Before cybersecurity was a buzzword, programmers were already hiding jokes, protests and signatures inside the machines they built. This episode traces the history of digital Easter eggs from a 1960s government mainframe that spat out an anti-war slogan, to Warren Robinette burning his name into a secret room in Atari's Adventure after the company refused to credit its programmers, to the moment an Atari executive decided to market the unauthorized code as a feature and coined the term.

From there the story scales up: the Konami Code born as a debugging shortcut in Gradius, the Sonic 3D Blast exception handler that turned crashes into a hidden level select, a flight simulator tucked inside Excel, chip art etched in silicon with a Russian-language taunt for Soviet spies, and the corporate crackdown that followed when Apple and Microsoft deci ...