Doctor Krieger’s Konami launch code took the internet by storm last week thanks to a magical blend of geekiness, nostalgia, and Archer. That got us to thinking about the other geeky easter eggs the Archer team has almost certainly buried over the years. And of course our friends at Floyd County were cool enough to give us an inside look.
Lead Motion Designer Mark Paterson — the man responsible for the Konami code — has provided us with a brief history of buried nerd goodness from several different seasons, along with commentary so it all kinda/sorta makes sense to the noobs out there. The Krieger GIF above captures how I think all of these came to be.
Mark’s Intro:
The script will often call for some kind of computer display that the character is interacting with. It’s my job to come up with a design for that. I’m not a fan of the nonsensical and often patronizing tech-babble you see on a lot of shows. In a show as fast paced as Archer, I prefer to use bold, simple graphics and text that get the point across and help advance the story.
Often they’ll be a bunch of auxiliary screens that also need filling with *something*. This is where we like to have a little mischievous fun. I don’t go for anything too obvious – the more obscure and subversive the better. And the more you can make the audience work for it, the better.
I’ll work something up and throw it over to our animation director and producer Bryan Fordney. He’s so busy spinning figurative plates, but if I can make him laugh and maybe even get an “awesome” then I know I’m on the right track.
Season 2
On making the ISIS coordinates the actual coordinates of Floyd County’s old Atlanta studio:
I made the ISIS HQ coordinates to be the exact coordinates of our (previous) studio. Something I later regretted, fearing an influx of visitors. Luckily that never happened because nobody really figured it out. People on Reddit were like “Hey, what’s up with the coordinates being some place in Georgia?”
Full size here.
Season 3
On slipping in a classic Reed/Thompson easter egg all over Space Station Horizon.
Something that’s never been found is a HEX version of 934TXS (39:33:34:54:58:53), which is on every single computer monitor in the space episodes.
It’s a reference that goes back a long way, to Adam (Reed) and Matt (Thompson’s) early days together. It’s been used as an easter egg in their shows ever since, often appearing as license plates, computer passwords, or anywhere where a number sequence is needed. It’s probably really boring to hear that I can’t possibly reveal what it means, as I promised under pain of death to never tell. But what I can say is, every single internet theory is WAY off.
Full size here.
Season 4
I recommend watching this first to increase your appreciation.
I made the crashing mainframe display a unix / Mac OS X style kernel panic, and wrote custom crash data for it. Including a HEX thing at the end referencing the scene from Jurassic Park where Samuel L Jackson can’t log into the mainframe. “You didn’t say the magic word.”
Full size here.
Season 5
And finally, in addition to the Krieger Konami code this season also had this elaborate gem that may be a little difficult for everyone to get their heads around but a lot of people on the internet really enjoyed it.
As for the rest of season 5, there was a popular one a couple of months ago that got about 500,000 hits on imgur. I wrote a unix easter egg based on the popular video game meme ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’, which came about from bad translation from Japanese to English (i think). Screenshot attached.
So here’s what I did…
The command is…
KR-1:~ KRIEGER$ chown -R US ./base
chown: ./base: No such file or directory
KR-1:~ KRIEGER$ mkdir ./base
KR-1:~ KRIEGER$ chown -R US ./base
ownership changed
KR-1:~ KRIEGER$There’s 3 separate commands that have been run. Kreiger has attempted to change ownership (chown) of a directory called ‘base’ to the user ‘US’, but no such directory exists. So he runs the ‘mkdir’ command to create one and runs the ‘chown’ command again. We see that ownership has then changed. The -R in the command means recursive, so basically ALL of ‘base’ now belongs to ‘US’.
I had main screen with Kreiger’s reflection contain multiple references to AE. Ray’s fictional legs are rigged in the same way we rig them in real life, with anchor points, nulls, etc.
I have no idea what just happened but I respect the sh*t out of it. Check out all of our Archer coverage here.
