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Rupert Goodwins: Confessions of an Easter egg writer

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 27 Mar 2002 16:56 GMT

Hidden messages have been a staple of art since artists discovered the ego. Put any half-decent art historian in front of a famous picture, and you'll get a torrent of explanation about how apparently innocuous details combine to reveal a secret world, obvious to the adept but invisible to the unenlightened. The artist's first duty is to make a work of art, but beyond that it's a mark of their intelligence and subtlety to show off to their pals without making it obvious.

It's the same with technology. Programming can be a dispiriting job: you spend years of your life being creative, disciplined and hard-working, but all the user sees is a monolithic piece of software, corporate and anonymous. It's not surprising, therefore, that programmers find the temptation to leave a little piece of themselves hidden away in the megabytes: being competitive creatures, it rarely stops there.

I've done it myself. It starts innocently enough: you're writing a look-up table of data that the program needs, and it's fifteen entries long. You know that there's no need for a sixteenth entry, so you create one and put your initials in it: it'll never be used, but one day someone will be picking the code apart and there you'll be. It's amazing how well you can disguise this sort of thing, even if your code is going to be reviewed before launch.

But, of course, your friend has to go one better. Type a magic word into an editing field, and up pops a little bouncing smiley. Create an error message that only appears if a rude word is entered as a command. As programs get bigger and more complex, the possibilities multiply: now you get flight simulators, rotating pictures of the programming team, even complete mini-applications. The worst I did was a sound-to-light routine built into the ZX Spectrum +2: empty space in software is unbearably tempting.

Are easter eggs evil? There's no doubt that they take time that the programmers could otherwise use for proper work, they can reduce reliability and confidence in products, and they rarely enhance the corporate image for which so many companies strive. If Microsoft can't stop a game from appearing in Excel, can it stop something more destructive or criminal working away behind the scenes?

It's a moot argument. Until programmers stop being human, they'll be carving their initials and a rude comment about their boss on the base of the statues. It makes them happy, it's an expression of pride and ownership, and it gives the rest of us something pleasurable to puzzle over when the dull business of working gets just that little bit too onerous. That's worth unwrapping, any day of the year.

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