>Clayton had picked up a dot, a secret key, in a black castle and carried it back to an earlier room where the dot granted him access to a door. Inside the door was another room, bordered in purple. The room was mostly bare aside from a message that read, “Created by Warren Robinett.” ..... >The memo stated the company had made ~$100m on game cartridge sales in 1978 ($420m in today’s money and ~10% of Warner’s total revenues). Because individual designers were responsible for individual games, several designers saw they drove millions in sales. Yet most designers made salaries between ~$16k and ~$25k ($67k-$105k today), regardless of how much revenue they drove. ..... >Atari refused to credit designers in any public fashion. This practice perplexed the designers, who felt they were similar to authors of books or directors of movies. Robinett believes Atari didn’t want its designers to become recognized, lest the company be forced to offer higher salaries. ..... >“It was kind of a little fuck you to Atari management,” Robinett said. “They took away my royalty, but I tricked them into publicizing my name.” ..... >As word spread about Robinett’s secret room on school playgrounds and insider gaming publications, Atari decided to embrace its former designer’s act of rebellion. An Atari manager named Steve Wright told Electronic Games the company expected to plant “little ‘Easter eggs,’” in future games, coining the term that has lasted for decades ..... >Adventure,” which Atari had discouraged Robinett from making, sold 1m+ copies at ~$25 each — $0 of which went to Robinett. ..... >Ron Milner, who worked at Atari from 1972 to 1985, inserted an Easter egg in the arcade game “Starship 1.” If a player followed a certain sequence of controls, the message “Hi Ron” would flash on the screen and the player would be awarded 10 free games. The Easter egg was proof that Milner had designed “Starship 1.” “I could go to an arcade with my friends and say, ‘Hey, I made this game,’” Milner said. ..... >“The word ‘Easter egg’ doesn’t apply that well to what I did, from my point of view,” he said. “It was a signature — an act of rebellion and defiance.”