Here are three of the most elaborate hidden secrets in pop culture

HAVE you ever thought there might be something more to a movie, game or album than you first thought. Well, it could be an Easter egg.

What does that “X” in the elevator mean?

DID you know the movie Old School has a second scene featuring “Frank the Tank” watching Girls Gone Wild, while throwing empty beer bottles at the wall?

If not, you likely haven’t gone to the DVD set-up menu and pressed select while highlighting the bold text saying “Ask Frank” at the bottom of the screen.

For those unaware, this secret scene is what is known as an Easter egg — an intentional inside joke or hidden message buried in movies, TV shows, software, music, books or art.

While this is fairly simple and easy to find, there are many extremely smart and complicated Easter eggs throughout the history of pop culture.

Here are a look at three of the best.

YEAR ZERO

When people purchased T-shirts at a 2007 Nine Inch Nails concert, people noticed random letters in bold in the tour schedule and thought there had been a horrid printing error.

Sleuths quickly realised strung together, the letters read “i am trying to believe”.

For some reason, fans used the phrase as a URL and were taken to a site claiming a government plot to sedate citizens was under way, with a drug introduced in the water supply.

This message was furthered when people used the contact page of the site, only to be greeted with the auto-generated message “I’m drinking the water. So should you”.

Things got more bizarre when fans noticed bold numbers on a different shirt, which were for a LA telephone number.

People calling the number were greeted with a message saying “Presidential address: America is born again“, which was quickly followed by a distorted snippet of a song from the band.

Soon after, another fan found a USB drive at a concert containing an unreleased Nine Inch Nails track, which she promptly uploaded online.

It was here people found a clue to another website hiding in the metadata of the song.

Dragging the mouse across the landing page revealed a message, which redirected users to an underground resistance forum when clicked.

It was all a ploy from Nine Inch Nails singer/songwriter Trent Reznor to promote his concept album Year Zero.

Understanding MP3’s didn’t offer the visual artwork needed to give context to the songs, Reznor thought outside the box.

“I started thinking about how to make the world’s most elaborate album cover using the media of today,” he told Wired.

Undated : Trent Reznor from band, Nine Inch Nails - music singers bands groups

A second flashdrive was found at a later concert, which contained a Nine Inch Nails track, followed by the sound of crickets.

After running the crickets through spectrograph, it revealed a phone number in Ohio.

The 1.7 million people who called were played another message, which offered more clues.

Reznor was able to monitor the fan action and found it highly addictive.

“I know it sounds nerdy, but it was exciting,” he said.

By the time the album was released in April 2008, 2.5 million people had visited at least one of the 30 websites used in the process.

In order to bring closure, those who had signed up to one of the websites received an email inviting them to gather beneath a mural in Hollywood.

A select number of people who turned up were given phones and told to keep them on and then five days later they were called and told to come to a parking lot.

After being loaded onto a blacked-out bus, they were taken to abandoned warehouse, led through a maze and stood before amps.

The band came out and played four songs, before a fake SWAT team attended the event and put everyone back on the bus.

The people were told to keep the phones and so concluded the most epic album launch of all time.

GOLDENEYE 007

'Goldeneye 007' computer game. /Computer/games

Since it was released in 1997, GoldenEye 007 has been captivating the mind of gamers across the globe.

It didn’t take long for people to discover an unfinished level, Line Mode and the ability to play as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton or Pierce Brosnan.

While these were all quickly discovered, it took 15 years for someone to uncover the biggest secret hiding in the video game.

After a keen fan examined the code of the game, he discovered an emulator for the ZX Spectrum computer — an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982.

As GoldenEye’s developer Rare had developed a number of games for the ZX Spectrum, it decided to include 10 of its favourite titles hidden on the game’s cartridge.

According to those who managed to uncover this mystery, Rare were believed to have been working on a ZX Spectrum emulator for the Nintendo 64 during the same period as GoldenEye 007 and had included the code for testing purposes.

Instead of removing the code when the game was released, Rare just disabled the Spectrum emulator.

So while emulator resides in every retail GoldenEye cartridge, it’s not easy to play Jetpac and Gunfright on the Nintendo 64.

In order to access the content, players have to run GoldenEye in a Nintendo 64 emulator, before running a special patch to access ZX Spectrum emulator.

Sure it’s a lot of work, but it’s still a pretty fresh Easter egg.

THE DEPARTED

Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime flick The Departed might have beena western remake of the 2002 film Internal Affairs, but it was also inspired by the original 1932 version of Scarface.

In Scarface, director Howard Hawks used a number of not so subtle X’s in the movie to mark people who were going to die.

The “X” used in the original Scarface.

Scorsese paid homage to this by including X’s throughout the film for characters that were destined to die.

What’s that on the windows?

Yep, he doesn’t reach the end of the movie.

To prove the theory correct, Mark Wahlberg’s character is the only major role to not be marked with an X and he is also the only one to survive.

What is your favourite Easter egg? Continue the conversation with Matthew Dunn on Twitter or Facebook.