Dev Stories #3 - Easter Eggs

Intro
I think most of you have somekind of stories how you searched easter eggs and secrets in video games when you were younger. Back in the day, me and my cousin were huge Halo fans and my first memorable easter egg moment was in Halo 2. My cousin had told me that he had heard that there is this mysterious weapon called Scarab Gun on top of some structure and it required multiple manouvers in order to get there. The hunt for this secret weapon felt like an unique quest, lots of failed attempts and when we finally managed to get it and fired it, I remember it felt like a special achievement and being part of this secret community who was aware of that easter egg.

Boring Sequences
There are exceptions of course, but in my opinion most of the video game easter eggs nowadays feel quite boring, just bunch of sequences with multiple tutorials on Youtube and there isn't that much creative thinking required. I think Youtube and the social media has kind of ruined many secrets in video games, but that's just how things are and I totally get that many developers want to prioritize their time towards more important gameplay stuff than designing cool and unique secrets.

Cicada 3301
I can admit that I'm the guy who likes to watch "Top 10" secret videos on Youtube and in general I like stuff that is related to cryptic and mysterious events, even though some areas are just pure fantasy. Back in 2014 (if I remember correctly), I found this a cryptic message thing that started appearing on across the Internet. I'm sure that many of you have also heard this Cicada 3301 at some point and there's some pretty controversial stuff around it but in anycase this certain "internet puzzle" caught my attention and I was impressed how deep it went in terms of solving it. I also think that one cool part of this spesific puzzle was that it was kind of a collective effort for people unknown to each other and there were many codebreaking areas that required different skillsets, so there were some pretty interesting group dynamics going on with some forums when people delegated some technical codebreaking tasks etc. After researching this thing, I kind of felt some same excitement that I had with that Scarab Gun when I was younger and even though there are some dark stuff behind all this, I was having tons of fun and I learned bunch of new stuff like technical audio decrypting and so on.

The Mother of all Easter Eggs
I don't want to get into spesifics what I did when I was in the military, but let's just say that I specialized in pretty interesting and technical stuff. I think my background and interest in these mysterious topics give me the possibility to create something really unique in Road to Vostok when it comes easter eggs. My plan is to implement bunch of small and lore-themed secrets but then there will be one major effort to implement something that is so difficult to figure out and unique, so there will be no step-by-step Youtube tutorials to help you. This might be a bit ambitious but I think I can pull of the most interesting easter egg that game industry have ever seen. This thing will be linked so deeply into the game's lore and there's so many layers to this that it's going to be an awesome journey when some people find the first clues about this.

- Antti (Developer)