In a bizarre story of a joke that has gone away, hidden messages that were originally meant for Oculus pre-production units have found their way into general production in what appears to have been a supply chain failure.

The messages, which included “Big Brother is Watching,” The Masons Were Here,” “This Space For Rent” and “Hi iFixit! We See You!”, were found to be on internal components in tens of thousands of Oculus Touch controllers.

The messages are described as “Easter eggs,” messages programmers and developers sometimes place into software and hardware for others to find. Demonstrating a complete lack of humor, the messages, once they were discovered, had social media users and tech websites freaking out with some calling them creepy and worse.

The “Big Brother is Watching” comment drew particular ire Friday on account of the privacy practices of Oculus’ parent company Facebook Inc., with many failing to see the funny side.

The messages on final production hardware say “This Space For Rent” & “?The Masons Were Here.?” A few dev kits shipped with “?Big Brother is Watching?” and “Hi iFixit! We See You!?” but those were limited to non-consumer units. [2/3] pic.twitter.com/po1qyQ10Um

— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) April 12, 2019

Nate Mitchell, co-founder and vice president of product at Oculus, took to Twitter to apologize to the outrage mob, saying that “unfortunately, some ‘easter egg’ labels meant for prototypes accidentally made it onto the internal hardware for tens of thousands of Touch controllers.”

He then added that “while I appreciate easter eggs, these were inappropriate and should have been removed. The integrity and functionality of the hardware were not compromised, and we’ve fixed our process so this won’t happen again.”

Despite the contrived controversy over what ultimately are words that most users will likely never see, Oculus is not withdrawing the affected Touch controllers, planning to sell them instead.

The controllers are bundled with the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S headsets, which are expected to start shipping to general consumers at the end of the month.

Image: Oculus