I came across this from DonHodges.com…

In 1983, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong was ported to the Atari 400/800 home computer systems by Landon Dyer. It was at the time the best home computer/console port for this game.

Mr. Dyer, in between pulling his hair out while working on this game, included what is known as an “Easter Egg” in the game’s code. If a certain sequence of moves or scores were done correctly, the designer’s initials would appear somewhere on the screen. He writes on his blog, “There’s an easter egg, but it’s totally not worth it, and I don’t remember how to bring it up anyway (something like: Die on the ’sandpile’ level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000).”

The Digital Press web site has a whole section dedicated to Easter eggs, and they are even offering cash rewards to those who can find out how to trigger them. Even Landon Dyer himself did not remember how to trigger this Easter egg in Donkey Kong for the Atari home computers. It was suggested on the Digital Press site that the initials would appear in the bonus score box.

He goes on to explain how he performed this game archaeology by digging through the assembly code dirt. He also links to Landon Dyer’s blog entry on porting Donkey Kong to Atari. It itself is a geeky fun game folklore read.