Kid Pilot

In late 1998, game development studio Dynamix put out a flight simulator game for children called Kid Pilot. This was likely an attempt to repackage the existing systems they built for their Pro-Pilot series of games for a younger audience. This game released to very little fanfare and has pretty much faded into obscurity, save for a woefully incomplete MobyGames page.

But... in early 2021 I managed to discover a previously undocumented easter egg in this game. When you try to look up this game now, aside from newer releases that happen to also be called Kid Pilot, you'll find some of the remnants of my easter egg hunt, including a Youtuber's coverage of this discovery.

I've always wanted to conclude this search with a dedicated write up, since I'm unhappy with reddit posts and a Youtuber's basic summary of it. So... here it is! The true story of how I found a lost easter egg in a 20+ year old game!

How It Started (Totally Not A Creepypasta, I Swear)

When I was a young child around 5 years old, the ISP my family used had a program that let customers redeem loyalty points for small rewards. My family ended up getting a bunch of CD-ROMs from this program, and among these was a copy of Kid Pilot. One day my father, a fan of planes and their software simulators, eagerly set up his joystick usually reserved for the more advanced grown-up types of plane games so that I could play Kid Pilot.

It's hard to remember if I enjoyed it, but I'm sure I did. The colorful graphics and animated cartoon penguin (Hah! It's because penguins can't fly! I get it!) helper are standard fare for kid's educational games of the time. And at the very least, it was fun to play with the fancy joystick.

But something happened that haunted me for years after the fact. I have a vivid memory of crashing the plane at one point and a message box popping up on the screen. This was before I could read, so I didn't know if the message box had any text on it. But I do remember seeing a "skull and crossbones" symbol made with the skull of the funny cartoon penguin mascot of the game.

This terrified me. And this penguin skeleton became the boogeyman I'd be afraid of in the dark for years. Every night as I crept up the stairs to go to bed I would dread the idea of the bird skeleton standing up at the top of the staircase, staring down at me with its dark and empty eye sockets.

Return To Kid Pilot: Where's The Skeleton In The Closet?

Meanwhile, in early 2021 I was unemployed due to the whole COVID-19 thing going on at the time. I already had plenty of free time on my hands due to my unemployment, and the pandemic had me feeling even more introspective than usual. Something I was fond of at the time was revisiting things that scared me when I was younger. It's empowering to come back as an adult and see something that used to terrify me and realize it's not scary at all anymore.

After knocking out a few of these past fears, I turned my eyes to that bird skeleton that haunted me going up the staircase every night. I had trouble even finding the name of the flight simulator at first, but I eventually found it was called Kid Pilot and started looking up any videos I could find to see how scary this game really was.

Except... hm... none of the footage I could find on Youtube featured this skull graphic that terrified me as a kid. But this is a rather obscure game, so there were only a few short clips on Youtube available. I ended up downloading the game from The Internet Archive and getting it running on my Linux computer through Wine. I booted up the game, flew around the low-res city a bit and crashed into the ground. No popup. No skull. Nothing!

This was really strange. I know memory can be a fickle thing, especially when it comes to childhood fears, but I have a vivid memory of being afraid of this skull graphic. I couldn't have imagined it, right?

Breaking Into The Game

As a fan of sites like The Spriters Resource and The Cutting Room Floor, I knew that if I really wanted to solve this mystery, I'd have to go into the game files to see if the spooky skull graphic is really there. But extracting assets from games can be tricky business depending on the game. Some games just dump all their assets right onto the CD in common formats. In those cases you just have to explore the files directly until you find the file you want. But other games are harder to crack, using special custom formats for their assets. Often many games bundle their assets together into larger files so that common textures can all be loaded together.

I was hoping that Kid Pilot would be the former. While I have some experience in computer programming and game development, I don't really have the specific background to just start reverse-engineering a proprietary image format from an obscure children's flight simulator from 1998. I peered into Kid Pilot's files and found in the Art/ directory... a bunch of proprietary asset pack files. Specifically, it seemed like all assets had a .vol extension and this looked like it was an in-house format made specifically by Dynamix.

This was going to be a major obstacle towards getting a look at the assets. I did not think I was going to crack this format. On more famous games that use these proprietary formats, people eventually find out how to extract the assets and document this online but we're talking about an obscure educational game that the internet almost forgot... although...

While Kid Pilot is an obscurity, Dynamix did make other games. Perhaps they reused this .vol package format between games and someone had documented this file format after all for another one of their games. And so I went through Dynamix's portfolio looking to see if anyone had resources on this file format after all.

And well... I have to hand it to The Outpost 2: Divided Destiny Fan Community. It turns out that in between making flight simulators, Dynamix also made a real-time strategy series. And one that was popular enough to maintain a fan community up into the present day. This community has done a lot to keep the Outpost games alive with unofficial patches to the game and more importantly... modding tools! Tools that can insert new assets into the game... tools that happen to be able to read and write from .vol files!

I was able to download and compile the open source OP2Utility and I pointed it towards one of the .vol archives present in Kid Pilot. And it worked! A bunch of .BMP files flooded onto my computer straight out of the game. And as I scrolled through dozens and dozens of monochrome textures used for skyscrapers... I found a file called IsThis.Bmp

Where Is This In The Game?

While it was a relief to know that I didn't manufacture that memory of a creepy skull of a cartoon penguin in this game... this asset raised more questions. I don't remember anything about cards in the game. Initially I thought maybe there was some kind of extra playing card mode in the game where you had to fly around and collect cards and the Is This Your Card message would pop up but... no dice! Or cards, I guess.

I did find a matching texture among the other assets I extracted, named FullDeck.Bmp. It's a full texture sheet of playing cards and presumably a card would be clipped from this texture and placed into the Is This Your Card blank spot.

I needed to figure out what could possibly trigger these textures to appear. And so I began to get technical! I first snooped around the KidPilot.exe file in a hex editor and was able to confirm references in the binary to the IsThis.Bmp and FullDeck.Bmp files. Near them were some other readable strings, namely Card, Suit, penn, and PennAndTeller. Hm...

I then decided to take it one step further. I ran KidPilot.exe through a decompiler to investigate what the code is doing with all of these weird strings. The code seems to roughly go a bit like this.

• When the player crashes their plane, do the following:
  1. Call some mysterious Windows API functions with the strings PennAndTeller, penn, Card, and Suit. If these functions return values, continue to the next step, otherwise stop.
  2. Read Card and Suit values, and use them to get the proper clipping coordinates for the chosen card in FullDeck.Bmp
  3. Display the IsThis.Bmp popup with the proper card in place.

Now what could this mysterious Windows API function be? It's a function to read an INI config file! So I shoved some lines of text into Kid Pilot's KidPilot.ini config file to see if it would work.

I ran the game and eagerly crashed my plane into the ground to see if it would work and...

And so finally I was able to recreate the experience I remembered as a kid: Crashing the plane and have a spooky skull appear on screen. I was finally done, and it turns out I just saw a weird card trick easter egg this whole time? Huh... actually... wait a moment...

A New Mystery: How Did I See This As A Kid?!

The only way someone can possibly see this in game is if they happen to edit the KidPilot.ini configuration file. Thanks to the decompiler I know that the only code path that displays the Is This Your Card? graphic needs these specific INI flags to be set. How could I have possibly triggered this as a kid who wasn't even able to read yet?

I ended up coming up with 3 theories for what could have happened, but they all seemed pretty unlikely.

1. There's a bigger playing card mode hidden in the game that is so well-obfuscated that it was able to hide from my decompilation efforts.

   This theory fell apart pretty quickly. If there really was a mode like that still hidden in the game, why wouldn't the code I found also be obfuscated? Plus the code I did find seemed small in scope, like it was quickly hardcoded in and not part of a bigger game mode.

2. This was snuck in by a developer (and perhaps aspiring magician) as a prank. Early cheat code/easter egg sites listed it online and my father decided to try it out.

   While I was not computer literate (or literate in general) when I played this, my father was the one who installed it and he is pretty computer literate. He totally seems like the kind of person who'd look up cheat codes and try them out on any new games. The problem is Kid Pilot's obscurity. As far as I can tell, up until I started looking into this in 2021, no one has ever documented this easter egg on the internet. So this theory was a quick dead end.

3. There was some other game or software, presumably made by the same developer or publisher and/or possibly related to Penn & Teller, that interacted with Kid Pilot in a weird forgotten ARG-style puzzle between multiple games.

   This was my personal favorite theory. The hypothetical idea here is that you'd pick a card in one game and that game would scan your computer to see if it has Kid Pilot installed. If it's installed, it writes the card you picked into Kid Pilot's config file to give you quite a surprise.

   I dug around a few games that seemed like good leads. In particular, Sabrina: The Teenage Witch - Spellbound seemed like an excellent lead. It at least had the same publisher as Kid Pilot, it came out a year after, it is a game all about magic, and it even features Penn Jilette of Penn & Teller fame... but it did not contain any functionality related to Kid Pilot.

At this point all my theories were complete dead ends.

An Anticlimactic End?

At some point while bashing my head against this mystery for some time, I ended up triggering an error while playing Kid Pilot and what I saw shocked me.

Yeah so turns out the skull graphic is used in more than one place. Slowly it dawned on me that what I saw as a kid was probably not the Is This Your Card dialog but instead this error dialog.

I'm glad the mystery's been fully solved now, but darn it I wanted Theory #3 to be true so badly! Still, I think it's kind of incredible what actually happened here:

1. An error message pops up when I play this game as a toddler, mildly traumatizing me as a result
2. Twenty years later, I decide to revisit this game that scared me as a kid. But I don't see the error message this time.
3. In desperation, I break into the game and find assets for a completely unrelated, undocumented easter egg that just coincidentally happens to use the same graphic that I saw as a kid
4. In further desperation, I become the first person besides the developers to figure out how to trigger this easter egg

Speaking of the developers, I ended up reaching out to the lead programmer on the project on LinkedIn. Here's what he had to say:

Oh man, that's been a long time. So the idea was you would do a "card force" (do a card deck shuffle, but your friend will always pick the card you want them to) of the 3 of clubs.

---

Then, at some future point you roughly land (i.e. crash) your plane in Las Vegas (where Penn and Teller perform) and the game will pop up a dialog saying "Is this your card?" showing the 3 of clubs. Thereby freaking out your friend. "How did you do that?". Hope that helps

---

So mystery solved: I am a Penn and Teller fan. I put that in, purely for fun. If you crash in Vegas, that dialog will pop up. If you don't set the specific rank & suit, it will display the 3 of clubs. I reached out to P & T's people for an endorsement (like including their logo), but they declined. So we put in the dead penguin.

So that pretty much confirms that's all there is to the easter egg. Chasing this thing was a pretty wild ride!

Epilogue (And More Uncharted Territory)

It's weird to know that I managed to actually discover an easter egg in a game like this. While I'm pretty sure there are plenty of easter eggs in games that I've been able to find on my own before, I don't think I've ever been the first person in the world to actually discover a specific one.

If you do a web search for Kid Pilot, these days you should be able to find remnants of my original search where I asked for help solving the mystery (even though I ended up solving it myself). I asked about on Reddit back in the day, and I also even reached out for help to the Youtuber oddheader, who ended up featuring my discovery in one of his videos.

One thing I mentioned to oddheader at the time that I never shared publicly up until now is that during my search I found evidence of further easter eggs in Kid Pilot (I hoped that maybe I could tempt oddheader and his subscribers to help me solve my mystery if there was a chance that they could make history and discover an easter egg in the game too).

Yeah that's right... there are potentially more undocumented easter eggs to be found in the game! I was mainly motivated to solve the Is This Your Card? easter egg because if I didn't I'd feel like I was going crazy. The main mystery has been solved and so I don't feel too much motivation at the moment to try and dig any more. And so... I'll leave some clues here and perhaps you can be the next person to make an historic discovery about this obscure game!

There appear to be images of some developers' kids hidden in the game! I found various pictures of kids among the game's textures. One of them is even called glenkids.bmp (with the "glen" most likely referring to lead programmer Glen Wolfram). There also seems to be a graduation photo and a photo of a child named Julia in there as well. I won't upload/post them here for privacy reasons, but if you follow my footsteps you should be able to find them yourself!

What I find interesting is that these textures are packed with the textures that are used for level geometry. They could be just dummy files included in the archive just because there was available space or placeholder images used early in development... but there's a chance they could actually be used in the game, hidden away in some obscure part of the level geometry.

That's the fun of discovering a new mystery in an old and obscure game. There's currently no proof that these images aren't used in the game. So are you ready to explore PC obscurity to find out? The world's waiting!

Thanks for reading this write up on Kid Pilot! I'm glad I can finally tell this story on my site! I often wonder what it's like to be the people behind media for children, getting reached out to decades later by the people who grew up with your work. Perhaps I'll find out in a few decades.

- Natalie

• Glen Wolfram
• oddheader
• The Outpost Universe