Most companies have written policies about those Easter Eggs. At most major companies adding unapproved features is grounds for termination.

As Hodgman pointed out there is a huge potential for legal problems. Hot Coffee was a big one. Another bullet that was fired and missed was the lawsuits against EA by Jack Thompson claiming that The Sims 3 had explicit content when the nudity blur was removed and other cheat codes were entered; lawyers reviewed all the images in the game and found none. Imagine the backlash if a single modeler had thought "this would be funny" and included something explicit. Outside of games, Microsoft has been bitten several times; from the unauthorized flight simulator in excel making it fail government certifications, to the "volcanoes" in the 3D text screen saver getting reclassified from a feature to a bug.

From a design perspective it often does not make sense, as JTippets pointed out. You can certainly design in "unexpected moments of delight". You can also design in quests that are difficult to complete and very few players will see. The 100%'ers like to have some content that is difficult to reach, but that does not make it an Easter Egg.

It is unwise to release any untested material. Adding a hidden feature without buy-in from QA is asking for trouble.

Considering those things, I wouldn't need any countermeasures because they wouldn't exist.

Most companies have written policies about those Easter Eggs. At most major companies adding unapproved features is grounds for termination.

Don't be such a party pooper

Who says Easter Eggs are sneaked in by lone programmers/artists? Many developers (or at least the ones who actually have fun making games) love to hide things in their games for the player to find. Rareware is perhaps one of greatest examples of this. Their games (especially the ones for the N64) were full of oddities that could only be found by going off the beaten path and doing some amount exploration and experimentation. These oddities range from cryptic messages in the text and on textures, to locations and objects that are out of reach, to bits and pieces of the game that were left over from the beta development period. These kinds of oddities and Easter eggs don't serve some ephemeral purpose - they make the determined player want to search every inch of your game and to do a lot of investigative research into the making of your game. As an example of this, the classic game "GoldenEye 007" is still being searched for hidden content to this very day. Just recently (some fifteen years after the game's release) it was discovered that within the game's code there exists a (nearly) fully functional ZX Spectrum 48x emulator, with ten games included.

This kind of hidden content is something I love seeing in video games

Yes, it is all good that they put those things in GoldenEye 007, .... but it did manage to ship two years after the movie it was supposed to be concurrent with.

So yeah, if bonus features and easter eggs are more important than shipping dates, I suppose you can add bonus features 'til your heart is content. Just like DNF.

Yes, it is all good that they put those things in GoldenEye 007, .... but it did manage to ship two years after the movie it was supposed to be concurrent with.

A lot of the development time was spent going through design concepts and creating the game engine from the ground up. Not to mention the planning for the game began the same year as the movie was released. Today, most games based on film franchises are in development well before the film's release, and development time is saved by using some existing game engines and by using formulaic game design. In any case, if it takes an extra year or two to create one of the greatest (and best selling) games of all time, then so be it. Of course, with the strict guidelines most game publishers enforce today, this is an unlikely scenario.

One of the reasons why I enjoy seeing Easter eggs and hidden content in video games is because it shows that the developers had fun working on the game and that they wanted to include things the players would be talking about for years to come. When you still have a large community of gamers playing, discussing, and finding new details about your game after fifteen years, that's when you know you've made a great game.

Write it into your code using obscure variable names. Don't put it into a resource file and the majority of people won't be able to change it or even find it until your program lets them. No safe is actually safe-- which kinda makes the word "safe" an oxymoron. Don't worry about the few people out there that will hack/exploit your game. The people that want to have a rich and full gaming experience won't look too hard behind the curtain anyway.

So, to sum up, JTippetts is correct. Don't worry about it-- you'll just waste valuable development time.