I Hid a Dozen Easter Eggs on This Website

There are intricate 3D CSS animations, I had to learn some linear algebra, a classic Mac game from 1991 has been resurrected, and somewhere around here is a troublesome goose. Also, Seinfeld jokes. So many Seinfeld jokes.

I hope you’ll walk down memory lane with me in the preamble below, but if you’re only interested in the hunt then you can jump right in from here. (You should probably at least read the instructions, though.)

(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)

My dad ran a small web development shop around the turn of the century, and my earliest memories on the Web are from him showing me the websites he’d created. As I was clicking around, he’d always get a mischievous grin on his face and ask “see anything else?” Inevitably, somewhere on the page, he’d hidden some kind of unexpected surprise.

Often it was the tiniest thing, like the dot of paint on his website’s logo changing color each time the cursor hovered over it. It looked like this:

Other examples were a bit more involved, though these were usually harder to find. When he built a website for my uncle — a screenwriter — there was an image of a typewriter in the nav bar. One of the keys on the typewriter was actually a secret link to a hidden page of the website, full of jokes.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these subtle, sometimes secret little touches had both a name and a storied history. They were Easter eggs.

My dad’s penchant for Easter eggs transferred thoroughly (perhaps better phrased as aggressively) to me. As I grew up, I’d often visit his website just to scroll my mouse back and forth across the logo and see that dot of paint change colors. It’s nothing — who could possibly care about this? And yet the fact that it’s nothing, and that no one should care, is exactly why I find it so fascinating. Hiding an Easter egg is definitionally going above and beyond what is required. When you find one, you know that whoever made it put thought and care into a project that you’re now interacting with.

That brings us to today, and this website which I just finished rebuilding. I know part of the point of Easter eggs is to not explicitly draw attention to them, but I am prepared to sacrifice my subtlety cred to draw attention to this very important issue: the Web should have more Easter eggs.

If you are a web developer, when is the last time you snuck in an Easter egg? If you run a website, what delightful secrets is it hiding? We need more. More! My thirst for Easter eggs knows no bounds.

Hey I’m not sending you to the mines; making Easter eggs is fun. It’s hard to describe how much of a joy it was to hide increasingly elaborate Easter eggs all over this website while keeping things simple, minimal, and generally unadorned. Is it insane that I spent well over half the development time of this website on Easter eggs? Probably. But this is my personal website. I am allowed to toe the line of sanity here.

To be clear, I do not advise spending greater than 50% of a project’s development time on Easter eggs. (If you do though, writing a blog post about it is a great way to convince yourself that it’s a healthy addiction, and that you definitely do not need to seek out some kind of Easter Eggers Anonymous support group.) I do think it’s worth creating at least one, though. If and when someone finds it, they’ll be made aware of the care and attention to detail that you put into your work. A well-placed Easter egg might even be enough to brighten someone’s day.

Anyway, a noxious case of sunk-cost fallacy has mixed dangerously with my Easter egg obsession and led me down the path of creating an elaborate Easter egg hunt for you to chase across this website. All items can be found on every page of the site, so you don’t need to go spelunking around to obscure locations (although progress is safe across pages and reloads if you choose to do so anyway).

Important caveat: the Follow page is a special web feed document and does not function with the hunt.

You may recognize the theme from the wonderful Untitled Goose Game — one of my all-time favorite video games. That blasted goose itself is skulking around here somewhere. I think it’s after my cube.

If you were playing Mac games in the early 90s then I might have some nostalgia in store for you as well, but I was too much of an unborn child at the time to know if anyone else will actually recognize it. It’s the first video game I ever played, and its goofy sound effects have been echoing around in my head for as long as I can remember.

Speaking of sounds effects, I strongly recommend having your volume on for this. If you’re on a mobile device then you should also disable silent mode, or just put in headphones. If you have no headphones and really need your device to not make any noise right now… Maybe come back and do this later. You’ve been warned.

And with that, please enjoy this Easter egg hunt:

(If you’re reading this through a feed reader or other non-browser medium, you’ll need to open the page in a standard browser view to join the Easter egg hunt.)