While you nerds are busy looking for easter eggs and references in Elden Ring, all the cool kids are looking for easter eggs in bitmap file data. Lucas Brooks is the coolest of these kids, as he discovered an easter egg that remained hidden on Windows 1.0 for 37 years. Take that, Nathan Drake.

As spotted by PC Gamer, Brooks is a Windows fan who likes researching, archiving, and deep diving into older Windows versions. He posts his finding on his Twitter handle for fellow Windows aficionados to marvel at, but one of his most recent discoveries takes the prize. He often reverse engineers early Windows versions in order to find any easter eggs and found an interesting little one in Windows 1.0.

"Which version of Windows is the first to include Easter eggs?" he tweeted. "Windows 3.0? Nope. What if I tell you there is an Easter egg in Windows 1.0 RTM?" Brooks discovered a list of credits with Windows developers' names on it, along with a "congratulations" message. It was hidden in the data of a smiley face bitmap file.

Which version of @Windows is the first to include Easter eggs? Windows 3.0? Nope. What if I tell you there is an Easter egg in Windows 1.0 RTM? This is what I have recently discovered: pic.twitter.com/dbfcv4r7jj

— Lucas Brooks (@mswin_bat) March 18, 2022

Among the many names is one Gabe Newell. As you may recall, he is the co-founder and and president of Valve – but at the time he worked at Microsoft, playing a part in the first three versions of the Windows OS. Of course these days he creates handheld consoles and moonlights as a delivery guy.

Of course, Microsoft has become very successful since the time of Windows 1.0. So much so that it can pay developers millions of dollars to feature on its Game Pass subscription service. Chris Charla, Xbox's general manager of content curation and programs recently revealed that Xbox has over 3,000 indie games on its platform, which comprises 4,600 developers across 94 countries. A thousand creators have signed up for ID@Xbox in the past two years.

What's more intriguing is what Charla said after that. "We’ve also paid developers and publishers across Xbox hundreds of millions of dollars in Game Pass license fees.” An interesting piece of information, considering we know very little about the kind of deal Xbox offers devs to feature on Game Pass.

Posted: Mar 28, 2022 8:12 pm
Related Forum: PC General Forum

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/37-year-old-windows-1-easter-egg-gabe-newell/