QUOTE(1234king @ Mar 19 2006, 10:23 AM)
The term "easter egg" is used to refer to hidden "treats" left by programmers in their released applications. Here's the definition from the
Hacker's Dictionary:
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Easter egg: n.
[from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe]
1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.
2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command 'make love' with 'not war?'. Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.
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In the context of computer games, easter eggs are often things like movie references in the choice of character's names and their situations, strange items that are more for amusement than useful or plausible in the game-world, etc. If you were given a quest to cut down the tallest tree in a forest with a herring (or a slaughterfish, for example), that would be an easter egg.