In brief: Microsoft’s first home game console, the Xbox, launched way back in November of 2001. More than 24 million units were sold worldwide before Microsoft officially discontinued the system in 2006 to focus on its successor, the Xbox 360. Nearly 20 years later, the console is still hiding secrets that gamers somehow never managed to stumble across.
Kotaku was recently contacted by an anonymous source that worked on the original Xbox. The person shared an Easter egg that, to the best of their knowledge, has remained undiscovered for almost 20 years.
It’s nothing groundbreaking, mind you, and the leaker even said they didn’t expect it to be found unless the source code leaked or someone reverse-engineered the Dashboard, but it’s still pretty remarkable that none of that has happened yet.
To activate the egg, fire up an original Xbox follow these steps:
- Go into “Music” and insert an audio CD. (A short album will take less time.)
- From the Audio CD screen choose “Copy,” “Copy” again, then “New Soundtrack.”
- Delete the default soundtrack title and replace it with (no quotes) “Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” (That’s the letter “y” 26 times. No need to count; just fill the entire field and replace the last one with a “!”.)
- Sit a spell. Enjoy the sounds of the hard drive stealing the disc’s essence.
- When ripping completes, back out to the main menu.
- Choose “Settings” and then “System Info.”
- You should now see a new screen listing members of the “Xbox Dashboard Team.”
The trick replaces the standard contents of the “System Info” screen with a new listing that shows the names of the Xbox Dashboard team. Like I said, it’s not groundbreaking, but neat nevertheless.
Kotaku further confirmed that this “is not the final secret hidden within the original Xbox” that Seamus Blackley referenced in 2017.
Yes. An there’s an Easter egg than nobody has noticed as far as I can tell.
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) September 26, 2017
The publication reached out to Blackley for clarification, who said the egg he has in mind involves the Xbox’s boot animation. When asked if controller inputs were needed to trigger it, he said “Nope, it doesn’t. But I’m tempted to say it does. But no it doesn’t really. At all. For sure. I’m pretty sure at least.”
Image credit Sam Bianchini