It's been a tradition at Pixar since Toy Story to list the "production babies" born to crew, in each film's credits. Other animation houses do it, too, and lately video game designers picked up on the trend. [They're called "development babies" on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.]
Well, flip that, because Cabel Sasser's nerdtastic investigation of secret messages embedded by developers in the code of early computer games seems to have uncovered the first production baby: Jessica Louise Ettinger, whose dad was working on Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball when she was born in 1988.
It's a much more specialized and low-maintenance type of fame than, say, being the naked Nirvana baby.
Another of Cabel's ROM finds: a picture of a developer and his two little kids hidden in an Elmo game. Good times all around.
UPDATE 2015: Steve Ettinger has appealed to the Intellivision gods of atariage.com, who have managed to uncover his birth announcement easter egg in the game.
Message in a Binary Bottle [cabel.me via waxy]
Production baby [wikipedia]
Pixar delivers, babies get credit [sfgate]
