Easter eggs, I think we're all familiar with
them. So much so that I think we've all seen an
easter egg in our lives that made us think out loud what the ... [bleep]
Sometimes this is actually the point of an easter egg as they're often the product
of an employee who was bored out of their mind during production and had to hide something
inside the work that only they themselves would know about. I know I’m guilty of it. This of course brings us to the question of
this video: has anyone ever been fired for an easter egg? The answer is: yes. In fact there's one famous case you may have
heard about. Usually when the discussion of easter eggs getting people fired comes along
the discussion usually ends with that famous case and it's it. I'm gonna share with you a few more stories
that I've gathered. I've found these by searching the deepest
corners of the internet and today you're gonna find out a
few stories about people that got fired from Easter eggs that you probably didn't know
about. Gex. I found out about this in a fascinating blog
written by game developer Gregg Man on his personal website. It's been hosted on there since 1997. Gregg's story's about Gex's lead designer named
here as Justin who slowly lost his mind as his creation quickly lost his vision. Gex was originally a game about stuntman in
Hollywood where every level was a different scene on a different movie production where
you had to perform a stunt for the film crew and would receive points based on your level
of style and success. Now considering we all know that Gex is actually
a popular 90's video game series about a gecko that gets addicted to TV who gets sucked into the world
of television, I think it's safe to say there may have been a little shift from his original
vision. In what was considered a rare move of Justin
at this point in employment, he came in one day during the weekend of final crunch. He found out that one of his levels had been
edited and completely lost his [bleep]. He went into his office and didn't come back
out until he finished programming an easter egg into Gex that he felt served as his personal
payback. Originally the player could find a secret
message on one of the kung fu levels. The secret message told the player of the
game's level select code and asked the player to choose a certain level. The level it said to choose was actually the
unedited version of Justin's original level with elements and in it that Gregg here says
were too glitchy to actually make final release. When the player beat the level a final message
would conjure up for the player. The message according to Gregg was something
close to this: didn't you think this level had some cool [bleep] in it? This level was cut because the company didn't
put you the customer first because they just wanted to make some
money. Call Mandelin Canpay at 555-1212 and give
her a piece of your mind and my mind too - unfortunately for Justin, playtesters found the egg almost
immediately. Soon after, they showed it to the suits at
the publisher. Ulimately their decision was to fire Justin. They feared that Panasonic, who agreed to
bundle Gex with their upcoming console the 3DO, would not find such
an unprofessional message amusing. The suits felt Justin's easter egg had potentially
threatened their relationship with Panasonic. Considering Justin put at risk their entirely
free distribution model with Panasonic, Justin nearly costed the publisher a huge monetary
loss and for that reason Justin's Easter Egg got him fired. Commodore Amiga. So thank you to commenter Troy Wilkins for
sharing with me a story very similar to the Gex story, except with a perhaps even crazier
outcome. On the Commodore Amiga Kickstart 1.2 (v33.166),
built into the ROM in early Amiga 500 and 2000 computers, if you were to hold alt, shift,
and F10, this message would appear at the top of the screen. Management did find this easter egg before release and told the programmer to remove it. He did remove it, but then put it back under
a different set of combinations. Units had already been shipped to the United
Kingdom with the offending easter egg and when Agima found out they had to recall tens
of thousands of units and replace all the roms. They missed three months of sales
in a major market, which not only prompted the firing of the engineer who did the egg,
they also shut down an entire branch, forcing hundreds of people out of their jobs. Amazing what seven hidden words can do. James May. James May was the feature's editor of Autocar
magazine in the early 1990s. I know myself its not easy to resist the urge
to kill the boredom and mundanity of your day job by hiding some hidden content you're
sure your colleagues and staff will never see. Well, James May decided to do just that but
he didn't exactly do that in a way that was easy for him to get away with it. You see James decided to hide a secret message
using the giant first letter at the beginning of every article. When you spelled the whole thing out it
said so you think it's really good yeah you should try making the bloody thing up it's
a real pain in the [bleep]! When readers began calling in the magazine
thinking they would win a prize for finding the secret
message, the staff learned of May's Easter egg and May was quickly let go. Don't worry though he found much greater success
much later as one of the hosts of one of the most successful shows in the world, Top Gear. Simcopter. This is actually the most famous example and
I mentioned it earlier at the beginning of the video. Essentially this Easter Egg is this: set the
game to Friday the 13th and then fly around and you'll start to see bikinied men everywhere. The premise behind this Easter Egg is what
the programmer Jacque claimed was the product of his sexist boss. Essentially his boss demanded that more bimbos
be added to his game and Jacque did not appreciate the poor taste remark. This case was very famous because you would
stumble upon this Easter Egg without even really having to do much. You just happened to play the game on the
Friday the 13th of the year the game that came out you would be bombarded with naked
men all around you all at once. Needless to say when the publisher found out
about this, Jacque found found himself out of a job. The BBC. In an article written for the BBC about a
history of Doctor Who props, clever users on Twitter noticed that if you took the first
letter of every sentence in the article it spelled out the "BBC worldwide are [bleep]." BBC quickly figured out that this article
was written by the prop coordinator on Dr. Who and he was upset about the refusal of
a certain season's distribution. The BBC quickly rendered his relationship with the
company no more. Really not hard to figure out why the BBC
took such great offense from a line like that and fired him. Marvel Comics. Marvel Comics fired artist Adrienne Soff over
a secret message hidden in Marvel comic X-Men Gold Number 1. The reference was a verse in the Quran 551. 551 was a verse being used in Indonesia at
the time to promote the idea that Christians should not be voted into government. Considering Marvel's influence in American
culture, it's pretty obvious why they didn't feel okay with that kind of political association. Show do Milhão. Now I couldn’t personally confirmation this
for myself but I’m going to put it on here if case somebody can uncover some more information. I found out about this in a comment from RudJohn,
he says that in Brazil in the early 2000s there was a popular tv show called Show do
Milhão (which is basically a version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire) and of course there
were several PC games of the show. The 4th version of the game came with this
question: What is the size of my [bleep]. Huge. Gigantic. Monumental. Immense. The person who did the joke got fired. Now I really want to believe this one is true,
but of course, since this took place in Brazil I wasn’t able to really find any information
about this myself. Please let me know if you know anything more
about this easter egg. An easter-egg that actually saved someone's
job. That's right, I'm actually gonna close not with an Easter
egg that got someone fired but actually managed to do quiet the opposite - benefited this
person's life quite a bit. Now I found this as an anonymous post while
I was doing research on the subject in a deep dive in a forum, so take that with a grain
of salt but even so I found this story enormously valuable because it even changed my perspective
on an easter egg. There was a point in time where easter eggs
were almost always viewed as time wasters. Apple and Microsoft both implemented policies
in the late nineties banning Easter eggs in any of the workplace claiming that it hurt
productivity and functionality of their products. But in this story this programmer actually
manages to create an argument for Easter eggs and actually why
it might be more valuable to sometimes do one instead of not do one. Essentially this programmer ran a company
designing software for various companies and in this situation they were designing a program
for managing call centers. He decided just as a joke to hide an easter
egg right there in the management software but to keep it a secret from the other programmer
he was working on the project with, he decided to hide the code and hid it across several
various modules. The client for the programmers wanted a trial
copy of the software. This was very pretty pre-software security
times so these guys burned the software onto a disk and gave it to their client for him
to try out. The client called up and explained that he
no longer needed their software. He explained that they already had an updated
version of the software, that it had been laying around and that theirs was not up to
the same quality. The programmers asked if they could come in
and take a look at the software for themselves. When they got to the call center they looked
at the interface and noticed that it looked similar to theirs but not exactly alike. To them it was possible that perhaps they
had lifted their code and slightly altered it only so it wouldn't look just enough alike
so that they could get away with using their software without paying them a dime. Right then and there that programmer knew
what he had to do: he got in that seat and he tried to do his Easter Egg and sure enough
there it was it. It popped up there with the name, the date,
his company's name and a large picture of Sailor Moon just as he had programmed. The call center operator turned white as a
ghost. All of a sudden he didn't want to talk. He called security and had both programmers
shown to the door but the damage was already done. Everybody had already seen what he did. It was decided that in exchange for them not
suing the company and telling everybody about it, that they would pay them four times the
original contract value. The call center operator that pulled this
move was fired from the company so this Easter Egg did technically get another person fired
so I didn't trick you in the end. This programmer goes on to say that ever since
this incident has happened he's gone on to hide an easter egg in everything that he does. It's his special mark to guarantee that the
product is his and never again will he be in a situation as dire as the one here. If you want to discuss more easter eggs like
this, leave a comment below or even join the Discord. We got a great community of people there just
discussing games, finding easter eggs, sharing music. Its a great place, love to see you there. If you want to see more content like this,
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