10 Coolest Xbox Easter Eggs Gamers Should Know About

The world of video games is practically drowning in Easter eggs. You can't play the latest titles without seeing a reference to "Minecraft" or "The Legend of Zelda." However, Easter eggs aren't limited to just video games. Sometimes, engineers hide little nuggets in the hardware and code of the consoles that play video games.

While Microsoft's Xbox hasn't been around as long as rivals PlayStation and Nintendo, the Xbox line of consoles has left quite an impact on the video game industry. Granted, Xbox has never quite caught up in terms of sales numbers, but where would online multiplayer be without erstwhile-Xbox exclusives such as the "Halo" franchise? Xbox has its place in history, but even if it didn't, engineers made sure to leave their marks on the iterations of the consoles with cheeky little Easter eggs. Some of these special features reference the origin of the Xbox brand, while others are more or less tiny cheat codes built into the operating system. Regardless of the Easter egg itself, the teams behind the various Xbox platforms use them as a chance to let their freak flags fly.

Here are 10 of the coolest Easter eggs to ever grace an Xbox console.

A location can mean everything in the development of entertainment. For instance, had Bungie not been based in Chicago when the studio worked on "Halo," the team might have never found Steve Downes, the local radio host who would eventually voice Master Chief. Likewise, Xbox designers pay homage to the headquarters of their company with several consoles.

The words "Hello from Seattle" can be found on the shells of the latest Xbox consoles, including the Series X and Series S. The reference is fairly self-explanatory: The headquarters for Microsoft is in Seattle, Washington. Technically, the campus is located in Redmond, Washington, which is part of the Seattle metropolitan area.

Depending on the lighting, one might have a hard time seeing the Easter egg, which is etched into the underside of the Series X and Series S. And it doesn't have any shading or highlight to help it stand out. However, Microsoft didn't stop there; the company also added this Easter egg to several Xbox peripherals. By removing the battery cover from the Xbox One and Xbox Series controllers, owners can find the words "Hello from Seattle" printed in extremely tiny font on the sticker in the battery compartment. Depending on how good one's vision is, Easter egg seekers might need a magnifying glass to read it. And, anyone who owns a Kinect can also find this Easter egg on the bottom of their device.

Most Easter eggs are hidden in the most unlikely places. If someone owns a Jeep Renegade, they might never know a fake spider is molded into the fuel compartment until they open it. However, some Easter eggs look us right in the face — like the Bigfoot silhouette in the Jeep Renegade's rear window.

The Xbox premiered when companies started implementing dashboards so users could tweak settings and manage game saves across a library. For its premier console, Microsoft created a stylish, sci-fi inspired dashboard that oozed an early 2000s attitude and looked like it was powered by Mountain Dew. We must credit the audio design, which solidified the aesthetic with spaceship bleeps and bloops whenever players scrolled through menus. The Easter egg game into play if users idled on the dashboard, which would start uttering what sounded like text-to-speech voices that were too garbled to decipher. These voices were creepy, but they didn't feel out of place given the theme of the dashboard.

Depending on one's knowledge of video games, one could be forgiven for assuming this Easter egg was created with the same text-to-speech programs used in games such as "Berzerk" and the "Faith" trilogy. However, it turns out this Easter egg had even more layers than anticipated. In 2014, the now-ex-Director of Programming for Xbox Live, Larry Hryb (aka. Major Nelson), revealed that the dashboard sounds were actually public domain audio from NASA Apollo missions that programmers had slightly tweaked. If you want to make gamers feel like they're piloting a spaceship while using a console dashboard, you might as well sample the sounds from one.

The original Xbox was the first console to feature a built-in hard drive. It was slow and tiny by modern standards, but it let users save game progress without memory cards and had the added (and forgotten) feature of being able to rip audio CDs. This audio-track-copying functionality hid one of the most obfuscated Easter eggs in gaming history.

In 2021, one of the developers behind the first Xbox revealed that several Easter eggs were placed into the original console's CD ripping function but went undiscovered for two decades. But don't blame hackers for not discovering this little joke sooner; the developer admitted the method to unlock the Easter egg was so esoteric they didn't think anyone could uncover it without help. And they were right. To activate this Easter egg, a user had to insert an audio CD, name the ripped soundtrack "Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!" (that's 26 ys), and let the program finish copying the audio tracks, the console's System Info screen would change to show the names everyone who created the Xbox's dashboard. And yes, that Easter egg is a reference to everyone's favorite "South Park" resident Timmy.

This wasn't the only Easter egg hidden in the Xbox's audio CD ripping software. We have known for quite a while that another secret could be activated by inserting an audio CD into the console and naming the new ripped soundtrack "<>" – that symbol that looks like a "B" is actually the Latin letter "Ꞵ". Once a user hit "Done," the Easter egg played a hidden credit screen honoring the Xbox development team. It wasn't much, but the first Easter egg in gaming history was a hidden credit screen, too.

As previously stated, the Xbox played a vital role crafting the multiplayer gaming heaven we live in today. However, early on, Xbox engineers had to establish the groundwork without existing systems that let console owners use their accounts as name tags in multiplayer matches.

While Xbox Live catalyzed the modern console multiplayer landscape, "Halo: Combat Evolved" predated this system but shipped with multiplayer functionality, albeit limited to local area network (LAN) parties. And to help tell the consoles apart, each Xbox was assigned a random profile name. These weren't part of the game but built into every console as an Easter egg. Players have reported names such as Penguin, Stumpy, Snake, Caboose, Butcher, Prancer, Cupid, and Walla Walla. Unfortunately, because of how the system worked, everyone whose console was labeled as "Stumpy" was stuck with it.

"Halo: Combat Evolved" wasn't the only title to utilize these multiplayer profile names. Another game that allegedly used this feature was "MechAssault," a third-person shooter based in the popular "BattleTech" universe. Once Xbox Live hit the scene and players started creating their own multiplayer names via gamertags, these premade profile names became obsolete and were phased out. However, some of these "Halo: Combat Evolved" multiplayer profile names lived on as the inspirations for several characters in Rooster Teeth's "Red vs. Blue" series.

Nowadays, we associate Easter eggs with out-of-place jokes and references to other media. For instance, that trashed ranch sign in the "Silent Hill 2" remake? An obvious jab at the infamous "Silent Hill HD Collection" that replaced the original ranch sign's font with ... Comic Sans (shudder). But sometimes developers blur the line and turn Easter eggs into full-on features.

As we previously established, since the Xbox included a built-in hard drive, owners could rip audio onto their consoles, but what would have been the point if they didn't have a means to play it? The Xbox also featured an audio player that let them listen to any CDs inserted into the console or soundtracks stored on the hard drive – including the music that came pre-loaded on the console. The Easter egg/feature came into play whenever anyone wanted to trip out while they were rocking out.

Xbox's audio player was designed with a "visualizer" that displayed frantically shifting lines of colors whenever it started belting out music, which was the style at the time. Normally, this was relegated to the small window next to the track list, but users could make the colors fill the entire screen by pressing the X and Y buttons at the same time. That's basically all there was to this Easter egg. Sure, similar music players on computers had the exact same feature, but they also had a button dedicated to full-screen mode; Xbox owners had to discover and press a combination of buttons to get the same effect.

When Microsoft debuted the Xbox 360, it introduced a new way for players to represent themselves online: the avatar system. Owners could customize 3D representations of themselves with a variety of options and accessories, but some were locked and unavailable unless users performed a trick that most gamers couldn't figure out on their own.

Some Xbox 360 owners discovered that they could unlock nine secret hair colors for their avatar if they idled on the avatar customization screen for a minute or two. Some people believed they had to spin their avatar around using the left or right triggers for a minute or continually tilt the head using the right analog stick. However, these actions served no purpose aside from making the on-screen character dizzy and did not contribute to the Easter egg. As long as they didn't stop highlighting the "Hairstyles" option, it would eventually spin and unlock the hidden avatar hair colors.

Apparently, this Easter egg had a few restrictions. For starters, it wouldn't activate for brand new avatars. Players had to finalize the character and then return to the editor later to unlock the Easter egg customizations. Moreover, if players got impatient and tried to enter the hairstyles menu while the icon was still spinning, they wouldn't have access to the new hair colors and would have to start the process all over again. While Microsoft eventually gave Xbox owners greater control over their avatars, including hair colors, with subsequent customization systems, that would all be for naught. In January of 2025, avatar support was discontinued.

Microsoft's Kinect was supposed to revolutionize gaming. Well, Microsoft wanted the Kinect to revolutionize gaming by implementing voice commands and motion controls. While the Kinect has been dead since 2018, before its death, developers implemented special Easter eggs in their games that were only accessible via the Kinect.

Arguably the most high-profile game developed with Kinect functionality (but not exclusively for the Kinect) was "Mass Effect 3." Instead of implementing motion controls, the developers at BioWare decided to focus on voice commands. Players still had to move around and aim using the controller, but they could activate actions and abilities by shouting commands. Admittedly, given the number of actions players could do in the game, the list of commands got long, and the Kinect wasn't smart enough to recognize most slang terms. Most, not all.

Three Kinect-bound Easter eggs that we know of reside within "Mass Effect 3," and they all revolved around equipping weapons. While players could equip a shotgun by shouting "Shotgun," BioWare devs programmed in two additional commands: "Boomstick" and "Shotty," both of which are popular nicknames for shotguns. The third Easter egg was not as creative, but players could equip a submachine gun in the game by shouting "Submachine gun" or the abbreviation "SMG." These Easter eggs were somewhat simple compared to others, but given the number of nicknames for weapons, who could ever have expected to find them? Heck, for all we know, BioWare hid even more secret voice commands in the Kinect functionality of "Mass Effect 3." We have just yet to find them because there are so many nicknames for firearms – and so few people bought a Kinect.

Many video game companies have or at least had a mascot. For Nintendo, it's Mario. Meanwhile, Sony has gone through several potential mascots, but the company has apparently settled on the star of one of the best single-player games on the PlayStation 5, Astrobot. As for Microsoft's Xbox, it's obviously Master Chief, and we won't ever forget it.

Microsoft has been engraving the likeness of Master Chief onto Xboxes for quite a while, although people often have to open up their consoles to see them. Arguably the most famous (and coolest) is hidden inside the Xbox One X. This Easter egg, which is engraved on the motherboard, consists of a Chibi-fied Master Chief riding a scorpion as if it were a rodeo horse. As cool as riding a tamed giant scorpion sounds, this Easter egg also serves double duty as a reference, since the Xbox One X was initially known via the code name "Project Scorpio." Either that, or it's poking fun at all the times Master Chief rode an M808 Scorpion tank into battle throughout the "Halo" franchise.

Unfortunately, the other Master Chief Easter eggs don't measure up to the Xbox One X secret. The Xbox One S, for instance, hides a similarly chibified Master Chief on the interior casing, but he's just standing there. And the Easter eggs on the Xbox Series X and S are even bigger downgrades since they only consist of Master Chief's helmet etched into different components. For the Series X, the helmet is nestled on the side of the console's cooling fan, and in the Series S, the "Halo" Easter egg makes its home on the console's power supply unit.

Usually, you only need patience and a keen eye to find an Easter egg. A walkthrough also helps. Regardless, most Easter eggs are intended so almost anyone can find them if they go looking, but some are a little more sinister and require special tools.

If you own either the 20th Anniversary Xbox headset or the 20th Anniversary Xbox controller, you can use a blacklight to find hidden details. No, not on the peripherals but on their boxes, so let's hope you saved those. If you illuminate the front of the headset's box with a blacklight, you should be able to make out the modern Xbox logo. Meanwhile, if you use a blacklight on the controller box, you can see an original Xbox controller (a.k.a. The Duke controller) superimposed on the image of the 20th Anniversary controller.

Microsoft also hid a blacklight Easter egg on one of the only two special edition Xbox Series X consoles out there: the "Halo Infinite" edition. On the surface, the console has a slick and stylish deco that is split between a starry sky and...armor plates maybe? But if you shine a blacklight on the front, you will illuminate an odd, alien-looking symbol. "Halo" aficionados should instantly recognize this as the symbol for Installation 07, where "Halo Infinite" takes place. Even without a blacklight, the 20th Anniversary boxes and the "Halo Infinite" Xbox Series X edition are still pretty.

What's more insidious than an Easter egg that is invisible unless you spend your hard-earned cash on a special tool? How about a two-in-one Easter egg locked behind an even more expensive paywall of a limited edition?

The 20th Anniversary edition controller's Easter eggs don't end with the box. Owners who open the battery case will find a "thank you" message printed on the inside of the battery cover. This consists of the phrase "When everybody plays, we all win." and the signature of the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer. Admittedly, Spencer's original quote was "When everyone plays, we all win," but we're not about to let a quibble stand in the way of a great sentiment.

Microsoft also programmed a secondary Easter egg into the 20th Anniversary edition that only activates whenever users sync it to their Xbox Series X/S. Once linked, owners can customize their Xbox with a special dynamic wallpaper consisting of glowing green lines and the 20th Anniversary logo. Unfortunately, these Easter eggs will likely go unnoticed by most Xbox owners due to the 20th Anniversary controller's rarity. Moreover, the few units that are still available are prohibitively expensive. Gamers who want an Easter egg in their Xbox controller would be better off purchasing a "Minecraft" Creeper or Pig controller since they're much easier to get and far less expensive.