#2 Developer's Initials (Donkey Kong, Atari 400)
Developer's initials again? So what’s the big deal with THIS one? Well, this one is particularly significant because of the ridiculous amount of time that it remained a secret: 26 years.
Landon M. Dyer was hired to convert Donkey Kong for the Atari 400 and thus spent the next five months in a cell (because that's how programmers were treated back then) reinventing the game, all by his lonesome. He was so deeply entrenched in Donkey Code that he went loco and did the unthinkable: hid his own initials into the game. It was buried so deep, in fact, that the only reason why it was ever discovered was because Landon told people about it. Only one problem: he had completely forgotten how to unlock it.
So along comes some insane, bored-out-his-mind person that figured it out. After going through all 25,000 lines of assembly code, backtracking from an AND statement through the ridiculous combination of setting a high score's fifth and fourth digits as 3-7, 7-3, or 7-7 as the, losing all his lives–the final death by falling–, resetting the system to level 4 difficulty and finally…
I’m lost just typing that out, but you get the idea.
