents often boil eggs and decorate them colorful and very festive. Then they put them in baskets along with some candies and hide them all over the house and the garden. Children will be eager to wake up and run around looking for these little treasures. This is fun.
2. The story of a game company
In 1979, Atari, a game company in America launched their game called Adventure. The company did not mention the name of the developers in the credits, for fear that rival companies would steal their employees.
Warren Robinett, one of those guys wasn’t happy with that. He sneakily inserted some codes in the game, which made it show a short message “Created by Warren Robinett” everytime the player hovered on a certain area. No one in Atari knew about that, even until Robinett left. Later on, the secret was discovered by some player.
Atari quickly planned to remove the message and release the game again, but figured out it wasn’t cheap to do that. Eventually, they decided to “go with the flow”, not only did they let the game be, they also put hidden messages like that in their other products for the players to find out and called it Easter egg, inspired from the Easter egg hunt game during Easter.
3. Easter Egg
At first, the term “Easter egg” was widely used in game and technology. It means secret messages intentionally hidden somewhere in the software. Later on, the term was spread out and has become popular, especially in media. The meaning is the same, Easter egg means a clue, a hint, a low key message sent to their audience via their products. One of the most well-known celebritys for leaving Easter eggs is Taylor Swift. She often put her lucky number 13 on her music videos, or described herself as snake, refered to the cyber bully calling her fake and dangerous like snakes.