Adventure

1001 Video Games

The Atari 2600 version of Adventure appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Easter Egg

Adventure was perhaps the first video game to contain a hidden "Easter Egg." While playing levels 2 or 3, players who enter the black castle and use a bridge in the catacombs will find a single grey dot near the bottom of one of the rooms. Bringing this dot to the screen south and east of the gold castle will cause the wall to the right to become transparent as long as another object is present on the screen. Players can then pass through the wall to a secret room revealing the words "Created by Warren Robinett" in flashing gold letters.

In an interview, Warren Robinett explained his reasons for hiding his name in the game:

Each 2600 game was designed entirely by one person. But on the package it said basically "Adventure, by Atari." And we were only getting salaries, no cut of the huge profits. It was a signature, like at the bottom of a painting. But to make it happen, I had to hide my signature in the code, in a really obscure place, and not tell anybody. Keeping a secret like that is not easy. I decided that if I could not keep the secret myself--I was very tempted to tell my two main friends at Atari, Tom Reuterdahl and Jim Huether--how could I expect anyone else to keep the secret? So I didn't tell anyone, handed over the final version of the program, Atari manufactured and distributed several hundred thousand cartridges of "Adventure," and then it was too late for them to undo it.

Of course, an adventure game, with multiple rooms, is perfect for secret things, because it's easy to make extra rooms that are really hard to get into.

Atari did not discover the presence of Warren Robinett's Easter egg room (an indulgence estimated as taking up 5% of the cartidge's storage space) until notified by a curious letter from a 12-year-old Adventure explorer from Salt Lake City. At this time, Warren had left Atari (in July 1979) and was unreachable for comment or explanation, traveling through Europe. Had he not just quit, he almost certainly would have been fired.

Multiplayer

Robinett worked on a multiplayer function, but had to abandon it because of lack of RAM.

Awards

• FLUX
  • Issue #4 - #35 in the Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list
• Game Informer
  • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #47 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll
• Retro Gamer
  • Issue 46 - #4 in the Top 25 Atari 2600 Games poll

Information also contributed by Big John WV, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual and FatherJack.