See that screenshot up there? See the initials LMD at the bottom of the screen? That's what passes for an Easter Egg in 1983.

The never-before-seen title screen for Donkey Kong for the Atari 800 was only recently discovered by a fellow named Don Hodges. Hodges knew about the Easter Egg, because Mr. Landon M. Dyer, the programmer who put it there, confessed on a blog that he had put it there. However, Dyer also confessed he didn't remember how he programmed that players were supposed to find it. As far as Dyer knew, it had never been discovered.

So Mr. Hodges did what any self-respecting Easter Egg hunter would do. He cheated. He started sifting through over 25,000 lines of code. Fortunately, he found it, because the alternative to sifting through the source code was to do the following steps:

1. Play a game and get a score of 33,000 through 33,900. This score must become the new high score. [Some other scores will work as well, see below.]

2. Kill off all of your remaining lives. However, your last life must be killed off by falling too far - by walking or jumping off a girder that is too high to land safely. If the last life is killed any other way, the egg will not appear.

3. Set the game difficulty to 4 by pressing the Option button 3 times. The icon for this difficulty is a firefox.

4. Wait a few minutes, and the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen will appear.

5. The title screen will then appear, and Landon Dyer's initials [LMD] will be at the bottom center of the screen:

(Thanks 1up and Game Set Watch!)