149 Fun Facts About Easter Eggs

What is the primary Christian symbolism of the Easter egg?

The Empty Tomb from which Jesus rose is what the egg stands for, and cracking the shell represents his resurrection from the dead.

In French tradition, what are said to fly back from Rome on Easter morning, dropping eggs for children?

Church bells fall silent from Maundy Thursday, so French children are told they have flown to Rome; when they ring again at Easter, they are said to scatter eggs in gardens on the way home.

Beyond Christian symbolism, what have eggs traditionally represented across cultures?

Fertility and rebirth: a chick breaking out of a seemingly lifeless shell made the egg an emblem of new life, which is why painted eggs also sit on Iran's Nowruz table each spring.

Ukrainian pysanky take their name from the verb 'pysaty', which means what?

To write: the designs are not painted on but written in fine lines with a stylus, one colour at a time.

Which tsar, the father of Russia's last emperor, commissioned the first Imperial Fabergé egg for his wife in 1885?

Alexander III gave his wife Maria Feodorovna the Hen Egg at Easter 1885, and she was so delighted that he ordered a new egg from Fabergé every year, each one hiding a surprise.

Which Protestant reformer is said to have organised early Easter egg hunts, with men hiding eggs for women and children?

Martin Luther is said to have had men hide eggs in the garden for their wives and children in the 1500s; German migrants carried the egg hunt to North America two centuries later.

Why were eggs traditionally forbidden during Lent in medieval Europe?

They were seen as animal products, so the Lenten fast barred eggs along with meat and dairy; hens kept laying, and the surplus was boiled, decorated and eaten at Easter.

Which director's films share made-up brands such as Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burger?

Quentin Tarantino uses his own invented brands in place of product placement; a Big Kahuna cup already appears in Reservoir Dogs, and both brands turn up in Pulp Fiction and later films.

In the 1973 game Moonlander, the earliest known video game Easter egg lets the astronaut visit which restaurant?

McDonald's appears if the player flies far enough sideways across the Moon; land beside it and the astronaut walks over, but crash into it and the game scolds you for destroying the only one on the Moon.

Which pop star is nicknamed the 'Queen of Easter Eggs' for hiding clues to her next releases?

Taylor Swift plants clues in outfits, colour schemes, numbers and album packaging, and fans decode them so eagerly that cryptic teasers have become a standard tool of pop marketing.

The 'do a barrel roll' search trick, which spins the whole results page, copies a move from which Nintendo series?

Star Fox pilots spin their Arwing fighters in a 'barrel roll' to deflect enemy fire; the search page copies the move, and typing 'z or r twice' sets it off too.

What surprising interactive Easter egg did Excel 97 contain?

A hidden flight simulator let players skim over a fractal landscape inside the spreadsheet program until they came upon the scrolling credits of the developers who built it.

Which future British queen wrote in her girlhood journal of hunting eggs hidden by her German-born mother?

Queen Victoria recorded the hunts her mother, the Duchess of Kent, laid on; she and Prince Albert later hid eggs for their own children, bringing a German custom into the royal household.

The oldest known decorated eggshells, engraved 60,000 years ago in South Africa, came from which bird?

Ostrich eggshells served as water flasks at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, and their owners scratched hatched bands into them, perhaps to show which person or group a flask belonged to.

A family in Saalfeld, Germany, drew crowds each spring by hanging about 10,000 eggs on what?

An apple tree in Volker Kraft's garden carried 18 plastic eggs in 1965 and more than 10,000 by 2012; the family stopped in 2015, and the town has kept the custom going on other trees since.

Why did Warren Robinett hide his name inside the game Adventure?

Atari refused to credit programmers, fearing rivals would poach named developers; when players found Robinett's secret room, management judged a recall too costly and left it in.

An American who unknowingly bought a lost Imperial Fabergé egg planned to do what with it?

Have it melted down for scrap was the plan, but the metal would have earned him no profit; a late-night online search then revealed the lost Third Imperial Egg, valued at about $33 million.

Which president brought the annual Easter Egg Roll to the White House lawn in 1878?

Rutherford B. Hayes opened the South Lawn to egg rollers in 1878, two years after Congress, tired of ruined turf, outlawed children's games on the Capitol grounds.

The White House Egg Roll is held on which day each spring?

Easter Monday has been the day since 1878, when children barred from rolling eggs on the Capitol grounds were welcomed onto the White House lawn instead.

At Easter Nicholas II gave one Fabergé egg to his wife and another to whom?

His mother, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna, had been given an egg each Easter by her late husband; Nicholas kept that custom alive for her and added a second egg for his own wife.

How are a pysanka's hidden colours revealed after its last dye bath?

Melting off the wax: each layer of beeswax shielded one colour from the next dye, so warming the egg and wiping it clean uncovers the whole pattern at once.

In German folklore, the egg-bringer behind the Easter Bunny is said to have played what role for children?

A judge of their behaviour, it is said, sorting the good from the disobedient at the start of Eastertide; children built nests where the creature could leave its coloured eggs.

The Cadbury Creme Egg was launched in 1963 under which sister brand's name?

Fry's had merged with Cadbury in 1919, which is why the egg could launch under either name; it stayed Fry's Creme Egg until the 1971 rebrand to Cadbury's.

Kinder Surprise, launched in 1974, was created by which Italian confectioner?

Ferrero's Michele Ferrero and William Salice modelled it on the Italian Easter custom of giving children a big chocolate egg with a toy inside.

Cascarones, confetti-filled eggshells cracked over heads at Easter and Carnival, are a tradition of which country?

Mexico uses cascarones mainly at Carnival; in towns along the US border the two cultures blended and made cracking them over heads an Easter custom, now common across the Southwest.

What is the challenge in the traditional egg dance?

Stepping among them, breaking none, is the feat: in a 1795 novel by Goethe, the girl Mignon ties a band over her eyes and skips between the eggs without touching one.

In some Pace Egg folk plays of Lancashire and Yorkshire, performed at Easter, which saint smites all challengers?

St George does the smiting; the plays are mock combats in which a slain fighter is brought back to life, often by a quack doctor.

Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after what?

The vernal equinox is fixed in church tables as 21 March, and the full moon is calculated rather than observed, so Easter can differ from the date astronomy alone would give.

In Franconia's Osterbrunnen tradition, what do locals decorate with thousands of painted eggshells at Easter?

Village fountains and wells are dressed with garlands and eggshells, a custom from early-1900s Franconian Switzerland that is often put down to how precious water was in that dry upland.

Hidden Mickeys trace back to Imagineers designing which park, planned as a more adult park without Disney characters?

Epcot was meant to be a more adult park that even sold alcohol, so Mickey was kept out; Imagineers took that as a challenge and slipped his silhouette into the details.

Which stock scream, first recorded for 1951's Distant Drums, recurs across the Star Wars films?

The Wilhelm scream is named for Private Wilhelm, who takes an arrow in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River; sound designer Ben Burtt revived the old recording as a running in-joke.

Audiences learned to watch for which director's cameo in most of his own films?

Alfred Hitchcock appeared briefly in most of his films, usually early so audiences would stop looking for him; he also hosted TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955.

Ready Player One centres on an Easter egg hunt in a virtual world called what?

The OASIS is the virtual world of Ernest Cline's 2011 novel; finding creator James Halliday's hidden Easter egg wins his fortune, and Spielberg's film adaptation arrived in 2018.

According to Bede, the word Easter comes from the goddess Ēostre, whose feasts fell in which month?

Bede's De temporum ratione says Ēosturmōnaþ, the month now called April, was named for feasts held in honour of Ēostre; Easter took its English name from that month.

Which Pennsylvania company took over the marshmallow Peeps chick line in 1953?

Just Born bought the Rodda Candy Company in 1953 and mechanised production of its marshmallow chicks, yet the Rodda name stayed on Peeps boxes into the mid-1990s.

In Australia, chocolate versions of which threatened marsupial are sold as an alternative to Easter bunnies?

The bilby is sold in chocolate form to raise money and awareness for saving it: makers such as Haigh's set aside part of what they take for conservation work.

Searching Google for which word produces the result 'Did you mean: nag a ram'?

Searching Google for 'anagram' returns 'Did you mean: nag a ram', itself an anagram of the word; 'recursion' similarly suggests 'recursion' in an endless loop.

The Turin widow Giambone is credited in 1725 with a first in Easter confectionery: what did she do?

Chocolate eggs had first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles.

In Lancashire lore, why must eggshells be crushed after egg rolling?

Or witches will use them as boats, the old legend warns; the rule matters less at Preston's Avenham Park now, where many children roll chocolate eggs instead of boiled ones.

In Christian symbolism, an egg's shell, yolk and white stand for what?

The Trinity, three persons in one God, is the idea: shell, yolk and white are three distinct parts that still make a single egg.

In Python, typing 'import antigravity' opens a strip from which webcomic?

Python's 'import antigravity' opens xkcd strip 353, 'Python', in which a character floats in the sky and explains that he simply typed that very line.

Android 5.0 Lollipop's hidden game, reached by tapping the version number, cloned which mobile hit?

Flappy Bird had been pulled from the app stores by its own creator in February 2014; that November Android 5.0 Lollipop arrived with a hidden clone starring the Android mascot.

Which day before Lent became Pancake Day because households had to use up their eggs, milk and butter?

Shrove Tuesday was the last day before the Lenten fast, so cooks turned surplus eggs, milk and butter into pancakes; the French name for the day, Mardi Gras, means 'Fat Tuesday'.

Hornazo, an Easter pie stuffed with pork, chorizo and hard-boiled eggs, comes from which country?

Spain's hornazo is a Salamanca speciality eaten outdoors at the Lunes de Aguas festival; hard-boiling was how cooks kept the eggs that hens went on laying through the Lenten fast.

What do Polish families take to church for Święconka?

Food baskets lined with white linen hold eggs, bread, salt and ham or sausage for the priest to bless on Holy Saturday, ready for the festive breakfast on Easter morning.

Greek women traditionally dye Easter eggs with what on Holy Thursday?

On Holy Thursday Greek women traditionally boil eggs with onion skins and vinegar to turn them red; the kokkina avga are cracked against one another and baked into tsoureki bread.

During which Egyptian holiday, following Eastern Easter, are boiled eggs decorated?

Sham el-Nessim, held the Monday after Coptic Easter, has an Arabic name meaning 'smelling the breeze'; Egyptians picnic with coloured boiled eggs, salted fish called fesikh and green onions.

Each Easter, Norwegians by tradition settle down with which kind of story?

Crime stories: the habit, called påskekrim, is traced to 1923, when a publisher advertised a new thriller on a newspaper's front page with a headline about a looted Bergen train and readers took it for news.

Margučiai are the decorated Easter eggs of which country?

Lithuania's margučiai are made two ways: the pattern is drawn on before dyeing, or the egg is dyed first and the design is scratched into the colour with a sharp point.

Which 2000 action RPG answered a long-running rumour with a secret level full of cows?

Diablo II's Secret Cow Level, opened by transmuting Wirt's Leg in the Horadric Cube, turned a hoax about the first Diablo into a real field of upright cattle armed with polearms.

In a Czech Easter tradition, what do men use on women, who reward them with decorated eggs?

A braided willow whip, the pomlázka, is swished at women's legs in a custom said to pass on health and youth for the year; in some places women answer latecomers by throwing cold water over them.

What feature lets visually impaired children join Easter egg hunts?

Eggs that beep or click can be tracked by ear; bomb-squad technicians in several US states build them as volunteers, in a project named for a member's blind daughter, Rachel, who inspired it in 2005.

Which Swiss chocolatier has sold a foil-wrapped Gold Bunny with a red ribbon since 1952?

Lindt has defended the Gold Bunny in court for years: Austria's top court barred a rival's look-alike in 2012, though the EU's highest court refused the shape a Europe-wide trademark.

Which Fabergé egg sold at Christie's London in 2007 for a then-record £8.9 million?

The Rothschild Egg was no tsar's gift: Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild had the cockerel clock made in 1902 as an engagement present for her brother's fiancée, and it stayed in the family until the sale.

In South Louisiana's 'pocking' game, what does the round winner get?

To eat the losers' eggs is the Creole rule: players knock boiled eggs end to end, and a cracked shell means handing the egg over; Marksville made it an official town contest in 1956.

The Pizza Planet delivery truck, a recurring Pixar Easter egg, first appeared in which film?

Toy Story has Woody and Buzz hitch a ride to the restaurant on a Pizza Planet delivery truck; Pixar has hidden the same truck in most of its features since, as a running in-joke.

'The cake is a lie' is a hidden message scrawled in which 2007 puzzle game?

In Portal (2007), the graffiti 'The cake is a lie' in hidden dens behind the test chambers warns that GLaDOS's promised cake is a ruse, and the line became a famous gaming meme.

Which comics writer's cameos in Marvel films became a running Easter egg?

Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man, kept popping up until Avengers: Endgame (2019); Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 joked that he was one informant, reporting every cameo to the cosmic Watchers.

Which text editor hides a psychotherapist at 'M-x doctor' and a game of Snake at 'M-x snake'?

Emacs ships with a set of amusements: M-x doctor starts an Eliza-style therapist that answers typed worries with questions of its own, and M-x pong and M-x snake start arcade games.

Which small animal is hidden, usually waving, in the background of almost every episode of Adventure Time?

A snail was creator Pendleton Ward's freeze-frame game for viewers, inspired by the in-jokes in The Simpsons; it later crossed into the plot when the villainous Lich possessed it.

Which saint's eggs are said to have turned red at the sight of the risen Christ in Eastern legend?

Eastern legend says Mary Magdalene was carrying cooked eggs to share with the other women on Easter morning, and they turned bright red when she saw the risen Christ; another telling has an egg redden before Emperor Tiberius.

Which 1976 text game includes the secret teleport word 'xyzzy'?

Colossal Cave Adventure, written by Will Crowther in 1976, lets players teleport with the magic word 'xyzzy'; the word became a running in-joke in later games, including Windows Minesweeper.

The chapter-and-verse numbers in Firefox's hidden Book of Mozilla are really what?

Dates in browser history: 12:10 stands for 10 December 1994, when Netscape Navigator 1.0 came out, and each mock-biblical verse retells such a milestone as the deeds of a great 'beast'.

What are catapult projectiles turned into by the Easter egg in the original Age of Empires?

Entering the cheat 'JACK BE NIMBLE' in the original Age of Empires makes catapults hurl cows and villagers instead of stones, a purely cosmetic joke left in by Ensemble Studios.

Which entire earlier game can be played on a computer inside Day of the Tentacle?

Day of the Tentacle (1993) is the sequel to Maniac Mansion, and the whole 1987 original runs on a home computer inside the game, a trick that was unprecedented then and has been copied since.

Which 2009 game hid a secret room of sequel blueprints that went unfound for months?

Batman: Arkham Asylum hid a room in the warden's office holding blueprints and hints for Arkham City; nobody found it, so Rocksteady revealed it six months after release.

Why was the Konami Code added to Gradius?

To test it: Kazuhisa Hashimoto found Gradius too hard to play through while porting it to the NES, so the code handed him a full set of power-ups, and he forgot to take it out before release.

What happens if you hit the side of a slotted-in Sonic 3D Blast cartridge?

It jumps to the Level Select screen because programmer Jon Burton sent every unexpected crash there, a trick to get the game through Sega's strict certification tests.

On 1960s PDP computers, the command 'make love' drew the quip 'not war' before doing what?

Creating a file named 'love' was the command's real job: 'make' opened a new file in the TECO editor, and William Weiher slipped in the reply 'not war?' at Stanford around 1968.

Doom II's two secret levels rebuild maps from which earlier id Software game?

Doom II's secret levels 31 and 32, Wolfenstein and Grosse, rebuild Wolfenstein 3D maps complete with SS guards, and level 32 has hanged Commander Keens for the player to shoot.

Which game was hidden in Microsoft Word 97?

Word 97 hid a pinball game among its files; Microsoft ended such extras in 2002, when its Trustworthy Computing initiative ruled out any hidden or undocumented code.

What was the Doom-style hidden room in Excel 95 called?

The Hall of Tortured Souls was a small Doom-style 3D room inside the spreadsheet; the tortured souls were Excel's own programmers, whose names and faces lined its walls.

What does typing 'apt-get moo' produce on Debian systems?

Running 'apt-get moo' prints an ASCII cow asking 'Have you mooed today?', the 'Super Cow Powers' that apt-get's help text teases; aptitude replies that it has no such powers.

What did Steve Jobs do about Easter eggs upon returning to Apple?

Banned them, and the rule outlived him: the first new egg came in 2012, when the Mac App Store stamped apps in mid-download with 24 January 1984, the day the first Macintosh went on sale.

What did some AMI BIOS PCs do when switched on on 13 November 1993?

Played 'Happy Birthday' on the PC speaker until someone pressed a key: a Trojan had been slipped into the firmware, and AMI had to issue updates to get rid of it.

A Tetris clone is hidden in HP's 54600B, which kind of device?

Oscilloscope: the Tetris clone plays on the HP 54600B's own screen, called up from the print menu by holding down two of the keys under the display.

HP's ScanJet 5p can play 'Ode to Joy' using which of its parts?

Stepper motor: the scanner changes the speed of its scan-head drive so that the motor's whine hits each note, once the scan button is held at power-on with the SCSI ID set to 0.

How is designer Jay Miner's dog Mitchy remembered inside the Amiga 1000's case?

An embossed paw print: the design team signed the inside of the lid, and Mitchy's mark was moulded in right beside Miner's own signature.

Which 1992 fighting game hid Reptile, a green ninja reachable only under strict conditions?

Mortal Kombat (1992) had Reptile drop in before bouts with cryptic clues; players who met his conditions on the Pit stage fought a green ninja using both Scorpion's and Sub-Zero's moves.

DEC's CVAX chip carries the etched jab 'VAX: When you care enough to steal the very best' in which language?

Russian, in Cyrillic letters: DEC's team expected Soviet engineers to copy the chip and wanted them to know they had been thought of.

The hidden thank-you 'THX2ALLGAMEFANS' is printed inside which Nintendo controller?

Switch Pro Controller boards carry the message, which shows through the translucent plastic around the right stick; a Japanese Twitter user spotted it the day after the console launched in 2017.

Inker Al Milgrom lost his Marvel staff job over a hidden bookshelf message mocking whom?

His former boss, ousted editor-in-chief Bob Harras, was the target: Milgrom lettered a gloating farewell on book spines in Universe X: Spidey, was fired from staff when it was spotted, then kept inking for Marvel as a freelancer.

What word did Ethan Van Sciver hide throughout New X-Men #118?

Sex is the word Ethan Van Sciver worked into the background art of nearly every page of New X-Men #118, a 2001 issue that reached print with the hidden lettering intact.

Marvel dropped artist Ardian Syaf in 2017 for hiding references to protests in which city in X-Men Gold #1?

Jakarta: the protests targeted the city's Christian governor. Syaf drew in the number 212, for a 2 December 2016 rally he attended, and a Quran verse reference, and Marvel ended his contract.

Which character hides once per episode in the cartoon 'She-Ra: Princess of Power'?

Loo-Kee hid in the scenery of nearly every She-Ra: Princess of Power episode, then reappeared at the end to show viewers where he had been and deliver the story's moral.

What did the pizza van phone number in Stranger Things season 4 connect callers to?

A message from Argyle greeted fans who rang (805) 45-PIZZA in 2022, the number on the Surfer Boy Pizza van he drives from California to Nevada with Mike, Will and Jonathan.

In which Doctor Who episode do DVD Easter eggs help solve the plot?

In 'Blink' (2007), the Doctor's half of a conversation is hidden as an Easter egg on seventeen DVDs owned by Sally Sparrow, letting her piece together his warning about the Weeping Angels.

Typing 'hello, sailor' in Infocom's Zork games produces what running-joke response?

'Nothing happens here' is the stock reply to 'hello, sailor' across the Zork games; the in-joke finally pays off in Zork III, the one game where saying it actually helps.

Firefox's about:robots page greets visitors with a line from which 1951 film?

Firefox's about:robots page is headed 'Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!', the command from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and its text riffs on Asimov's laws, Blade Runner and Futurama.

Which American magazine publisher's famous Fabergé egg collection was sold by his heirs to a billionaire collector in 2004?

Malcolm Forbes built the biggest gathering of the eggs outside the Kremlin; his heirs had it headed for a Sotheby's auction when Viktor Vekselberg bought the lot and took the eggs home to Russia.

In which James Bond film does 007 swap a forged Fabergé egg for the real one at an auction?

Octopussy (1983) starts with a dying agent delivering a forged Fabergé egg; Bond then switches it for the genuine one at a London auction. The prop was modelled on the 1897 Imperial Coronation Egg.

Which Fabergé egg was the newly married Nicholas II's first Easter gift to his bride Alexandra?

The Rosebud Egg of 1895 opens on an enamel rosebud, a reminder of the rose gardens of Darmstadt that Alexandra missed during her first Easter in Russia.

Which 1969 album ends with 'Her Majesty', a 23-second song left off the original sleeve and often called an early hidden track?

Abbey Road closes with 'Her Majesty' after a stretch of silence following 'The End'; because the original sleeve did not list it, listeners stumbled on the song by leaving the record running.

What is the UK advertising question for Cadbury Creme Eggs?

'How do you eat yours?' arrived in 1985 to get people comparing how they tackle the egg; New Zealand's adverts instead warned 'Don't get caught with egg on your face'.

In UK-made Creme Eggs, what gives the 'yolk' its yellow colour?

Paprika extract tints a little of the same white fondant to make the 'yolk'; the only real egg in a Creme Egg is the dried egg white that goes into that fondant.

What 2015 change to Creme Eggs reportedly cost Cadbury more than £6 million in sales?

A cheaper chocolate shell: Cadbury swapped Dairy Milk for a standard cocoa-mix chocolate and cut multipacks from six eggs to five, and complaints poured in as sales fell.

In Vim, ':help 42' opens a joke note about which author?

Typing ':help 42' in Vim opens a note lamenting that Douglas Adams, 'the only person who knew what this question really was about', is dead; ':help holy-grail' and ':help UserGettingBored' are sibling jokes.

Which 1938 US law keeps Kinder Surprise off American shelves?

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 bans sweets with a 'non-nutritive object' embedded inside, so the toy capsule sealed in the chocolate makes the egg illegal to import or sell.

How does Kinder Joy differ from Kinder Surprise?

It is eaten with a spoon: Kinder Joy is a plastic egg in two sealed halves, one of milk and cocoa creams topped with wafer balls and one holding the toy, with no chocolate shell at all.

Which 1987 Apple computer's ROM hid four photos of its design team?

The Macintosh SE's ROM grew to 256 KB, four times the original Mac's, which left its engineers room to hide four photos of themselves, shown by jumping to one address in the debugger.

In which city are marshmallow Peeps made?

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has housed the Peeps maker since 1932, when the candy firm left New York for a four-storey building bought from a bankrupt printing company.

Which competitive eater downed 255 Peeps in five minutes in 2017?

Matt Stonie set the Major League Eating record of 255 Peeps at National Harbor, Maryland, two years after ending Joey Chestnut's run of eight straight Nathan's hot dog titles.

In the homemade treat 'Peepshi', a Peep sits on a Rice Krispies Treat and is wrapped in what?

Fruit by the Foot stands in for the seaweed: the fruit-leather strip wraps a Peep perched on a Rice Krispies Treat so the snack passes for a sushi roll.

Mistyping 'ls' as 'sl' on many Unix systems summons what across the terminal?

The 'sl' program, written by Toyoda Masashi in 1993, punishes a mistyped 'ls' by running an ASCII steam locomotive across the terminal, and by default it ignores Ctrl+C until the train has passed.

Which first lady proposed opening the White House Egg Roll to Black children in 1953?

Mamie Eisenhower proposed it in 1953, the year the Egg Roll returned after a decade's break for war, food conservation and the White House rebuild; Black children took part from 1954.

Which 1982 Atari 2600 game hides designer Howard Scott Warshaw's initials?

Yars' Revenge (1982) hides Howard Scott Warshaw's initials, displayed as 'HSWWSH' when the Qotile is destroyed under specific conditions and the Yar is flown to the right spot.

What item, found in the Black Castle catacombs, unlocks Warren Robinett's secret room?

The Gray Dot, a one-pixel object hidden in the Black Castle catacombs, opens a hidden wall when carried to it with two other objects, revealing a room reading 'Created by Warren Robinett'; the egg works in games 2 and 3.

In Atari's Adventure, what are Yorgle, Grundle and Rhindle?

Dragons: yellow Yorgle, green Grundle and red Rhindle guard the kingdom, but the Atari 2600's blocky pixels left them looking, as the game's designer admitted, more like ducks.

Prototype code from Atari's Adventure was reused to build a 1979 game about which hero?

Superman: Atari wanted the half-built game turned into a tie-in for the 1978 film, its designer refused, and colleague John Dunn took the prototype code and built the superhero game from it instead.

What alternative names does the famous Konami cheat sequence go by?

Contra Code and 30 Lives Code both come from the NES version of Contra, where the sequence handed players thirty lives and became famous across North America.

What does the Konami Code unlock in BioShock Infinite?

The '1999 Mode' difficulty is otherwise locked until the story has been finished once; the code at the main menu opens it early, with tougher enemies and the aim assist and navigation arrow stripped out.

Which 1986 comedy has a character return after the credits to tell the audience to go home?

Ferris Bueller's Day Off brings Ferris back after the credits to shoo the audience out; thirty years on, Deadpool parodied the scene in a bathrobe and told its own audience to go home.

Which 1997 N64 shooter secretly contained a ZX Spectrum emulator?

GoldenEye 007 carries a ZX Spectrum emulator and ten of Rare's old games on every cartridge; built as a side experiment and switched off before release, it was later unlocked by fan-made patches.

The Mac alert sound 'Sosumi', added in 1991, was a jab at a lawsuit from which company?

Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, had sued Apple over music-related uses of the name; when lawyers objected to a sound named 'Chime', Jim Reekes renamed it 'Sosumi' ('so sue me') and told them it was Japanese.

In parts of Switzerland, which bird was long said to bring children their Easter eggs?

The cuckoo delivered the eggs in parts of Switzerland such as the Emmental as late as the 1800s, while children in Westphalia were told a fox brought them and in Thuringia a stork.

Among which German-American community was the egg-laying 'Osterhase' first told of in the US?

German immigrants brought the egg-laying Osterhase, or 'Oschter Haws', to the Pennsylvania Dutch country in the 1700s, where children built nests in caps and bonnets for its coloured eggs.

Why were hares linked to the Virgin Mary in medieval art?

They were thought to breed without mating: ancient writers from Pliny to Plutarch held that the hare was a hermaphrodite, so it kept its virginity while bearing young, a fitting emblem beside Mary.

Cadbury makes its Creme Eggs at which Birmingham factory village, built by the firm for its workers?

Bournville is the model village the Quaker Cadbury family laid out around its chocolate works, with alcohol sales banned; the egg-shaped Creme Egg cars are based at the factory there.

The giant Vegreville pysanka in Alberta marks the centennial of which Canadian institution?

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police: the town marked the force's centennial with a giant Ukrainian Easter egg, saluting the Mounties in the folk art of the district's own settlers.

What does the Easter egg 'A113' refer to?

A113 is the number of the character-animation classroom at CalArts where Brad Bird, John Lasseter and other Pixar veterans studied; it appears in almost every Pixar film, starting with the licence plate of Andy's mum's car.

Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld hid which name in the folds and hair of his drawings?

Al Hirschfeld hid his daughter's name, NINA, in the folds and hair of his caricatures from her birth in 1945, and wrote the number of NINAs beside his signature.

What colour were the original marshmallow Peeps chicks?

Yellow chicks were the original Peeps, each one formed by hand in the 1940s; other colours and shapes followed only after a new owner replaced the hand work with mass production in 1954.

Entering the Konami Code on Facebook once added what effect to the page?

Lens flares burst across the page each time the user then clicked or scrolled, a joke Facebook's engineers left live for a while and later took out.

Which 1999 film flashes its co-lead on screen in single frames before introducing him properly?

Fight Club slips Tyler Durden into single frames before the Narrator meets him; director David Fincher said the hero is inventing Tyler in his own mind, so he first flickers at the edge of consciousness.

Which Cheers actor, nicknamed Pixar's 'good luck charm', voiced a character in every one of its features for 25 years?

John Ratzenberger began as a piggy bank and ended the run as a cyclops builder in Onward; when Soul broke the streak, its animators drew a lookalike of him into a subway crowd instead.

Which group began promoting a native Easter mascot in Australia in 1991 to highlight damage done by introduced pests?

Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia took up the idea in 1991 to show the harm introduced rabbits do to native wildlife, and later backed children's books about its marsupial stand-in.

Which Rat Pack star led The Silencers, a 1966 spy spoof with a post-credits scene?

Dean Martin's Matt Helm reappears after the credits sprawled among scantily clad women under the words 'Coming Up Next'; the film is often cited as the first with a post-credits scene.

Which Muppet yells 'GO HOME!' at the audience after The Muppet Movie credits?

Animal waits until the credits have rolled, yells 'GO HOME!' at the audience, then sighs 'buh-bye' and slumps over; the Muppets spend the whole film watching themselves in a screening room.

What does Skeletor say in the post-credits scene of Masters of the Universe (1987)?

Masters of the Universe (1987) ends with Skeletor's head rising from the water at the bottom of the pit to say 'I'll be back!', teasing a sequel that never came.

Which 2008 film's post-credits scene had Nick Fury propose the 'Avenger Initiative'?

Iron Man (2008) ends with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury waiting in Tony Stark's home to discuss the 'Avenger Initiative', the post-credits scene that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe's habit.

A Google search for 'Festivus' has put which item from the Seinfeld holiday beside the results?

A plain metal pole, the unadorned Festivus pole of the show, runs down the side of the results, and the result count gains the words 'A festivus miracle!'.

Which film shows a trick-or-treater dressed as Yoda?

In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), E.T. spots a child in a Yoda costume on Halloween and calls 'Home', a nod to George Lucas; Lucas answered by putting E.T.'s species in The Phantom Menace's senate.

What does searching 'kerning' do to the word in Google's results?

Adds spaces between its letters, a joke on the word's own meaning, the adjusting of gaps between letters; search 'keming' and the gaps close up instead, mocking type set so tight that 'rn' reads as 'm'.

Which Pixar film hides a toy Nemo as a teaser for the studio's next release?

Monsters, Inc. has Boo hand Sulley a clownfish toy that is unmistakably Nemo, two years before Finding Nemo reached cinemas; Pixar has made a habit of trailing its next film this way.

Which mathematician's cellular automaton has run beside Google results for a search on its name?

John Conway's Game of Life, devised in 1970, plays out beside the results when its name is searched, and the user can pause the cells or redraw them.

What does searching 'dvd screensaver' make Google's logo do?

Bounce around the screen changing colours, as the logo on an idle DVD player once did: it drifts from edge to edge, switching between the company's blue, red, yellow and green.

In Aladdin (1992), the Genie briefly takes the form of which other Disney character?

Pinocchio's long-nosed face replaces the Genie's when Aladdin promises to set him free, the Genie's way of calling it a fib; Sebastian the crab and the Beast also turn up in passing.

Cheats at which Easter game have reportedly used eggs with cores of cement, alabaster or marble?

Egg tapping pits two hard-boiled eggs point to point and the uncracked one wins, which is why cheats have reportedly slipped in eggs with cement, alabaster and even marble cores.

Nirvana buried the noisy hidden track 'Endless, Nameless' after ten minutes of silence at the end of which album?

Nevermind was meant to end with the surprise, but the track was accidentally left off the first pressings; later CDs restored it after ten minutes of silence following 'Something in the Way'.

R2-D2 and C-3PO appear as hieroglyphs in which 1981 film?

Raiders of the Lost Ark puts R2-D2 and C-3PO among the hieroglyphs in the Well of Souls because George Lucas, who dreamed up Indiana Jones, was nodding to his own Star Wars.

In Aertsen's painting The Egg Dance, a dancer rolls an egg from a bowl, then does what?

Covers it back up: working only with his feet inside a chalk circle, the dancer rolled the egg out of the bowl and then had to flip the bowl over it without touching anything else.

Homer Simpson's hairline and ear were first drawn to form which two letters?

M and G: Matt Groening hid his initials in Homer's zigzag hairline and right ear, then judged the ear too distracting and redrew it, though he still sketches the 'G' version for fans.

Clicking the 16-bit hedgehog on Google's 'green hill zone' results 25 times turns him into what?

Google's Sonic card, shown for 'green hill zone' or 'sonic the hedgehog', has a pixel Sonic who spins when clicked; after 25 clicks he turns gold as Super Sonic.

What HTTP-style status code does Google's hidden kitchenware-themed page report?

Google.com/teapot returns '418. I'm a teapot', the joke status from the 1998 Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol April Fools' RFC; clicking or tilting a phone makes the teapot pour into a cup.

For April Fools' Day 2015, Google Maps let users play which arcade game along real streets?

For April Fools' Day 2015 Google Maps turned real street grids into Pac-Man mazes playable in the browser; Ms. Pac-Man followed in the Maps app for April Fools' 2017.

Chrome's offline-page game was code-named 'Project Bolan' after the singer of which 1970s glam-rock band?

T. Rex fits because the runner is a Tyrannosaurus: Marc Bolan fronted the band, and the designers picked a dinosaur as a joke about being sent back to the prehistoric age with no Wi-Fi.

Entering the Konami Code on a Chromebook Pixel does what?

Blinks the lid's LED strip: the light bar exists only to look cool, glowing in Google's colours as the lid shuts, and the code sets it flashing in a wild pattern of colours.

What undocumented feature is hidden in HP's 1973 HP-45 pocket calculator?

A stopwatch hides in the HP-45, reached with an unlikely key combination but not especially accurate; its 1975 successor, the HP-55, gained a quartz crystal and made the timer official.

Which Zelda game shows Mario-series portraits through a Hyrule Castle courtyard window?

In Ocarina of Time (1998), peering through a window in the Hyrule Castle courtyard reveals portraits of Mario, Luigi, Peach and Bowser, a nod to its N64 sibling Super Mario 64.