Donkey Kong Easter Egg Discovered 26 Years Later

[Vidboy10]

Last year, the coder who wrote the Atari 400 port of Donkey Kong revealed it had an Easter Egg but it's "totally not worth it." Someone has gone to the trouble of finding it.

Donkey Kong for the Atari 400 and 800 was one of the best early ports of an arcade game, and its writer, Landon Dyer, detailed how he built it practically by himself, with no support, reference code, or anything one would expect in a licensing deal. He also revealed the existence of the Easter egg, but incorrectly described how to get it ("something like: Die on the 'sandpile' level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000," he writes.)

Don Hodges, who earlier fixed Pac-Man's notorious kill screen, set to picking apart the Donkey Kong code and finding the egg. He did. It's rather underwhelming, but for posterity's sake, he found the conditions for achieving it.

• Play a game, setting a new high score that is either 37,000, 73,000 or 77,000. The digits for hundred thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones may be anything.
• Kill off all of your remaining lives, but your last death must be by falling.

• Then set the game difficulty to 4 (press the option button 3 times.)

• Wait for the game to cycle through the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen, then at the title screen, the programmer's initials, LMD, will appear. (Pictured above)

That is a set of conditions so specific I can't imagine anyone discovering the egg without prying apart the code, much less knowing how to repeat it. Hodges shows how he found it in the code, using an emulator.

I think the only question remaining is why Dyer made the egg so hard to discover. Certainly other Atari-programmed games of the time had Easter eggs that were not only easier to find, their methods were widely known and circulated.

Source

 

[madtamski]

BeeJeez what a cryptic easter egg!

No way, I mean no way would that have ever been discovered without picking apart the code!

 

[soulfire]

they expect that you find it on accident ?

wow that is one hard easteregg

 

[Dwight]

Let alone hard, it's pretty much pointless. They should have at least said something funny.

 

[mrfatso]

ya, even if it some lame message, that might have made it a tad worthit but then again, even the coder mentioned that the easter egg is totally not worth it, so...

 

[VVoltz]

Awesome! I wonder how many more games has stuff nobody has discovered yet, like the ending of Final Fantasy V for me =)

 

[triassic911]

They should have made that easter egg reference to the future like the n64 or something.

 

[VVoltz]

They should have made that easter egg reference to the future like the n64 or something.

I'm sure he would have if his Time Traveling machine was working.
No, seriously.

 

[Elritha]

While the easter egg isn't that great, I still think it's pretty awesome it was hidden for so many years. Makes you wonder how many other old games have easter eggs that have yet to be discovered.

 

[Joe88]

They should have made that easter egg reference to the future like the n64 or something.

I'm sure he would have if his Time Traveling machine was working.
No, seriously.

lol was just about to say

remember this game was for the atari 400
ie: 1979-1983

 

[skawo96]

I'm 99% sure that even if I DID manage to achieve that easter egg by accident, I wouldn't even notice it

 

[Islay]

Its like beat Emeraled and ruby weapon with KoR and the phoenix cheat, its a badge of honor to obtain it, but it's the shitest egg I've ever.

 

[shakirmoledina]

lol funny egg... u do sooo much to get tht, i think they were hoping ppl would ask but nobody did

 

[Celice]

This is when you have something like a nudie run across the screen shouting obscenities--not like the rating team would ever figure it out :3

 

[GentleFist]

i was reading the conditions and was like

o) have this score ...yea
o) wait for this ...yea
o) lmd will appear ...yea

what wheres the rest?

...oh that was the easter egg -.-

lol who would do that by accident and actually notice it