There is a flight simulator inside Microsoft Excel 97.
I wasn't around for it. I learned about it the way most people my age learn about anything from before they were born, which is to say late at night, from a video, with the volume low, and with the vague feeling of having missed something. You open a blank sheet, press F5, type X97:L97, press Tab, and hold Ctrl and Shift while clicking the chart wizard. The spreadsheet disappears. What is left is a range of purple hills under a black sky, and you are flying over them.
This is a screenshot of Microsoft Excel.
If you flew long enough you would find a grey monolith standing in the middle of the terrain, and on its face the names of the people who built Excel would scroll upward, slowly, like the credits of a film. There was a lagoon nearby. Nobody asked for a lagoon.
The monolith. Those are real people. Some of them are probably still at Microsoft.
The same terrain, another day. It was generated at random, which meant no two people saw quite the same hills.
I think about this more than I probably should. A handful of engineers put an entire small world inside a program meant for accountants, and for a few years every finance department on earth carried it around without knowing, which is a strange thing to be moved by and yet here I am. It had no purpose and it wasn't in the manual. It existed, as far as I can tell, because the people who made Excel wanted, in some quiet and probably unexamined way, to be found.
That won't happen again. I want to be careful about how I say this, because it sounds like nostalgia for a decade I didn't live in, and I am suspicious of my own nostalgia in general. But I've come to believe that the easter egg, the real kind, the kind no one approved, is gone, and that I know, or at least strongly suspect, what took it.
The first one
The first easter egg came out of a grudge. In 1979 Atari did not print the names of its programmers anywhere. A person would spend the better part of a year alone with four kilobytes, and the box would go out with a painting of a dragon and no human being credited on it. Warren Robinett wrote Adventure under those terms and decided he would not be erased.
So he built a room. To reach it you had to find a single grey dot hidden in a wall, carry it across the map, and squeeze through a gap that was not supposed to be there. Inside, in flashing letters, the game said: Created by Warren Robinett. He told no one and left the company. About a year later a teenager found the room and wrote to Atari, and Atari, after working out what a recall would cost, decided to leave it in.
The room.
I keep returning to what the room needed in order to exist. It needed one person holding the entire program in their head, with no one else reading the code, on a cartridge that shipped once and could never be patched. Most of all it needed someone who had been in there long enough to feel that the thing was theirs.
What happened to it first
Several things had already gone wrong with the easter egg by the time I was old enough to notice, though I did not notice.
Microsoft stopped allowing them in 2002. Bill Gates had sent a memo about trust, and somebody realised that a customer like a government cannot buy a product with code in it that nobody documented. A hidden flight simulator and a hidden backdoor look the same from the outside. So the flight simulator went, and the pinball game in Word went with it, and no one at Microsoft has been allowed to hide anything since. That's compliance for you.
Everywhere else, code review did the same job. A secret needs a place to hide, and there is nowhere to hide in a codebase where two other people read every line before it is merged. If someone opens a pull request and finds four hundred lines of terrain generation in a spreadsheet, they ask what it is for, and the moment there is an answer it becomes a ticket with an owner.
Around the same time software started being measured, and an easter egg has no number attached to it, so it never got scheduled. And the internet made the whole thing brief anyway. A hidden room in a game today is on a wiki with the exact button presses within the hour, often before the game is even out.
And still, through all of that, people kept hiding things.
Search for the word askew. Google still tilts the page. It also, now, explains the word to you first.
Every Minecraft changelog for fifteen years has ended the same way. Herobrine was never in the game.
Name a sheep jeb_ and it will not stop changing colour.
Chrome, when the internet is gone.
I love all of these. I want that on the record before I say the next thing. They were planned, and specified, and someone in legal nodded at them, and still, behind each one, there was a person who wanted to be there. None of this killed it, though. It limped for a long time, a little more corporate every year, but it limped.
What finally took it
What I think actually killed it was the code starting to write itself. Ask why those engineers built a planet inside a spreadsheet. No user wanted it and no metric moved. They built it because they had been living inside that codebase for two years. They knew the charting engine the way you know a house you grew up in, including the parts that were ugly, because they had been awake at two in the morning fixing them. Somewhere in all of that the suffering became a kind of ownership, and ownership, without meaning to, turned into something like love, and love wanted to carve a name into the underside of the desk.
Robinett's room was what months alone with four kilobytes does to a person.
I have watched an app appear in the time it takes to make coffee, and I have made some of them myself. You describe what you want to a text box and you step away, and when you come back it is there: the routing, the login, a dark mode toggle, a settings page no one will ever visit. It works, mostly. It took eleven minutes, and in those eleven minutes there was no two in the morning and no ugly corner you came to know by heart, only a wall of plausible code that arrived all at once and had never met you.
Somebody else's text box. This is the illustration on the Wikipedia article for vibe coding.
This is the part I find hard to say plainly, so I will say it the long way. It baffles me a little, but you don't want to leave a piece of yourself in that app, and I think it is because no piece of yourself went into it in the first place. The egg needed a person who had earned the right to be possessive about a codebase, and eleven minutes is not long enough to earn that.
You could ask the text box for one, of course, and it would give you one, and it would be a Konami code that makes confetti, and it would carry exactly as much of you as a birthday greeting from your bank.
The Konami code. Type it on the right website and confetti falls, or the page flips, or a dinosaur appears. It has been the default hidden thing since the eighties.
Over a thousand packages on npm that listen for it. You do not write the easter egg. You install it.
What I am not saying
It may be tempting to read all this as a plea to go back, and it isn't one. The old way of building software was slow and it hurt, and a great deal of the hurting was, if we are being honest, pointless. The tools are better and the things get built. I use the text box too, and I will keep using it, and I do not think there is anything to apologise for in that.
But the unauthorised easter egg was proof that a human being had been inside the machine for a long and unpleasant stay. The lawyers made that risky, code review made it visible, the dashboards left it unfunded, and the internet made it brief. Then the generated code took away the one thing it could not survive without, which was someone who had been there long enough to care.
The software still works, but it never met anyone.
I write this more solemnly than the subject deserves, and I know it. It is a spreadsheet with a flight simulator in it, and a sheep that changes colour. But I have noticed that the things I make quickly, I do not remember, and the things I made slowly and badly, at hours I should have been asleep, I can still walk through with my eyes closed.
If you are still building the slow way somewhere, on something no one asked you for, leave the room in, a line that only shows on one day of the year, or a command that is not in the help text and does something small and unnecessary. No one may ever find it, and that was never the point.
Perhaps the point was only ever this: that somewhere in the program there is a wall with a name on it, and the name is there because a person was.
Originally published at stimmie.dev. Also on Medium and Hashnode. Source and images on GitHub.
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