I spent a large chunk of my childhood exploring multiplayer maps in shooters like halo by my lonesome taking in the atmosphere. On July 7th sometime between 2005-06 I was exploring Zanzibar on the original xbox when I came across my 1st official easter egg Ling Ling's head sign. I had never seen it before then and rushed upstairs to show my dad but he didn't really care that much and by the next day it was gone. Turns out there were a couple different posters that would appear on certain dates but I only discovered that while resarching some of my fav easter eggs.

with the scale of open world maps there were bound to be little secrets to be found and games within the GTA Franchise thrived from that. This may just be my childhood brain speaking or the more common usage of data mining in games but the vastness of world space led to so many myth and legends that either turned out a hoax or was a reality. One of my favorite secrets was the heart of liberty city easter egg from gta IV. With my online friends we spent a good hour failing over and over again trying to land the helicopter successfully so we could jump down onto the statue walkway with the door. The buildup of climbing the long ladder before seeing the chains holding up the beating heart. I always wondered how the first person to discover this reacted. Before my mass deletion of youtube videos I too had myth videos in san andreas with the xfiles theme playing in the background. I didn't know about youtube to "file format" websites back then So I used to either record the laptop screen with my mom's digital camera or use kickass torrents to get songs or video clips which in retrospect was much more difficult.

Another classic easter egg I found as a kid that bridged the gap of internet culture at the time and video games was the star wars kid featured in Tony hawk underground 2. In the first level of the world tour you arrive in Boston where you can find him inside the apartment building doing his performance. Back then it felt like the internet was so much more disconnected from media and real life compared to today but that might also be my young age speaking.

hard to talk about easter eggs and not mention call of duty zombies. I remember my friends and I would pull out a notebook anytime we launched up Origins on Black Ops 2 so we could solve the staff codes. I always found it tough to get together 3 other friends to complete the easter egg but my online friends and I made the exception for Origins to get the end cutscene which was a first for the series. Even before the grander secrets in bo2 I always found it so cool piecing together bits of dialogue from radios that you would activate with no button on screen. It's a much more non linear and interactive form of storytelling that can only be done in this medium. It's convenient for the fans who couldn't care for the story and just want to survive the zombie horde and intriguing for the player interested in the bigger picture of a convoluted story. While trying to discover these secrets hidden around these vast maps you always have a zombie or two at the end of the round crawling or chasing you hoping you trap yourself in a corner. Some of my favorite easter eggs resided in Mob of the Dead because a lot of them were able to be done solo. I loved the process of getting the golden spork or upgrading the hell's retriever to the redeemer. I haven't played much zombies in the last couple of years but I will occasionally load up custom zombies on Black Ops 3 which all have their own scale of easter eggs. At one point I tried making my own zombie map but I never got far as I couldn't figure out the nav mapping for zombie spawns.

Before I got banned from VRCHAT I had some worlds I made that had some scrapped easter egg ideas.