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"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

24 May, 9 tweets, 4 min read

Last month I told you about the first Easter Eggs in video games, but even earlier Eggs existed in other software.

Who created the first software Easter Egg? I thought this mystery was unsolvable, until a team-up with Ed Fries.
acriticalhit.com/make-love-not-…

This is a two-parter, and you get to pick which order you read them in! Here's Ed Fries' side of the adventure:

edfries.wordpress.com/2021/05/23/who…

Originally my Easter Eggs video was going to be twice as long, and include mention of "Make Love Not War" as well as how the term "Easter Egg" invaded non-computer media, but the lack of info about "Make Love Not War" felt anti-climatic.
acriticalhit.com/ready-player-o…

I decided to narrow in on just video games (to put more of the focus on Moonlander), with the thought of doing a sequel if "Make Love Not War" was ever solved.

So the sequel is on! But I have a few other videos I need to finish up first. Maybe I'll do the sequel next Easter?

Despite the gaint tangent in the middle of the William Weiher interview, I did cut a few things. For example, in the Usenet discussion I discovered a similar Easter Egg from 1972 (still before Moonlander) where using the MIC command "GOTO" to "GOTO HELL" results in "Get stuffed."

Also on Usenet, Robert Clements hints at quite a tale about installing the PDP-6 at Stanford.

Also: DECUS conferences were video taped? Do computer historians out there know this?

Here's an alt photo of the Great New York Subway Race, which I didn't know about until I was trying to find photos of Dick Gruen. You can read Peter Samson's memories of this event from his homepage here: gricer.com/anysrc/anysrc.…

There are several photos online of young Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Lakeside School in 1970. Here are two others I considered:

Okay, poll time. If you've read the article: Do you think Weiher including the Elvish Feanorian alphabet as a font option in a plotter is an Easter Egg, or just a fun font option?

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More from @katewillaert

"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

@katewillaert

29 Apr

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1254520492981202946

Last year I did a thread about Metroid's likely connection to Baraduke, a Namco game released a year earlier. If you missed it, here's a link.

But I've also got an update for you.

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1254520492981202946

@shmuplations

Did you know you can vote on what @shmuplations translates next if you donate to his Patreon (patreon.com/shmuplations)? I got some friends to vote with me (thanks @kelslewin!) to get this Baraduke article translated!:
shmuplations.com/yukiotakahashi/

Maybe the biggest reveal in the article is confirmation that Baraduke was not only inspired by Alien, but also by Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind!

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"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

@katewillaert

29 Apr

If you grew up in the late '80s or early '90s, you probably remember playing The Oregon Trail on an Apple II. But why were Apple IIs so popular with schools? I've seen a lot of explanations, but they always seem like they're missing...something?

I set out in search of sources that confirmed Apple IIs were the most frequently bought, hoping they'd tell me why. Apple set up a permenent "Education Purchase Program" in 1987, but Apple IIs were already the most popular with K-8 in 1986. Why?
macmothership.com/timeline.html#…

Several people have written about how Apple got started with schools (the linked article is particularly good), but they always stop after explaining Apple II dominance in MN and CA by 1983. What about the other 48 states?
hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kid…

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"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

@katewillaert

8 Apr

A weird accidental thing that happened in my first three videos is that each one connects via a shared reference to some game. "This would be funny to continue," I thought, "but there's no way my next vid connects to the Easter Eggs!"

Until it did. o_o

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'll walk you through it. My first video was about Nintendo's Wild Gunman, which was originally going to share its name with Sega's Gun Fight.

My next one touched on Taito's Western Gun, which was directly inspired by Sega's Gun Fight.

That second video, the intro to Video Dames, also gave people a first glimpse of my Moonlander footage. My third video was a showcase of Moonlander.

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"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

@katewillaert

7 Apr

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1378716697553743878

I had a really hard time cutting one particular tangent. I was confiding in friends "I really don't want to cut this, but I can't figure out how to work it in seamlessly!"

So today's thread is about how each of these Easter Eggs were discovered.

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1378716697553743878

Atari Adventure was released in March 1980. Within months people were already finding the hidden message. The first person to write to Atari about it was Adam Clayton of Salt Lake City in August 1980, who even drew screenshots.

"I just thought I'd tell you because I want to."

By contrast, the next earliest Easter Egg took 26 years to find!

While answering questions from collector Fredric Blåholtz in 2001, Brad ReidSelth casually mentioned that he hid his name in a couple games. But he couldn't remember how to unlock them!

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"Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻

@katewillaert

5 Apr

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1378716697553743878

For those who missed it, I launched a video over the weekend. It’s about the Easter Eggs that predate Atari Adventure, but it’s also about an extremely important but largely forgotten game called Moonlander.

Getting footage was tough. Today’s thread will be about how I did it.

https://twitter.com/katewillaert/status/1378716697553743878

None of this would’ve been possible if not for Eric Smith, who created a page about the GT40 in the late ‘90s and continues to host it to this day.

brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocom…

It’s here that you can find the most important artifact in this journey: the Moonlander source code!

I should note that despite it saying “First Version,” it’s not. It seems that the header wasn’t updated in later revisions. This version fixes the bug described below, and it also doesn’t use the original title screen text (but I’ll get into that later this week).

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