The History of Windows Easter Eggs - A Retrospective

[@XaneMyers]

Whoa, the Excel developers were the best with their easter eggs… I knew about Hall of Tortured Souls but not the other ones…

[@Cursedbox009]

Hall of tortured souls...

[@squazguy]

Windows eternal. People who worked 3.

[@CNETech]

@@squazguy ?

[@beeswithchainsaws]

@@CNETech doom

[@CNETech]

@@beeswithchainsaws ???

[@WedgeStratos]

"Eject PC" is used on dockable laptop PCs like IBM's Thinkpad machines. That's most definitely a bug, hence why it only shows up with the RTM release.

[@MichaelMJD]

Yeah sounds like a bug, that makes a lot more sense.

[@XaneMyers]

I have a ThinkPad somewhere that has Windows 2000 on it. Did this option appear in Windows 2000's start menu too? I can't remember as I think I just used the "safely remove hardware" option to disconnect it.

[@KwatsanDarbinian]

@@XaneMyers you're welcome I was thinking the same thing I'm doing one on

[@PhirePhlame]

I'm pretty sure I saw where they made the undocking function much more self-explanatory in later versions of Windows. Then again, though, "Eject PC" probably is pretty self-explanatory when it's actually supposed to be there.

[@jamieop]

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

[@TheShattenjager]

I remember when I first found out about the Excel 97 flight simulator, my friend said “well, didn’t you wonder why the software took up so much space?!” lol.

[@Mr.X2]

Dan Knight all of these easter eggs were encouraged by microsoft themselves, bc at the time people didn’t think an application was good and genuine if it didnkt take up a lot of space

[@TheWolfproduction]

True story. Based on facts. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[@DanielleWhite]

IIRC there was one in a version of Exchange which was a large (for the time; 500MB) .dll which was just a renamed video

[@sebtile4126]

at 11:29 we just gonna ignore that a game called "the hall of tortured souls" has the development team in it?

[@crazyrabbit5722]

I do believe it was to show the work conditions of Microsoft Offices

[@doom5895]

@@crazyrabbit5722 probably just a joke about work

[@heartofiron2251]

It was to make the application look more efficient. I think it was to just attract customers I guess.

[@eldermaga]

@@heartofiron2251 no its not

[@heartofiron2251]

Laudza Dermaga how do you know?

[@tzisorey]

Haha, I remember hacking the 3D Text screensaver's Volcano easteregg, when working at a computer store, to put advertising messages on the computers we had on display. Stuff like "Easy Finance!" and "Delivered and Installed!"

[@alywayart]

that’s actually pretty clever!

[@TheFakeVIP]

The Eject PC start menu option is not an egg, it's actually a feature that prepares windows to be disconnected from devices in a laptop docking station. So if you wanted to walk away from your desk and take your laptop with you, you *should* choose it. Naturally, people didn't, and BSODs commensed. I learned this from a video by uxwbill about a Compaq laptop from the late 90s Edit: should've read more of the comments, this has already been pointed out.

[@MichaelMJD]

Thanks for the info! Yeah that makes it sound like a bug then as I'm sure it's not supposed to show up on a desktop PC haha.

[@steeviebops]

@@MichaelMJD The bug was caused when something caused the Start menu to refresh (such as changing a program icon or something adding a new entry while the menu was open). When the menu refreshed, it added the Eject PC option even for devices that didn't support it.

[@mwbgaming28]

I remember playing hall of tortured souls in primary school The number if times the IT teacher wiped the computers and reinstalled windows is hilarious

[@caseys2698]

Lmaooo 😆

[@BlindingLight]

Looks like the teacher has become the teached

[@SkermiebroTech]

Haha same

[@selalox373]

not for me BECAUSE I AM 7

[@romanescu76]

7

[@PavusthePug]

Speaking of the pipes screensaver Easter Eggs, there is a very rare moment where one of the joints will render a Utah teapot. The Utah teapot is the most popular test 3D model, as it was pretty much the first. The teapot not only was in the screen saver but appeared in The Simpsons and in Toy Story as an in-joke for the 3D community.

[@MikeBSc]

2:10 I see Gabe Newell isn't on that list. He's never been a part of anything that had "3" in its name.

[@VectraQS]

Ha! I can't recall exactly when he left Microsoft, but I do recall he was a part of the Windows 1.x development team and did spend several nights in his office as a part of the final push to get the final release out the door.

[@LoLingVo]

@@VectraQS He left in 1996, a year after Windows 95's release.

[@henkkaperkele666]

👏VALVE👏CANT👏COUNT👏TO👏THREE👏

[@withersheep9009]

@@henkkaperkele666 Valve counts like 1,2,Alyx

[@thetrashmann8140]

@@withersheep9009 1, 2, 2 Episode 1, 2 Episode 2, Greater than 2 less than 4, Alyx (The Greater than 2 one is from Dota 2 when he made an announcer pack and when you got a 3 kill streak he said that instead)

[@michaels840]

I was lucky enough to find the secret message in Atari's Adventure. The secret was that when more than three sprites occupied a screen they caused the whole screen to blink. That blinking allowed you to cross over to the area that had the secret message. I don't know all the elements, but i think they included the magnet, a dot, and a key. One of the fun aspects of the game was "if" you died and the bat got you, it would take & fly you all over all over the maps.

[@DemonPete]

To get the dot, you needed the bridge to access part of the invisible maze that was otherwise inaccessible. The dot was hidden in part of the maze wall, you had to push against the wall to retrieve it.

[@georgeworley6927]

You left out my favorite Windows 95, 98, and NT screensaver Easter Egg involving the 3D Pipes screensaver. 1. Go to Display properties for screensavers 2. Select pipes as "multiple" 3. Select Pipe style as "Traditional" 4. Select joint type as "mixed" 5. Surface style to be "solid" 6. Click OK 7. Watch the screensaver for teapots instead of joints! Rev George

[@ChiaraWatson]

Not working in my 95 vm

[@novacation1367]

They are rare, you really have to look for 'em.

[@magma2050]

I remember seeing those. It's the Utah Teapot - one of the first 3D test objects.

[@princeofdew8980]

Yeah, it's the teapot that's used in 3d design programs.

[@Reziac]

You may have to watch for a long time... that's my default settings and I've only seen it once in 20 years. But I did get a screenshot!

[@federicopacei8072]

Michael is the kind of guy whose favourite videogame is the android Easter egg

[@ustamok1227]

You sound like a really good text to speech AI

[@SluggishRain]

plot twist: he’s too lazy to talk so he made a text to speech AI of himself

[@macronencer]

In the late 1990s I put a pretty elaborate Easter Egg into a business software product I was working on. Sadly, the product wasn't at all well-known and only had a small number of customers, and it's now long obsolete. It was fun to do it, though! I had vector-rendered letters that morphed into different words, transitioning between the names of people on the software team and anagrams of those names. The Easter Egg was accessed via a complex series of control keys and clicks, including, at one point, the requirement to click the rhythm of "Shave and a haircut, two bits" on a particular screen area. Yeah, we had a lot of spare time on my team :)

[@chrispixxherr4650]

The last one hit home for me with the XP 3D pipes, I ended up getting that candy cane texture and I never even knew how I did it until now, nor did I know it was even an Easter egg. And I will say that some of the other Easter eggs are very complicated, watching the video thinking to myself how would anyone even know how to do this. Especially without this video which didn't exist back then, kudos to anyone who found some of them.

[@DerfJagged]

Worth mentioning that there was an easter egg included on the Microsoft Xbox (eggsbox easter egg) which was eventually exploited to mod your console. This spurred Microsoft to put an internal ban on Easter eggs, and there hasn't been any more since 2002.

[@JeffreyPiatt]

They were banned earlier during the windows 2000 Era. Balmer claimed that 2000 was the most secure version ever. Hackers had a field day breaking win NT. This led to the Trusted Computing program and kind of delayed XP and disrupted Vista.

[@SkyyySi]

"And *as always*, I will see you all in the *next decade*." Um...

[@ivyflow3r]

2029: new easters eggs that we already shown!

[@gp75motorsports]

Confirmation that Michael MJD is eternal

[@Skittleology]

2019 is the end of the decade, and 2020 is the start of the next decade. That's what he means.

[@Feloogle]

Actually the next decade starts on the 1st of January 2021 not 2020

[@itskdog]

DaBlueSkittle we get what he means, but “as always” indicates that it’s only ever in the next decade.

[@dafoex]

I think the pipes one isn't so much an egg, but a default texture, kind of like how in some games a "missing texture" is a pink checkered pattern. Its still cool, though.

[@KomradeMikhail]

Microsoft hid an easter egg command inside when they licensed out Commodore PET BASIC V2... which predates Windows, or even MS-DOS.

[@professorj13]

what was it?

[@ErebuBat]

Rory Clark If you type “WAIT6502,1” into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. But this was more to prove it was derived from MS intellectual property

[@Yasharvl]

Nostalgia overload! Thanks for this great new year's gift!

[@MichaelMJD]

you're welcome! Glad you enjoyed the video

[@Yasharvl]

Michael MJD loved it.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

The whole concept of "Easter Eggs" (although probably not by that name) dates back at least to the 1950's and probably earlier. There's a Daffy Duck cartoon where Daffy and Porky are playing the part of detectives, and they come to a typewriter-like machine which says something like "to locate known criminals, press key" and there's a pause so you can read the names on some of the keys. Not only is there the name of the fictional person who Daffy and Porky are looking for, but also names such as Mel Blanc (who did the voices for the characters) and the names of the main producer, director and art director (and possibly other people, it's been a while since I've seen that cartoon). I seem to recall reading about similar jokes done in ancient artworks, such as depicting the visage of someone the artist disliked as the face of Judas at The Last Supper. All of which is just my way of saying that there is a long tradition of doing what we now refer to as an "Easter Egg" and only the method is new while the concept is ancient.

[@draixsama]

I'm curious who the hell has the initiative to find the more complex and more specific easter eggs on their own.

[@ederadee]

Love this video!!! I've always loved your content, and I really love Easter eggs so this video was extra enjoyable for me. Keep up the great work man 👍

[@MichaelMJD]

Thank you so much! Glad to hear you enjoyed it.

[@choccymalk123]

5:29 I just wanted something that said volcano! I like volcanoes.

[@OzzFan1000]

I always thought these eggs were fun and cool. But I remember many people complaining about the unnecessary "bloat" these eggs created and alleged security risks. I've always suspected the complaints were the reason why Microsoft stop doing Easter eggs.

[@PosingCrib]

I remember my friend and I were on his grandpas windows and found the 3D screen saver Easter egg I don’t know why but I remember feeling proud it doesn’t make sense because we saw a video on what to do and didn’t find it our selves

[@TechyMedia2023]

Me in Windows 98: Presses Eject PC My Computer: Shoots through the roof

[@sccjono]

Nostalgia overload. Thank you so much.

[@TheShattenjager]

Oh the nostalgia! Back in the day when I made clouds.mid my ringtone hah.

[@SupaPhly0]

0:43 "somebody get this freakin duck away from me!"

[@joseboss4530]

Love it I learn a lot of history of computer because of u

[@LEGOGames1000YT]

0:26 Other games, like the first Zelda game, do include credit scenes, but hidden behind nicknames due to something called Talent Poaching, where a company would have a determined employee, but another company would offer that employee work for them by offering a higher salary. That's why they used nicknames: to protect their best employees. I dunno when that was finally banned from doing, or if it was banned at all, but currently that's not the 1980s case at all!

[@forthrightgambitia1032]

Dev Hunter has fond memories for me. Somehow someone at my school found out about it and to the horror of our teacher the entire computer room was filled with people playing it instead of learning about spreadsheets.

[@mastonepaws]

15:06 that easter egg is awesome

[@technoWZ5598]

I found out that the christmas themed pipes screensaver also works in Windows 95, NT 4.0, NT 5.0, 98, 98 SE and ME. Thanks for the easter eggs buddy! For a change, maybe you should do a video on easter day (sat thru tue) with easter eggs of another OS, perhaps Android, Mac or even Linux or maybe even more easter eggs you find in Windows.

[@BelaCurcio]

it's sad that they don't do this any more. It would be fun, and maybe help for marketing purposes when they come out with updates, to encourage people to update to find the easter eggs

[@rukas2961]

The easter eggs are cool and all but who tf found them

[@llothar68]

Nobody they were all leaked bis the Developers

[@samuelthecamel]

@@llothar68 Too bad, would've been funny if someone was just messing around and accidentally revealed an easter egg

[@arteonyx]

@@samuelthecamel I had a NEC laptop that had XP and I was messing around the customization and exploring the OS. For some odd reason I liked the pipes screen saver and I was messing with it. I found out the candy cane texture. idk, XP really was something.

[@atsapylknurcs]

@@llothar68 there are actually ppl that find these..

[@jasbk]

The Volcano one was probably discovered as its the easiest i guess?

[@blainepalmerza]

AWESOME VIDEO,Michael

[@MichaelMJD]

Thank you!

[@spinblade6459]

Thanks, The Palmer Studio. I appreciate it.

[@rarzwon8761]

In middle school there was a kid who knew about the Excel flight sim and would play it as often as he could, but never told anyone else how to get to it I still think about what a jerk that guy was

[@adamplenty1645]

5:24 There's another Easter egg in 3D Text, which no one talks about: create a text file containing the - character followed by a trigger string, followed (on new lines) by a list of text strings. In the Screen Saver 3dText section of control.ini, add a Magic= line. Go into 3D Text settings and set the display text to your trigger string. 3D Text will alternate between the strings in your list. 15:53 That looks to me like the default texture rather than an Easter egg. However, there is an Easter egg that turns joints into teapots. I forget how to trigger it, though...

[@DanielleWhite]

IIRC the teapot one had to do with setting the joint type to something like "both."

[@meligarcia]

I love Clouds.mid and it's tradition for me to play it on New Year's XD

[@BPLOL]

Office Eggs: pure high school memories!

[@Jack_dub]

5:50 oh crap, another Three Sisters? Yea, The only Three Sisters I know is where I visited the Blue Mountains in Australia.

[@SlyHikari03]

This stuff is cool. My favorites as a kid Were music files hidden in windows 95/Xp, Godmode, and the midis in C:/Windows/media

[@kingcoveryepic]

There was also that teapot Easter egg in the pipes screensaver

[@Akselmoi]

Very well done video, was enjoyable to watch. I wonder if Win 10 has anything hidden, even there shouldn't be.. :D

[@MichaelMJD]

I don't know of any, but it would be cool if MS started putting them back in Windows

[@spinblade6459]

Windows 10 is just one endless Easter egg because after every update, you get to discover a new way they've fucked it up.

[@DiabloXL69]

The candy cane screensaver also works on any Windows OS: you can download the screensaver, install it and do that trick

[@elfishpresleybarbiebreath1116]

OMG Your voice is just like hearing Microsoft SAM play back text :D

[@PCWindowstechguy]

I like the video and very interesting Easter Eggs.

[@PCWindowstechguy]

Lol

[@ayannelenke6528]

nice info . . btw for nice Windows features, google Folderchanger

[@thudeshifflett8844]

niz

[@thatoneuser5066]

Came back to this video from his latest regarding when the new decade starts as there is a comment about seeing you in the next decade.

[@ZeyMight]

16:58 imagine getting candy cane teapot :)

[@rgerber]

Meanwhile at Apple: This years Easteregg will be SO revolutionary- it will cost you $499

[@sedrosken831]

The Windows 95 Product Team easter egg also works in Windows 98 if you use 98lite or something similar to change the shell to the Windows 95 version of Explorer.

[@GBlastMan]

i remember trying to do the Hall of Tortured Souls, the Flight sim and the Spy Hunter one so much that i can literally do them by memory, specially the Spy Hunter one since my pc at that time couldnt handle 3D complex games (Soul Reaver lagged like hell and i had to lower the settings of Jedi Knight to even play it at a decent FPS) so the car easter egg was what i mainly played until we got a better 3D graphics card and more ram.

[@Nogli]

I wasn't popular with my IT teacher when I showed my friends the Excel 97 flight simulator in the middle of a lesson. Everyone was playing on that in no time, instead of making some thrilling spreadsheets and pie charts.

[@catcs]

I could watch hours of these

[@KowboyUSA]

When it first became widely known there were hidden Easter Eggs the hunt was on!

[@MrTjp420]

the 3d text volcano screen saver works still in windows 10 as long as you downloaded the screen saver..... i just tried my current background is the windows 98 3D cube one where it has the background building in 3D blocks! its my personal favourite screen saver!

[@2GlitchinAwesome]

You mean to tell me, all those times at school, I could have been playing mini games? Not even the teachers could stop it 😂

[@hershmysson]

Oh my god, I feel like I might have found the candy cane pipes by accident when I was a child.

[@NithinJune]

0:28 after reading Ready Player One "I'm somewhat of an expert"

[@wadmodderschalton5763]

Do a retrospective video on Microsoft Agent. You've already did one for one of the programs powered by Microsoft Agent BonziBuddy, and the actual Microsoft Agent software should have it's own as well.

[@genericname9875]

Man I love the candy crush saga EE in win10

[@terasestHammasratas]

it's literal bloatware, not an easter egg

[@AtrumNoxProductions]

I remember I was trying so hard to get the flight simulator when I was a kid. I always thought it was a fake! I remember playing the racing one. Or seeing my brother play it.

[@testok4180]

There is an Easter egg in Windows versions 1.xx and 1.01 It basically shows the developers working on it. For Windows 1.xx, you press alt, shift, esc and enter. For Windows 1.01, you press alt and then escape, release alt then escape, press escape twice and then press backspace.

[@Jahades]

Fun fact, I knew about the windows 95 product team Easter egg since RTM my mother showed it to me on day 1 of release, because she was one of the developers with windows 95!

[@MichaelMJD]

Woah that is super cool!

[@ReverendMeat51]

I grew up with a view of the Three Sisters, never knew they were volcanos. What a weird thing to learn from this video

[@hatsunemikuchannel2023]

15:05: I trust you, MJD, that i never heard of this game 🤔🤔😮😮

[@FRUTIGERCOREZAERO]

10:27 egg was so ENA aesthetic i love it.

[@funigamer5500]

The Eject PC option was for laptops with docking stations

[@Cirnothegoober]

instructions unclear, ejected my pc and now its in space

[@BustedJunkStudio]

Always looked forward to the easter eggs in the development builds for Apple's GS-OS which were sent to me on a weekly basis back in the mid 80's. I had a software company back then and had full access to Apple's engineers, they even hooked me up with AppleLink, for free, ahh... the pre-internet. They were a great bunch of guys and helpful beyond belief. What ever happened to that?

[@aarontrupiano9328]

the pipes screensaver apparently has teapots though ive never seen one.

[@Honest_N]

Multiple traditional solid coloured pipes with mixed joints. I don't know if this was still in past me/xp

[@Honest_N]

The utah teapot

[@AdityaRawat-f7e]

actually in windows 10 and 11 you have an easter egg similar to the magic 8 ball to access it open calculor and keep dividding by zero until you see messages.there are 5 of these acessed by doing it a 1-5 times respectivly

[@woodant1981]

Excel devs now: Office 365 license scary Excel devs then: "lets make a full 3D game that works on any GPU and build into a full office suite" "lmao ok let's give it a hellish name as well lol"

[@BilisNegra]

One can't help but wonder, how the directions to activate these were meant to be "undergroundly" spread? It's not like you would stumble upon them by accident, you'll never get to them if you weren't told how to.

[@FunBoysGaming]

Reverse engineering perhaps?

[@BilisNegra]

@@FunBoysGaming That makes a lot of sense.

[@JohnDeere1]

Good video!

[@ruthlessadmin]

Every other developer: Look how many useless features we added to bloat our software that no one will ever even know exists and just wastes precious disk space Microsoft: Hold my beer.

[@peteasmr2952]

When I was a kid in 2002 I was playing with the pipes screen saver and got the Candy Cane pipes, I never knew that was an Easter Egg. WOW that is so cool. Also somehow I used to have that Eject PC option on my Windows Me system I never clicked it I never knew what it did so I ignored it.

[@maniatore2006]

I had no idea, thank you for the video.

[@MichaelMJD]

you're welcome!

[@opiniononion919]

No one adressing the fact that the "Green Monster's sign was missing the closing tag? "[bold] W.P [bold]" should have been [bold] W.P. [/bold]

[@lt1492]

Btw there's another Easter that can be found in Word 2003 (2007?) and it is related to New Year holiday: create a new document and leave it open. So when new year comes January 1st 0:00, you will see a nice message appeared in the document.

[@rafaelamadeus5155]

Fun fact: The cities/areas where you need to be clicked on time zone to trigger the Windows 98 Product Team are Memphis (in Egypt and Tennesse) and Redmond (the location of Microsoft HQ). Memphis is a beta codename for Windows 98.

[@I_am_Allan]

Merry 7th day of Christmas, Michael!

[@steeviebops]

There's one in IE4 (so only doable in Windows 95 or the original Windows 98). Go to the About box, hold Ctrl, drag the 'e' logo to the left of the Internet Explorer text and push the text with it. You'll notice that the text slides to the right. Keep dragging to push it away and you'll find an Unlock button underneath. Clicking that button causes the globe logo to shake, when this happens, hold Ctrl again and drag the 'e' on top of the globe and release. You're presented with the IE dev credits.

[@singletona082]

I remember the flight sim one in school. It was fun.

[@mojouk8935]

quake II has that easter egg with pictures of developers and names under the boss room

[@kfiatooh666]

In XP you could write in notepad "Bush hid the facts" and save it under any name. Once reopened, text disappeared inside replaced by some rectangles.

[@steeviebops]

That's a bug in the Unicode detection. "this app can break" (without the quotes) will also trigger it.

[@andrewszombie]

10:40 Doom was my first thought 😭😭😭😭

[@duderobi]

technically you can say the first two Bytes of Windows executables could be called Easter Egg. These Bytes state MZ the developer's initials who developed the Windows the EXE it is used to identify a Windows Executable.

[@PrateekSrivastava789]

11:34 There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.

[@aviemelonn]

12:17 RIP Clippit

[@L0tsen]

dont forget the teapots in the 3d pipes screensaver

[@SlavTiger]

Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant has easter eggs referencing the Halo franchise as well as Clippy.

[@SlavTiger]

Looks like they're still having a little fun with hidden content.

[@BetamaxFlippy]

I just now remembered one time where I accidentally activated the candy cane tubes easter egg, I was kinda worried!

[@rexsoloman6874]

Is it a problem that I am annoyed that the Three Sisters is considered a 'volcano'. I mean, technically they're a small part of a long extinct volcano system. But does that really count? Great vid btw 👍

[@Stiky_Piston]

8:32 I think that it would be used for dockable laptops like the PowerBook Duo

[@Parth5d]

Wow I actually remember seeing candy cane pipes screen saver when I was a kid . I might've actually triggered the Easter egg because I loved customizing in my home pc.