Do you remember the thrill of being a child, waking up on Easter morning, and running to find the treats the Easter bunny (or your parents) put out for you? Colored eggs. Chocolate bunnies. A stuffed animal. Peeps. More chocolate. More eggs.
My kids enjoyed hunting for Easter eggs so much, we would take turns hiding empty plastic eggs around the house for days just for the fun of searching for them.
Of course, the hunt for hidden things doesn’t have to be limited to Easter. Some people have a knack for seeing things that other people miss. But if you know what to look for, you can be on the lookout for hidden Easter eggs all year long.
“Easter egg” has a unique meaning when applied to movies, TV shows, video games, and comic books. It’s a feature that isn’t necessary to the story but is added as a little something extra for people paying attention. It can be an inside joke, a disguised reference to another movie or game, or a hidden message.
Some examples include the Pizza Planet truck hidden in many Pixar films, the cameo appearances of Stan Lee in Marvel movies, and the hundreds of pop references in “The Gilmore Girls.”
Some movies are full of Easter eggs, like Ready Player One (2018), based on a book by the same name. It has references to older films like Back To The Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, The Shining, Buckaroo Bonzai, and The Iron Giant, along with numerous video and arcade games popular before the turn of the century. The movie even references the very first Easter egg ever hidden in a video game.
Adventure was released by Atari in 1980. In Ready Player One you find out this important information:
“There’s a secret in Adventure, and you don’t find it by winning….
“You see, Warren Robinett was proud of Adventure. He wanted people to know who was behind it. That’s why he created the first digital Easter egg. And to find it, you don’t even have to win. You just had to blindly play, searching around in rooms for an invisible dot. You took the dot back to the main screen and that’s when you found the first Easter egg ever put in a video game—the creator’s name.”
I got chills the first time I saw Ready Player One and heard that line. The biggest Easter egg in the movie was right there in that line of dialogue, even if the writers didn’t intend it to be that way.
You see, like video games and movies, we also have a Creator, and his handiwork is all around us. We can find it in the stars, in the first flowers of spring, in the laugh of a child, in music, in light, in the love we share for one another.
God’s Easter eggs are hidden everywhere. We just have to look for them. They remind us that he is with us, that he loves us, and that he has a purpose for the beautiful world he created. Go ahead and look. What do you see?
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