Do you know what the first easter egg in history is?

Easter eggs are all those hidden pieces of information that we can find on websites, games, movies, videos, series, and much more. Over the years, putting these surprises in creations of the most diverse formats has become incredibly common within entertainment, which can be a reference to some other production, or just a simple phrase or extra word.

Pixar, for example, is phenomenal when it comes to this subject. In his animations, we can always find items that link us to other films from the studio itself, or the classic yellow ball and the Pizza Planet car that are present in almost all feature films. It was precisely because of these clues that the hypothesis arose that all of his films would be interconnected in the same universe, in the famous Theory of pixar.

However, the story’s first easter egg isn’t something with as deep a meaning as those in pixar, and it doesn’t come from a movie either. The Guinness World Records, the book of records, considers the phrase “Hi Ron!” present in the game Starship 1, made for the Atari console and released in 1977, as the first hidden message in all history.

When appearing on the screen, if the player pressed a certain sequence on the joystick, ten extra lives were distributed to whoever was playing. However, the fact was only revealed 40 years after the game’s debut, in 2017, by the game’s programmer, Ron Milner, to whom the phrase itself referred. Before that, many believed that the oldest was a gift from the 1979 Adventure game.

Even with “Hi Ron!” being considered the first easter egg, there are still several discussions around the world that defend the fact that other older productions already contained secret messages. One of these theories states that, probably, the oldest of all would be the work School of Athens, from 1511, where the artist Raphael would have painted him hidden among the other thinkers present in the painting.