The developer may be anxious.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Game Research Society” (ID: yysaag), author: Ping Rouxing.
Recently, an Xbox developer who remained anonymous revealed to the media Kotaku a host easter egg that has been hidden for nearly 20 years.
The protagonist of the easter egg is the original Xbox released by Microsoft in 2001. As the console that was released 20 years ago, although it has long since retired from the stage of history, there are still legends of Xbox in the arena from time to time.
For example, in 2017, someone discovered that if you copy any music CD to the host and rename the music to “Eggsßox” at the same time, it will trigger the host’s hidden easter eggs:
The content of the easter egg is roughly the official thank you words to players and employees, and an animation showing the list of the original Xbox developers.
The secrets of this host are not exhausted yet. According to the anonymous developer, if the song name is changed to “Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” when copying music, a brand new easter egg will be triggered.
Yes, you read it right. The Easter egg requires the player to repeatedly enter 26 “y”s and an exclamation point before it can be triggered. Maybe this is the reason why it can be hidden for 20 years. Even the developer who announced the secret said: Unless the source code of Xbox is leaked, it is difficult for anyone to find out.
Entering “Eggsßox” can trigger the first layer of Easter eggs and unlock the Xbox developer list; then what can you unlock when you enter a more complex new name?
The answer is the list of developers for the Xbox console:
After entering this complex name, the system information will have an additional list option. This hidden list has only four names, all of which are designers who participated in the early design of the console UI and related content, and these four names It has been hidden in the Xbox console for nearly 20 years.
As for why the Easter egg was announced after 20 years of hiding, the former developer’s reasoning was: “If you don’t say it now, no one may ever know.” Due to the difficulty of triggering the Easter egg and the long time, In the future, it will be difficult for players to take the initiative to find out, considering that the people on the list are no longer working at Microsoft, so he believes that it is time to announce the Easter eggs.
Another very important point is that the original “Eggsßox” easter egg was precisely due to the official excessively exaggerated “riddler behavior”—referring to the hint that there was a very “Cool” hidden design in the interview. The player looked frantically, and was disappointed when he finally learned that it was just a list of developers.
So this time, I took the initiative to make the Easter eggs public. Although it is not a “hidden game” or “hidden animation”, it is at least a secret that the developer has hidden for nearly 20 years.
So the secrets of the original Xbox have been unearthed like this? Seamus Blackley, the former director of Microsoft, known as the father of Xbox, once tweeted in 2017 that there are still hidden easter eggs that have not been discovered:
But Seamus now stated that the easter egg he was referring to was not a developer list, so this old machine still has secrets that have not yet been discovered.
As for whether players still have the patience to accompany developers to play such a complicated “riddler game”, it is another matter.