Kotaku has revealed an Easter egg that’s been hidden on the original Xbox for almost twenty years, after a developer who worked on the console sent in a tip. The Easter egg, which has apparently remained secret until now, can show you the Xbox Dashboard Team’s names after you follow a byzantine set of steps (as is par for the course when it comes to some video game secrets).
Kotaku was able to find someone with a working Xbox who could actually carry out those steps, which you can see in the publication’s video below. If you’ve got one of the consoles, you can try it out for yourself by ripping a CD as a soundtrack and calling it “Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” (using 26 “y”s to reach the maximum amount of characters allowed). After the rip is complete, going to the Xbox’s Settings > System Info screen will instead display the names of the people who worked on the dashboard.
[embedded content]
The Easter egg is similar to another one that exists on Microsoft’s original console, where naming a soundtrack rip “<<Eggsßox>>” will immediately play credits thanking the console’s development partners and players.
Developers hiding their names in games and consoles is nothing new. In fact, it’s widely believed that the first video game Easter egg was created by a developer trying to get their name into their game. As the story goes, developer Warren Robinett hid his name in the 1980 game Adventure after Atari refused to give him credit.
Modern consoles also like to incorporate various winks and nods to gaming culture as well — the PS5 has PlayStation’s iconic circle, triangle, square, cross symbols molded into some of its plastic, and this Fisher-Price gamepad for literal babies incorporates the famous Konami Code.
Despite gamers being ever-vigilant for hidden secrets, it seems as if there’s still at least one hiding somewhere in the Xbox. As Kotaku points out, Seamus Blackley, the creator and designer of the Xbox tweeted in 2017 that there was still a hidden secret that no one had found. But the one revealed Friday wasn’t what he was referring to, he told Kotaku:
Thankfully, Blackley was kind enough to respond to a few queries about all of this. He confirmed that yes, the Xbox Easter egg he has in mind does in fact revolve around the Xbox’s boot animation, and is not the “Timmy” secret we’re revealing today—which he actually didn’t know about.
It seems the egg hunt can continue on for fans of the ancient console.
