Easter meanings,,,

Why is Easter Island named “Easter”?

The instantly recognizable statues on Easter Island (887 of them), called moai, have perplexed and fascinated explorers, experts and average folks since the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen came across it in 1722. And Mr. Roggeveen is the reason it’s called Easter Island. He and his crew dropped anchor on Easter Sunday.

The current inhabitants of Isla de Pascua (Spanish for “Easter Island”) call it Rapa Nui, a phrase whose origin points to the sad history of the place. Apparently Rapa Nui derives from slavers who abducted island dwellers and somehow confused it with another island named Rapa.

For all the magnificence of the moai, the human story of life on Rapa Nui has been bleak for centuries. Famine, warfare, disease from visiting ships, and ecological changes seem to unceasingly pummel the native people. Of course, these conditions only make the existence of the statues all the more of an enigma.

The how and why of the statues deserves its own detailed explanation. Click here for a brief answer. The task at hand is naming.

Research suggests two possible names that the island was called prior to contact with Europeans. Te pito o te henua translates roughly as “navel of the world.” Mata-ki-Te-rangi is approximately “eyes looking to the sky.” Both come from conjecture and the lack of a definite answer again highlights the tragic and chaotic past of one of the world’s most remarkable locations.

The Other Easter Eggs: Coded Messages and Hidden Treats

The term Easter egg started popping up in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its original meaning refers to a hollowed-out or hard-boiled egg, dyed or painted for decoration. It can also refer to an egg-shaped item, such as a receptacle or chocolate, given as an Easter-time gift. In the 1980s, however, the term Easter egg took on an additional meaning—a sense that gave the term meaning all year long. This sense springs from the realm of digital technology and means “an extra feature, as a message or video, hidden in a software program, computer game, DVD, etc., and revealed as by an obscure sequence of keystrokes, clicks, or actions.”

The first discovered Easter egg appeared in the 1979 Atari VCS 2600 game Adventure, created by Warren Robinett. In those days, video-game makers received no individual credit for their work from Atari, so Robinett hid the message “Created by Warren Robinett” within a one-pixel gray dot on a gray background. Robinett told no one of his hidden credit, but a dedicated teenaged gamer found it within a year of the game’s release and wrote to Atari about his discovery. It would have cost over $10,000 to “fix” this, so Atari executives decided to leave it. In a 2003 interview, Robinett recounts that Steve Wright, an Atari manager at the time, loved the idea of hidden surprises in games because they reminded him of “waking up on Easter morning and hunting for Easter eggs.” Thus these hidden features became known as Easter eggs.

Another famous type of gaming Easter egg is a special sequence of arrow keys and letters called the Konami Code, which acts as a cheat code. It first appeared in 1986 in the Nintendo game Gradius. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, a game programmer for Konami, found it too difficult to play through Gradius during testing, so he created the Konami Code to give the player extra power-ups. This cheat code and Easter egg has the honor of being permanently seared into the minds of video-game players around the world.

Easter eggs soon seeped into other technological sources—from DVD extras to heavily trafficked websites. Google is especially fond of these fun little surprises; if you search for “tilt” in Google, the results appear askew, and if you type the Konami code into Google Docs, your English text will show up in mirror image from right to left.

Have you stumbled across an amazing hidden gem? Share your favorite Easter egg with us in the comments.