What better time to go looking for Easter Eggs. I'm not referring to chocolate ones in the physical environment, rather to games or jokes that have been coded into the virtual world, waiting for an unsuspecting visitor to be delighted by their discovery.

Coded Easter Eggs have an established tradition in software - if you don't already know it follow the link to our history article. But over the years the original motivation - a way of including the name of the developer whose code was otherwise anonymous - has declined and been replaced by a means of rewarding and entertaining Internet users.

Although easter eggs were well established before Google, nowadays it is Google that keeps the tradition alive. As explained in Android Easter Eggs Revealed, each version of Android since Gingerbread in 2010 has had an easter egg associated with it in order to heighten the excitement of the announcement of its name. The easter egg torch was then carried into Google I/O, its annual developer conference and even this year, when the event is fully online we are being enticed to register for the event and create a developer profile that will let you participate in the I/O Adventure which, during the event, includes being able to search for easter eggs.

Event-related easter eggs are generally ephemeral, but others have a long shelf life. Remember Zerg Rush, which unleashes an attack force of red and yellow zeros that as they fall, dissolve the contents of the page and then rise up the page to form the message "G G" standing for "Good Game".

We first reported it after it had gone viral nearly 10 years ago and you can still access the game and play it. But now it's in a new location, the Google Mirror site dedicated to the games and jokes that started life as Google easter eggs. See the menu icon in the top left? Clicking it provides a list of games and 

The option highlighted above pays homage to Google, letting you see it as it was in 1998 when still in beta:

As well as Zerg Rush you can play Snake and a game of Atari Breakout where the blocks in the wall are all images of Atari Breakout. You could see this as an easter egg within an easter egg - and if you don't understand my joke type Recursion into Google search.

The recursion joke is one of my personal favorites and another is searching for "the answer to life, the universe and everything". A word-related easter egg that was new to me was "askew":

If you smile at that one try: Do a Barrel Roll. As an enhanced easter egg on the mirror site you now have the option of performing this 20 times - dizzying - 1000 times - I think that would make me feel unwell - or 5.6 times - useful for a screenshot:

So if you want to revisit the Easter Eggs of yesteryear, you no longer need to hunt.  

More Information

Google Mirror site

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