What Hidden Liftoff Easter Eggs Did Fans Discover?

Even after all these years, the smallest details, almost childish, that reveal that yes, we love rockets too. A burn mark on a launchpad model, a children’s drawing on a wall of a control room with a stick figure in a rocket, a half burned checklist in a drawer. And those props and details are almost always linked to much bigger Easter eggs. Like a scratched serial number on an object which, once cleaned, reveals a password. Or a faded poster of a fictional space program in a corner, which, in another place of the scene, will trigger a brief animation of a launch.

Nerds can likely recognize all these tiny items of love and figure out a chronology of hidden lore in the game. New players, on the other hand, get to experience the joy of stumbling upon little developer made up facts about orbital mechanics, hidden in the game, as they uncover little developer jokes about space. The evidence for me that the developers are space nuts just like us is that they included so many of these lovingly detailed pieces for the curious and patient player to uncover and bring to bear on past scenes – and thus relive them as if reconnecting with an old friend.

Even now, a flicker of excitement runs through my chest when I find a liftoff-related Easter egg, hidden away in a game or TV show. These have been my ‘hobby’ for several years now and most of the really good ones are patient-rewarding, subtle or just clever. For example, in the drone sim ‘Liftoff’, players discovered a series of custom skin decals for the player’s drones that, when viewed from the correct angle, actually spelled out launch telemetry for each of the drones. A really sweet little touch from the developers and one that makes me feel like I’m part of a special club of pilots who ‘get it’.

Sometimes, even outside of video games, you can find more Liftoff tributes in films and books. For example, I once noticed in a sci-fi series I follow that the props department for the show put mission numbers and launch site mottos on crates and console panels in various scenes. One of the scenes even had the mission numbers and call sign dates from classic space missions mirrored on a console in the background of a scene. A fan made a star chart from the scenes of a liftoff in a particular cinematic and after comparing it to the constellations from an older space opera that I love, I found that they were aligned in the exact same way. It was like a long conversation between the creators of the two series. I’ve even found collectible toy packaging and concept art for books on various subjects including space, with blueprints for fictional launch vehicles that fans have made into community projects. Finding these little notes about the making of something is really cool and shows a lot of craftsmanship and love for what they’re doing.

While tracking all these easter eggs down can be a fun past time of mine, in the mean time they also completely change the way I experience liftoffs in games. Because finding a hidden plaque with a developers birthday in it or a faint Morse code pattern in the countdown is so very, very much more special than watching some rocket blasting off into space. It makes the scene so much more personal. I very much enjoy making a catalog of them and swapping screenshots with friends. Sometimes even I get to put them in chronological order to see how other people incorporated the easter eggs of a previous game into their own. It’s all very playfully nerdy and makes a lot of sense, because in the end it’s just like finding someone else’s hidden doodles in the margin of a book and realizing that there are loads of other curious people out there.

My take on the tiny liftoff easter eggs that are slowly being uncovered by fans is pretty positive. I've been reading through quite a few threads in order to keep up with fans that are frantically cataloguing every easter egg in the game. It's been cool to see secret coordinates hidden in HUD art for levels that can then be entered into the game to find a special skybox with a sunrise at the developers hometown launch site or even a reference to 'The Martian' in the form of a set of potato satchel blueprints for growing potatoes in space that have been hidden away in an inventory screen somewhere. There are also a number of audio glyphs hidden throughout the game in the form of brief telemetry beeps that when decoded reveal messages such as "good luck" or other inside jokes from the studio behind the game. I've even come across a few community made maps that allow fans to play through levels with launch pads that have been placed in real-world orbital mechanics which really makes a single easter egg feel like a mini research project.

These little goodies normally wouldn’t sit well with my impatient nature but somehow they have me pausing to appreciate and share with friends and family. Low-key clever and fun to play over and replay scenes and even zoom in on certain textures. It gives me a reason to rewatch launches to see if I have missed anything, which is kinda satisfying in itself.

I managed to get the chat excitedly pointed in the right direction last night for the hidden launchcam so I went to try it out myself. It’s all been quite playful and a sequence can be triggered by certain emote combinations down by the flight bay. I tried out a few of the relevant ones, and then the ceiling panels above would slide down to reveal a slow and beautiful lift-off to the right of the screen. It was kind of like stumbling upon a secret TV channel that your controller can tune into. There’s another mechanic too, environmental storytelling. The crates down in the hangar have been labeled with the mission numbers that they were used for, and if you stack them up in the right order it reveals a schematic for the abandoned upper stage of the rocket.

Audio easter eggs hidden in spaceflight soundtrack reach new level when played backwards revealing phrases like “Lift off” or historic mission control chatter. Fans have since created a small gallery of vintage space photos for this sort of audio clip. The finds have inspired fans to write their own spaceflight missions (Fan Missions) and recreate historic launches, and even use in-game space coordinates to recreate real-life lunar landmarks. I find this really fun, and transforms the normal one-player game into a fun treasure hunt that can be played by all.