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+--- Thread: Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! (/showthread.php?tid=114)
Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! - Legerdemancy - 10-06-2025
As far as I’m aware, this has never been documented online before. I’ve thoroughly checked the websites that usually write about these kinds of things, including the Nancy Drew Fandom Wiki, The Cutting Room Floor Wiki, etc. Astoundingly none of them had it listed.
Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Arguably the best all-rounder of the mystery adventure games produced by Her Interactive. It is definitely the perfect introduction to the series for anyone unfamiliar with the triggering words “It’s locked!”
I played it when the game was a new release title. The alluring cover art finalised by Tim Jacobus of Goosebumps fame gave it an air of mystery too hard to resist. I would have bought it anyway though, having got my first taste of Nancy Drew games via a Scholastic magazine purchase in 2002.
Diving into the game itself, it featured pleasing 3D graphics for the mid 2000s, educational elements about gemstones, a balance of suspects to keep things interesting and a fitting soundtrack by Kevin Manthei. All these positive traits the game contains are only offset by puzzles that ultimately feel shoehorned rather than diegetic.
Comic relief from characters such as Joe Hardy and Fatima get peppered in at only appropriate moments in order to prevent diverting attention from the main plotline about Cheeseburgers long-lost gold.
Speaking of long-lost things, wasn’t I meant to be revealing a 20 year old Easter egg? Lucky I’m not a train driver, or we would have missed our stop by now. Let’s get things back on track, shall we?
I used to frequent the forums of both Her Interactive and Nancy Drew Mania from 2008 to 2009 under a different username handle. I eventually got tired of posting on those sites, and so I decided to quit. Funny thing about that actually... I discovered the Easter egg in 2010. Awkward timing, amirite?!
I was searching through the Bink video files of the game. 1,148 files to be exact, but who’s counting? Don’t worry, I didn’t go through all of them, just the most promising ones for finding secrets.
A lot of these files are literally “blink and you miss it”. This is because they are single-frame videos. I resolved this issue by looping the frame.
You’ve been very patient so far, kind adventurer, let me reward you with an Easter egg for enduring my Trademark Verbosity.
* takes ancient easter egg out of pocket and forces it on you *
It’s Dave Gregory from The Secret of Shadow Ranch with a speech bubble saying “ move along lil’ cowpoke... “
‘Poking’ around those files 15 years ago was well worth it. I’ve attached a screenshot for your convenience. “ CAB_H_Opn “ is the original filename, which matches up with being the internal doorway of the caboose.
So what do you think, folks? Pretty cool, huh?
RE: Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! - Space Quest Historian - 10-07-2025
This reminds me of the "LOOM SUCKS" text hidden in the hood of one of the Elders in the CD-ROM version of Loom.
RE: Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! - Guyra - 10-21-2025
That's a fun, little easter egg!
RE: Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! - DrewClue - 11-23-2025
Neat! I wonder if you record the game while you open the door if you can slow it down and see the frame.
RE: Revealing A 20 Year Old Easter Egg! - Legerdemancy - 11-23-2025
An excellent suggestion, feel free to try that method out if it interests you. Also thank you for the reply, DrewClue. Great to see some fellow Nancy Drew fans on the forum here.
What I found truly mind boggling was that back in the early 2010s when I discovered the Easter egg of Dave Gregory hidden inside the files of Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon, was that Her Interactive by that point in time was exclusively using the Bink video format, which has a nearly ubiquitous usage across the entire video game industry, but no one has mentioned it on literally any website I've read. Lucky that I thought to loop the split-second frame as a solution to view it.
In contrast, Her Interactive's earlier games in the series used to exclusively use a custom-built in-house proprietary AVF file format. Here's a fun story, I was so determined to be able to view this format back in 2014 that I downloaded some Github code and attempted to compile it myself despite having ZERO programming skills. It had very strict requirements, C++11 standard, probably designed primarily for a Linux coding environment, and lastly finding all the Win32 binaries of the library dependencies was a scavenger hunt in itself! In total I spent 1 week of my life trying to compile it, and in the end I managed to solve it! My analogy is that programming is like creating a jigsaw puzzle from scratch, whereas compiling (which is what I did) is like putting the jigsaw together.
My favourite game is Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, so that was easily my first choice for extracting obscure unused graphics. Nancy can't take the boat out at night on the lake (for safety reasons, duh!) which means we never got to see the door of Em's Emporium being shut closed... until right now, a colossal 23 years later after the game launched!
Speaking of Easter eggs in Nancy Drew games, I'm convinced that The Creature of Kapu Cave never had one included. Maybe it's hidden in the inventory images of something obtuse like the CIF tree files, but I doubt even that, plus I don't know how to decode those files in any case. I did manage to find something cool though in the video files, it's a broken microscope at the jungle campsite! I don't remember that ever happening in the game itself.
Thank you for reading all of this. I love Easter eggs and Nancy Drew, that clue is clearly self-evident.
