Atari’s Adventure was the first action-adventure game on a home console, and it hides one of the most famous secrets in gaming: a sealed room with the words “Created by Warren Robinett” inside. Robinett put it there without telling anyone at Atari. More than forty years later, you can still find it, and this guide shows you exactly how, using the emulator on this site.
Why a programmer hid his name in a cartridge
In the late 1970s Atari did not put programmers’ names on its games. The company, then owned by Warner Communications, did not want competitors to find out who its best developers were, and it did not want those developers to use their fame when bargaining over pay. Four programmers who left over credit and royalties went on to found Activision in 1979.
Warren Robinett joined Atari in November 1977. His first game was Slot Racers. After playing the text game Colossal Cave Adventure at Stanford’s AI lab, he set out to turn it into pictures on a machine with 4 KB of cartridge ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. His boss told him it could not be done. In a lecture he later gave to computer science students, Robinett summed up his reward: the game sold a million copies at a $25 retail price, while he was paid a salary of $22,000 a year. On one of the slides he wrote simply: “I created a secret room and hid my name in it.”
He finished Adventure and the Basic Programming cartridge in June 1979 and then quit. The release date is often given differently: the game’s code carries a 1979 copyright and Robinett’s own website says 1979, while Wikipedia’s article on the game dates Atari’s release to March 1980.
How the secret got out
Robinett had not even told the author of the manual about the room. The first person known to report it was Adam Clayton, a 15-year-old from Salt Lake City, who wrote to Atari explaining how to reach it. The Atari Compendium dates his letter to August 1980, about a year before Electronic Games magazine confirmed the secret and nearly two years before Atari described it in its own Atari Age magazine. Robinett kept a copy of the letter.
By then Robinett was gone, so Atari had engineers track down the code. The one who found it joked that if he fixed it, he would change the message to “Fixed by Brad Stewart”. Brad Stewart went on to co-program the 2600 version of Asteroids. Making a new ROM mask would have cost around $10,000, so the room stayed. Steve Wright, the director of software development in Atari’s Consumer Division, argued that hidden surprises gave players another reason to keep playing and compared them to Easter eggs. The name stuck, and Wright made hidden eggs part of Atari policy.
Adventure’s egg was not the first hidden message in a video game. Wikipedia lists earlier ones, including a hidden “Hi Ron!” in the 1977 arcade game Starship 1 and eggs in 1978 Fairchild Channel F games. But it was the first to become widely known, and the first to be called an Easter egg.
How the trick works inside the cartridge
Walkthroughs disagree on the details. Some say you need one extra object, others two, and some add “but not the bridge”. The game’s disassembled code, published on 6502disassembly.com, explains why. There are two separate checks:
- The door. When you walk off the right edge of the room with the barrier, the game sends you into the secret room instead of the usual next room, but only if the dot is no longer in the Black Castle room where it starts.
- The wall. The barrier normally stops you. The 2600 can draw only two objects per frame, so with three or more objects in a room the game draws them in turns, which causes flicker. On the frames where the dot is drawn as the second object, the barrier does not stop you. More objects make those frames happen reliably. The code also prefers to put the bridge in that second slot, which is why the bridge is a poor choice of extra object.
That is why “drop the dot and two other objects” is the safe rule, and why one object is sometimes enough. The Atari Compendium also reports that a dragon can stand in for the two objects.
Emulator controls for the hunt
- Move: arrow keys. You pick things up by touching them.
- Drop what you are carrying: Space
- Choose game 1, 2 or 3: F11 (Select), then F12 (Reset) to start
- Come back to life after a dragon eats you: F12. This does not restart the game, and objects stay where they were.
- Dragon speed: F4 (left difficulty). In position B, dragons pause before they bite.
- Dragons afraid of the sword: F9 (right difficulty). In position A, dragons run from the sword.
- Save and load: Ctrl + 0–9 saves, Alt + 0–9 loads. Save before each risky step.
Step by step: finding the secret room
The egg only exists in games 2 and 3, because game 1 has a smaller kingdom. Use game 2: its objects always start in the same places, which the list below follows (from the object table in the game’s code). The bat moves things around as you play, so if something is missing, look in nearby rooms.
- Start game 2. Press F11 until the screen shows 2, then F12 (press it again if the number screen is still showing). You begin in front of the Golden Castle, and the sword lies on the same screen.
- Get the white key. It starts at the bottom of the Blue Labyrinth, directly north of the Golden Castle.
- Open the White Castle and take the black key. From the corridor below the Golden Castle, go one screen west, then south to the White Castle. Touch the gate with the white key. The black key is at the bottom of the red maze inside. Remember that you can carry only one object at a time.
- Find the bridge. It starts in the dark catacombs below the barrier room. To get there, go one screen south and one screen east from the Golden Castle (you are now in the room with a thin barrier on its right side), then go south. The kingdom’s links are not always two-way, which the manual blames on “bad magic”, so the way back may not be the way you came. Carry it, and later the black key, toward the Black Castle, which lies beyond the Blue Labyrinth, north of the Golden Castle. Take one object at a time and drop it near the gate.
- Open the Black Castle and carry the bridge inside. The inside is a dark maze where you only see a small patch around you.
- Find the sealed chamber. Go north into the first dark room, then bear west and follow the twisting passage into the room to the west. In that room is a small chamber with no entrance. Drop the bridge so that it spans the wall into the chamber, and walk across. If the bridge and the light around you start to flicker, the invisible dot is in the room with you.
- Pick up the dot. Rub along the bottom wall of the chamber toward the lower-right corner. The dot is the same grey as the floor, but you will hear the pick-up sound. Save now with Ctrl + a number key.
- Carry it out. Cross the bridge back and leave the castle without dropping anything. Outside the dark mazes, the dot is invisible even while you hold it.
- Go to the barrier room. From the Golden Castle, go one screen south and one screen east. You are in the room with a thin vertical barrier on the right. Drop the dot there, away from the walls.
- Add two more objects. Bring any two others, such as keys or the sword, and drop them in the same room. Avoid the bridge.
- Walk through the barrier. When the objects start to flicker, push right against the barrier. You pass through into a room where “Created by Warren Robinett” runs down the screen in changing colours.
If the barrier will not let you through
- Swap an object. Chris Federico’s guide on Orphaned Computers & Game Systems notes that some combinations fail. Replace one object or add another, and remove the bridge if it is in the room.
- Check that you really have the dot. Carry an object into a dark castle maze and hold the dot against a wall: it shows up in your lit area there.
- Lock the bat away. It will not take the dot, but it steals the other objects. Several guides suggest giving it an object you do not need and leaving it inside an empty castle.
- Game 3 works too, but objects start in random rooms, so the search takes longer. The dot always starts in the same place.
More Atari Easter eggs to look for
After Adventure, hidden signatures became a habit at Atari. A few you can try here:
- Yars’ Revenge: destroy a Swirl in mid-air with the Zorlon Cannon, then find the thin black “Ghost of Yar” behind the explosion. Howard Scott Warshaw’s initials, HSWWSH, then appear.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark: Warshaw’s second game puts his initials, HSW2, in your inventory on the final Ark screen, but only after you uncover a Yar near the Flying Saucer Mesa.
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: collect all the phone pieces, give Elliott seven pieces of candy and revive the flower, and it turns into a Yar.
- Missile Command: Rob Fulop’s initials, RF, can appear in a city on game 13. The Atari Compendium says they were removed from some later production runs, so not every version has them.
Games that grew out of Adventure
Atari’s managers wanted Robinett to turn his prototype into a Superman tie-in. He was not interested, so John Dunn built Superman using some of Robinett’s code, on the condition that he got a 4 KB cartridge instead of the usual 2 KB. Like Adventure, it lets you fly from screen to screen through a city of connected rooms. A planned Adventure sequel, announced in 1982, turned into the Swordquest series: Earthworld, Fireworld and Waterworld. Each came with a comic book holding clues to a contest with $150,000 in prizes. A fourth game, Airworld, was never finished.
If you like Adventure’s style of carrying one item at a time through a large map, try Haunted House. You explore a dark mansion as a pair of eyes, and the only light comes from your matches.
Ready to try it? Open Adventure, press F11 until you see game 2, and head for the Blue Labyrinth. Save often: the dragons will not make it easy.
