Gamasutra has an interview with Warren Robinett, the developer of the legendary 1979 Atari 2600 game Adventure, probably one of the most influential action-adventure games of all time (The Legend of Zelda bears more than a passing resemblance).

“My boss told me not to work on it, because it was impossible to do on the Atari 2600 console, which had only 1/8 K of RAM and 4K of ROM,” he says. “But I worked on the idea anyway.”

Adventure is also notable because it contained the first ever " Easter Egg." By carrying a particular object through a particular wall, you could see a screen with Robinett' s signature. This was his way of getting around Atari' s administrative policy of not crediting their programmers.

“I thought of it as a way to put my signature on the game,” he explains, “like painters do in the corner of the painting.”

In his foreword to Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron’s 2003 Video Game Theory Reader Robinett described the room as a “meta-level” for players: “the way to truly beat the game and get to the real conclusion”. For himself, he reveals that he now considers it a kind of “meta-game” with the company’s management, noting that while they “had the power” to stop his name appearing on the box, he “had the power to put it on the screen”.

Robinett also designed the BASIC Programming Cartridge for the 2600, a remarkably ambitious undertaking that I recall being somewhat curious about as a kid... but by then I was dabbling in BASIC on the Apple IIe.

The article goes on to describe Robinett' s career after Atari, working in educational software, VR, and most recently nanotechnology. It' s a brief but fascinating read... check it out here.

Cool. It' d be good to see what other classic programmers are up to.

Adventure is also notable because it contained the first ever " Easter Egg." By carrying a particular object through a particular wall, you could see a screen with Robinett' s signature. This was his way of getting around Atari' s administrative policy of not crediting their programmers.

Reminds me of that head on a stick at the end of DoomII! But I' m sure that was more just for fun!