Created back in 2015, IRLEasterEggs is counting its 7th year of being active with 491k members coming in for entertaining content. The community’s description is as follows: “You know in games or movies when you find an odd little secret that someone in production left unnoticed for the few in the audience that would look for it or happen to stumble upon it? This is the place to share those things you find in real life.”

However, the creators of the subreddit make it very clear that “this isn’t the area for posting digital Easter eggs, as in screenshots or photographs of screens (games, computer software, TV series, DVD menus); as those are regular Easter eggs and not IRL Easter eggs.” They recommend trying the popular corner of r/EasterEggs for such things.

For those who are still new to the term “Easter eggs,” it refers to hidden messages, images or features that filmmakers, game designers, and other (usually electronic) artists include in their work for audiences to discover. Previously, Bored Panda reached out to Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, to find out more about them.

"Most Easter eggs are bonus materials that are not essential to the main narrative. Sometimes they do enrich our experience of the story by connecting it with other, similar stories to create a 'shared universe.' But if nothing else, they are always meant to amuse by conveying 'insider knowledge' in a clever way,” the professor explained.

Moreover, the term “Easter egg” itself “was coined in 1979/80 by Atari’s then-Director of Software Development, Steve Wright, to describe a secret message that had been planted in the video game Adventure,” Lisa explained. “The game designer Warren Robinett was angry with Atari for the company’s failure to include developers’ names in the game credits, so he programmed the message 'created by Warren Robinett' to appear when players encountered a special pixel called 'the gray dot' that gives entry to a secret part of the game map.”

Sadly, Atari took that Easter egg out and you won’t find it in any contemporary versions of the game. "But," Lisa told us in a previous interview, "you will find an homage to it at the end of both the novel and film versions of Ready Player One, where players in a massive virtual game compete to find Easter eggs—including, at the very end, the Easter egg from Adventure!”