Newsweek Zombies!

About a year ago I created Konami JS in response to an article about ESPN putting a Konami Code Easter Egg up on their site. It seemed like a stupidly easy thing to make, so I added iPhone gesture support to make it a little more interesting. When it was done, I had a nice script that anybody with a little website-building knowledge could copy and paste into his or her site for instant shenanigans.

Since then, it's been downloaded over 10,000 times and used in all kinds of silly places. Mostly on people's blogs, but a few months ago Marvel.com implemented it when they relaunched their website.

Now it appears Newsweek has implemented in a really funny way. When you enter the code on the front page, all of the headlines and story abstracts are replaced with stories about zombies. Even more hilariously, if you look through the code you can see they tried to hide all of the obvious variables under the guise of building an object for debugging their advertisements. Now that's dedication to an Easter Egg!

It would appear a lot of people have caught wind of this one too. I have a feeling somebody's in trouble. That's too bad.

UPDATE via NPR: A spokesperson did send the New York Observer a statement. They said, ""It's true that our programmers had a bit of fun and hid the Konami Easter egg in the site," the spokesperson said in a statement. "It does not affect the rest of the site's functionality. Now that we've all had a laugh, we will be removing it."

So no one's "in trouble." Good.