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The first ‘Easter eggs’ were an act of corporate rebellion - Guest - 04-24-2022
When Atari’s video game designers were stiffed on credit for their work, they expressed their dissatisfaction through hidden messages.
These days, video games require extensive work from dozens of people with varying specialties. But Atari 2600 games were not nearly as complex. A single designer typically built an entire game from scratch:
They generated the idea
They wrote every line of code
They created the graphics and sound effects
The process involved a difficult mix of left brain and right brain and the ability to build a world that felt expansive, despite dealing with a limited amount of memory.
One day in 1979, Atari’s marketing department circulated a memo listing the top-selling games of the previous year and the amount of money they had brought in. The purpose was to inspire designers to make similar games.
But the takeaway for Crane and other designers was that Atari undervalued them.
The memo stated the company had made ~$100m on game cartridge sales in 1978 ($420m in today’s money and ~10% of Warner’s total revenues). Because individual designers were responsible for individual games, several designers saw they drove millions in sales.
Yet most designers made salaries between ~$16k and ~$25k ($67k-$105k today), regardless of how much revenue they drove. Meanwhile, Kassar made ~$3m a year ($12m today) and had use of a corporate helicopter and Rolls-Royce.
According to former designers, Atari promised bonuses and a royalty system that never came to fruition under the control of Kassar and Warner, who engaged in “Hollywood accounting” to make profitable projects appear worthless on paper.
The secret room
Atari was Robinett’s first job after graduating with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
He liked the creativity and independence of being a designer. What he didn’t like was the compensation and the lack of recognition. Besides not paying royalties, Atari refused to credit designers in any public fashion.
This practice perplexed the designers, who felt they were similar to authors of books or directors of movies. Robinett believes Atari didn’t want its designers to become recognized, lest the company be forced to offer higher salaries.
“The idea of putting our names on (the games) was foreign to them,” Crane says, “any more than they would put the designer’s name who designed a towel on a towel.”
Crane and fellow designers Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead protested their compensation to an unswayed Kassar after the memo circulated. They left in October 1979 and founded Activision, where they promised credit and fair pay for designers.
Robinett had an escape plan, too, but he wanted to try something on his way out the door.
After starting in 1978, he designed “Slot Racer” and was working during most of 1979 on “BASIC Programming” and “Adventure.” In “Adventure,” he realized he could insert his name into one of the game’s many rooms.
Robinett didn’t tell anyone about it, and nobody discovered the secret room while testing the game.
https://thehustle.co/the-first-easter-eggs-were-an-act-of-corporate-rebellion/