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The Pixel 4 box is hiding an AR Easter egg
If you were one of the first people to scoop up a Google Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL, you might want to try pointing Google Lens at the rear of the box when you receive your phone. That's because Google has hidden an augmented reality Easter egg on the packaging.
Tesla 'Santa Mode' Easter egg turns your EV into a winter wonderland
Tesla is no stranger to offering Easter eggs that get you into the holiday spirit, but its latest is particularly... festive. Dive into the Easter egg section on your EV and you'll discover a reindeer button that invokes a Santa Mode. To say it brings a Christmas vibe to your car would be an understatement. It turns your car into Santa's sleigh on the dash display (and other cars into reindeer), but that's really just the start of the flourishes.
Canada hid the Konami Code in its commemorative $10 bill launch
Canada's currency is already the world's dorkiest, with its plastic material, transparent windows and holograms everywhere. For a $10 bill celebrating the nation's 150th anniversary, however, the Bank of Canada outdid itself with an Easter egg on its website that rewards visitors with (a dorky version of) the national anthem and a shower of tens down the screen. The best part is that to get it, you punch in the "Konami Code" first made famous in Konami's 1986 Contra NES game.
Tesla owners can expect easy access to all discovered Easter Eggs
Over the years, Tesla has snuck a number of quirky Easter Eggs into OTA updates for its cars. That includes everything from Ludicrous mode enhanced acceleration to a James Bond send-up, or even an impressive holiday-themed light show. Today CEO Elon Musk tweeted that soon, there will be a feature giving owners "one touch access to all discovered Tesla Easter eggs." That removes the need for key combinations or passcodes once you've unlocked them once -- helpful for the EV owner who just can't stop showing off.
Siri's latest Easter egg lets you become 'Lego Batman'
Apple's personal assistant Siri is known for its Easter eggs and its oddball answers to questions like, "What is the meaning of life?" Now, its latest trick will help you get in touch with your inner Dark Knight.
The new 'Doom' hides sinister images in its soundtrack
It's no secret that the new Doom is chock-full of Easter eggs and other surprises, but the latest is one you wouldn't find just by wandering around the game's tortured halls. Intrepid fan TomButcher has noticed that at least one tune in the soundtrack, "Cyberdemon," shows both pentagrams and the number 666 when you visualize the music's frequencies through a spectrogram. Composer Mick Gordon recently teased that this hidden sinister imagery might be present in a video (below at the 3:29 mark), but there's no doubt about it now. Clearly, he remembers the days when the original Doom's hellish artwork had some parents in a frenzy.
'Punch-Out' reveals a surprise nearly 30 years later
More than a few games have extremely obscure Easter eggs that might take months or years to uncover, but this one might just set a record. Reddit user Midwesternhousewives has discovered an egg in Punch-Out (aka Mike Tyson's Punch-Out) that tells you when to deliver a knockout blow to two fighters. See that bearded man in the front row of the crowd, to the left? If you're in your second fight with either Piston Honda or Bald Bull, he'll duck at the exact moment you need to punch -- you only have to watch him to guarantee victory. Believe it or not, no one caught this secret in the 29 years since the boxing game reached the NES.
'Battlefield 4' hides an incredibly elaborate Easter egg
You've probably seen some clever gaming Easter eggs in your day, but few of them are likely to be this... involved. Gamers playing Battlefield 4's new Dragon Valley map have discovered an Easter egg that requires a massive, multi-step sleuthing campaign to complete. How massive? Well, it starts with translating Belarusian Morse code and moves on to hidden objects, logic puzzles and audio editing. The kicker is that this isn't repeatable -- even if you pay close attention to the video below, you'll have to do some of the hard work yourself.
Watch this: Inside Android's Easter egg tradition
Google loves placing Easter eggs in its products. On Android devices, this has been a tradition since the Gingerbread days, wherein a zombie showed up on the screen after repeatedly tapping a menu's setting. That's still the case now, although the results have changed throughout the years to resemble the name of the platform -- Android 4.1, for instance, made room for a bunch of cute, floating jelly beans that you could flick out of your sight. But what's the story behind these Easter eggs? Now you can learn more about it thanks to Nat and Lo, a side-project started by two Google employees (Natalie and Lorraine) to give people an inside look at the company. In the video below, they sit down with Android Framework Engineer Dan Sandler, who shares some insight into Google's long history of Android Easter eggs.
Play 'Breakout' on your Nintendo 3DS by drumming the Mario theme
Ready to use the browser in your new Nintendo 3DS more than you likely ever have so far? As spotted by the Verge, Japanese user Guiro@Sumaburu found an Easter egg that lets you play a gloriously silly version of Breakout. All you need to do is open the browser, tap on it to the rhythm of the Mario theme song (yep), and then click on your favorite site of choice. That'll let you smash its link into smithereens in a way that Breakout inventor Steve Wozniak likely never imagined back in 1975.
Google makes sure its founders will survive a Terminator assault
The Connor family may be doing a great job preventing Skynet from becoming self-aware and declaring war on humanity, but Google apparently isn't taking any chances. The internet giant has quietly uploaded a "killer-robots.txt" Easter egg file that tells Terminators to avoid hunting down the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There's more to this joke text than stopping murderous automatons from the movies, of course. It's really there to mark the 20th anniversary of robots.txt, the document you put on a site to exclude pages from Google's search crawler. However, it does make us wonder why Google didn't see fit to save people like Andy Rubin or Sundar Pichai -- surely it would expect those behind Android to get some mercy from androids.
Google Maps easter egg lets you plan journeys with Nessie and dragons
Google took its sweet time adding almost UK-wide journey planning to Maps, and perhaps it could've done so quicker if it wasn't so busy building easter eggs into the feature. It's been discovered that looking up certain travel routes will factor in the odd fictitious and entertaining option, alongside normal recommendations of completing the journey by bus, train and the like. These range from more mundane suggestions, such as punting from one college in Oxford to another, or taking the Royal Carriage from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, right through to the fantastical. You can cut travel time down the length of Loch Ness by pinching a lift off Nessie, for example, or fly from Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons via dragon. And, we'd hazard a guess there are more out there still to be found -- the Maps team don't really do half measures.
Skrillex debuts noisy new album as a mobile game easter egg
When is a game not really a game? When it's a Trojan horse for new music from Skrillex. Play the seemingly humdrum shooter Alien Ride on Android or iOS and you'll find that it's actually a preview for the dubstep(-ish) artist's first full album, Recess -- you can listen to the whole LP ahead of its March 18th debut. You'll still have to rely on other music services to get your wubwubwubs a more traditional way, but the app easily beats other run-of-the-mill attempts at building up hype. Just be prepared to endure an audio assault alongside the alien kind -- we doubt that the game will sway your opinion of Skrillex if you weren't already a fan.
Mac 101: Easter eggs
For decades, programmers have hidden secret features and surprises inside the software they write. Such tidbits are known as Easter eggs, after the annual holiday hunt. (Note that undiscovered hard-boiled eggs may eventually create less pleasant surprises if left to mature in warm places.) As you're enjoying the Easter holiday, we've got a few links for Apple's Easter eggs. For OS X Easter eggs, the Easter Egg Archive has a fairly comprehensive list that includes some classics; the BSOD Windows icon and the "here's to the crazy ones" copy on TextEdit's icon are particular favorites. The classic Mac OS was populated with plenty of Easter eggs -- even inside the hardware itself -- but did you know that there was even an Easter egg in Inside Macintosh, the developer documentation for the Mac? Folklore.org has the story. As OS X is built atop the BSD flavor of UNIX, it carried forward some truly ancient Easter eggs from the older operating system. The command-line calendar program's data files include some mythological/fictional anniversaries, including a disputed birthday list from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Apple's newest (and most portable) OS is no stranger to the Easter egg tradition, but the new hidden items have a speakable twist. Siri's subtle movie reviews and silly answers to simple questions have taken over for some of the spontaneous/secret items you might find on the Mac.
Google adds 'Bacon Number' easter egg to its search engine
Adding to the fun and games already hidden within its search box, Google's new not-so-secret addition gives you a quick way to calculate exactly how many degrees your favorite (or most obscure) actor falls from Kevin Bacon. Sure, it may take half the debate out of it, but at least the definitive answers are now out there -- just type in "bacon number" followed by your thespian of choice.
Hidden photos found in Mac SE ROM (Updated)
Update: As noted in the comments, the presence of these images in the original Mac ROMs has been known for years, so this decoding project qualifies as a "rediscovery" rather than an original find. The folks from NYC Resistor found an old Macintosh SE computer on the side of the road in Brooklyn, NY. The team grabbed the device and started to dig into the Macintosh's ROM. Using modern tools on the old code obtained from a ROM dump, the team pulled four images that were added to the ROM as an Easter egg. The images, available on NYC Resitor's website, are reportedly of the team that created the ROM and each one shows a different group of people. Besides images, the NYC Resistor team also found a fifth surprise buried in the ROM, but they couldn't parse it out of the ROM at this time. Based on the strings in the ROM, the team guesses that it could be an audio file. You can read the details on how they tracked down these images in the ROM on NYC Resistor's website. [Via TechHive]
Google reforms 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button, lets you savor other emotions
While many of us simply gravitate towards the companion search box or address bar to tap into Google's wealth of search know-how, anyone still visiting the original homepage should give that second button another glance. If you float your cursor over the randomized "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, the text will now spin through a handful of new options, reducing its arbitrary nature a little and, as AllThingsD note, guiding you to other Google services within the results, including location data, restaurant reviews and even its collection of doodles.
Nexus Q app throws in voice-powered Magic 8 Ball mode
No stranger to throwing in some extra, if not-that-functional, additions to its products, Google's new audio orb packs its own Easter egg -- a Magic 8 Ball mode. Tapping the Nexus Q's image in its companion Android app will throw up a new screen, offering voice input to take your existential questions. Replies are certainly of the Magic 8 Ball caliber, although there's no accelerometer-based shaker -- at least not yet.
Google includes Jelly Bean easter egg in Android 4.1: yes, it's cute (video)
In Gingerbread, those tapping repeatedly on the version number with Android's "Settings" menu were greeted with a picture of "zombie art" by Jack Larson. In Honeycomb, a bee found its buzz. In Ice Cream Sandwich, we saw an image of the Android robot dressed up in an Ice Cream Sandwich, which grows in size when you long-press it until it transforms into a Nyan Cat-style animation. Today, we grabbed hold of a Galaxy Nexus equipped with Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), and sure enough, the tradition continues. This time, we're graced with a cutesy bean, and when long-pressed, you're presented with a game that encourages you to flick candy around a gravity-less location... for eternity. Care to see for yourself? There's a video just past the break. [Thanks, Jarrett] %Gallery-159338%
Elaborate Nike YouTube video has hidden Sonic Game (video)
When you've got a marketing budget the size of Nike's, a few international footballers and a glossy video aren't really enough. That's why its latest "My time is now" campaign is an all out interactive spend-fest, complete with a hidden Sega Sonic the Hedgehog mini-game. The standard YouTube version (as seen over the break) isn't interactive, but head over to Nike's official channel, and it's a whole different ball game. Clicking on players slow-mos the action, bringing up player details etc., and there are nine hidden "tunnels' to find -- one of which being the Sonic game. Can you find it? Hint: look for the pitch-side adverts with go faster boot on. Your time is now...
