Microsoft have embedded several eastern eggs in its early products. With Office as a known example containing multiple hidden games, it has surprised me however, that one eastern egg was seemingly remain undiscovered (or forgotten) in most English media, although its early mentions can still be found in some chinese websites, e.g. here. Since none of these articles have actually published what was found, for informative purpose, I’m writing this blog to get this bit of knowledge recorded.

The eastern egg is a hidden music in MIDI format. It’s not a standalone file, and thus would not be found by searching over file directories. This piece of data resides within the very binary of winword.exe. As translated from article, by using a HEX editor, like UltraEdit, the data is extracted

3) by locating row 0001DF90, where 4D54 6864 0000 is seen. That’s the header of a midi file.

4) Make a selection from 4D to 9639 0002 911A 0000 FF2F 00 at row 0001FE10, which is the end of this file. The selection should be 7819 bytes in length. Save the selection into a file with extension .mid.

5) Use a midi player for listening this beautiful music piece.

By following these steps some more than 15 years ago, I made a dump successfully and kept that on my computer till today. You can download this file now

• either as original data
• or its converted form (in .ogg)

to have an impression. Certainly you can also hear online:

Unfortunately I do not currently own a copy of Word 2000, and cannot replicate above procedure for demonstration.