Xbox Developer Reveals ‘South Park’ Easter Egg 20 Years After Console Debut
“Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
Two decades after Microsoft shook up the video game industry with the launch of Xbox, a developer of the first console has shared a hidden South Park-themed Easter egg.
According to a source speaking to Kotaku, the trick requires the execution of a fairly lengthy string of commands involving the import of a CD to an original Xbox hard drive and typing an apparent reference to the wheelchair-bound character Timmy from South Park.
Here are the steps to unlock the Easter egg, via Kotaku:
- 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 anonymous developer who leaked the sequence admitted that he was surprised no one had discovered the secret yet, given the age of the console and the amount of effort that’s gone into hacking the first-gen Xbox over the years.
“You might have thought somebody would have found it, and I do think the source code was out there, but it’s possible the Dashboard source wasn’t leaked and [it’s just] the main OS/libraries that are out there. Hackers are pretty amazing, so I guess I should be surprised it wasn’t known.”
What’s more, there is at least one more OG Xbox Easter egg that has yet to be uncovered. Seamus Blackley, who’s known in the gaming community as the “father of the Xbox,” confirmed with Kotaku that the Timmy trick is not the unknown boot animation that he first alluded to 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
Keep searching, hackers.