So imagine my surprise when I saw that Darren Palmer, Ford’s Vice President of Global EV, had shared a short little video of someone playing what looks to be yet another update to the classic concept behind Spy Hunter using the single physical control on the F-150 Lightning’s stack. And it took all of five minutes to me to go from “cool” to “why?”.
The tradition of cool easter eggs on software is a long and storied one. Ever since Warren Robinett decided that he’d just about had it with Atari not giving him any credit for his work, developers everywhere have taken the opportunity to add a little bit of fun to their deliverable. From Breakout on MacOS 7.5, to the small easter eggs on the version page of every Android Phone, to another version of Spy Hunter, but hidden in Excel 2000 (presumably for when you are done looking at boring spreadsheets). For the devs that hid it there, to the people that discover them (accidentally or otherwise), easter eggs are a fun diversion. Something to give you a sense of belonging as part of a small community that discovered it, or something with which to amuse and delight coworkers who may not be especially interested in computers otherwise.
However, there is a reason we don’t see a lot of big easter eggs anymore.
Making an easter egg is time consuming. Making an easter egg that’s stable and doesn’t affect functionality? Even more so. Nowadays, companies such as Microsoft ban their developers from adding easter eggs. They add complexity and become one more thing to maintain. Crucially, some especially paranoid workplaces (which may or may not be justified in their paranoia) will ban software with easter eggs (I guess that’s Android and Chrome out?) making the entire thing pointless.
Tesla doing games on their screen is not surprising, over the years we have seen the company evolve from “let’s make a lotus but electric” to something that’s rather more akin to the vehicular equivalent of a shitpost. But Ford doing such a thing is rather surprising. Their easter eggs are generally in hardware, where they can’t make life difficult for their software department or their end users. The F-150 Lightning is supposed to be the most serious vehicle in their lineup, the one that will literally become the most common vehicle on American roads upon release. And yet here we are, playing Spy Hunter using a volume knob as a controller.
If complex easter eggs are really as risky and a pain to include on your custom software, then I can think of few places where I would want an easter egg as little as on a giant main screen which is now my information center, stereo controls, HVAC controls, and that’s already so fragile that there’s a non-zero chance that a particularly clumsy person will cost me many thousands of dollars on a replacement.
Cars are becoming closer to smartphones, and to be honest I don’t game on my mobile either.
