programmer's room

A lot of old video games (especially RPGs and really early arcades) would have these things that came to be known as "programmer's rooms". They were basically just easter eggs that were implemented as special screens integrated into the game.

The best programmer's room ever was in Final Fantasy IV. It was a real room, a part of one of the castles. In the dwarf castle you first come to in the underworld, look closely between the inn and the shop. There's a weird little hole in the wall behind one of the pillars. Go into it, and then look closely for some cracked floorpieces in the room you find. The wall next to the cracked floorpieces can be walked through. Walk through it. I'm not going to tell you where you wind up, and i'd like to request nobody post writeups on this node spoiling it, but it kicks ass.

(Ai! Ursus is, of course, right. I forgot. Sorry.)

The programmer's room in Chrono Trigger is one of the endings; beat Lavos at your first opportunity, which is right after Lucca's demonstration at the Guardia fair. You'll have to have already beaten the game once, though.

As a sidenote to mcc's writeup, the Final Fantasy IV programmer's room is only available in the hard-type version of the game; that is to say, you would need to play the Playstation game or have an imported hard-type japanese cartridge (or emulate the ROM if you're not squeamish about that sort of thing), as any other English translation you'll find outside of Japan is of the easy-type variety.

Actually, you can get to the programmer's room in Chrono Trigger through various methods; it's kind of the catch-all ending for various weird ways of ending the game (I've seen it several times, and been disappointed for not getting an original ending for the particular ways I finished the game).

My favorite way of getting the Programmer's Ending was by killing Lavos when he first appeared in the Dark Omen... y'know, the time when Crono was supposed to die, thereby starting that whole period in the game when you're goal is to resuce him. It was very strange to find out Lavos actually could be beaten at that point in the game - granted it requires quite a bit of level-building. At that point I had played back through the game several times using the New Game + feature, so I had all the best equipment and techs.