Doom Musings: Easter Eggs in maps

Well this has to crop up eventually. Easter eggs. They are often in-jokes or weird references to things that players may never be able to get in games (or get right away). Build Engine games, especially Duke Nukem 3D, are just full of these things. They make the overall game experience feel wacky, especially during normally serious moments. People who find the easter eggs are then quick to immediately go on the internet and post what they found, which then leads to hysteria as all of a sudden everyone wants to find them. Heck, some people probably got fooled by some "fake" easter eggs, like the unlocking of Sonic and Tails in Super Smash Bros Melee which was fake, or unlocking Toad in the same game. Good times.

So Doom's got a few notable easter eggs. The ones that immediately come to mind are the Nine Inch Nails reference in E4M1, the secret maps of Doom II, Commander Keens at the end of MAP32, and of course Romero's head technically being the final boss. One might argue that the map layout of E3M2 could be an easter egg in some way as well. Then you've got the ones in the PWADs, like the Sparkster easter egg in MAP15 of Community Chest 3, a super-hidden Dopefish artwork in Doom The Way Id Did, the secret levels of Doom 2 The Way Id Did in general, the cybie.wad references in Paul Corfiatis wads, and "IT'S A CHEST!" from Community Chest 4's MAP14. Like the IWADs, PWAD easter eggs are often tongue-in-cheek references or tributes to other things that the authors enjoy, which is acceptable.

On a personal note, I like it better when an easter egg does NOT count towards the secret total at all, such as the aforementioned Dopefish in DTWID. They act like "super secrets" essentially, in that they shouldn't count towards the secret total, but offer a lot more effort than a standard find for a secret sector (and if you know me on Doomwiki, I'm all about finding actual secrets).

This post comes about two months after a seemingly offensive easter egg was removed from a Doom mod as well. I won't go into detail, but from what I saw, it's...actually something from Shadow Warrior more or less. The author who put the easter egg in seems to have a fetish for the sort of thing he puts in as well, according to some members (who may or may not be telling truth). Well, more power to him I suppose, I honestly don't care about the backlash it received. In general though, easter eggs shouldn't seem offensive, because you never know when the nitpicking police will lose their cool.