XYZZY

the quintessential magic word, originally from the “advent” text-adventure game. the word xyzzy would teleport the player when spoken in the right location.
(from adventure)
>you are in a room filled with debris washed in from the surface. a low wide p-ssage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. a note on the wall says “magic word xyzzy”.
from the advent game the canonical `magic word’. this comes from advent, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. if you type `xyzzy’ at the appropriate time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points. if, therefore, you encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on this quite succinctly by saying simply “xyzzy!” “ordinarily you can’t look at someone else’s screen if he has protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it anyway.” “xyzzy!”

xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undoc-mented no-op command on several oses; in data general’s aos/vs, for example, it would typically respond “nothing happens”, just as advent did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. in more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, aos/vs responds “twice as much happens”.
the popular `minesweeper’ game under microsoft windows has a cheat mode triggered by the command `xyzzy‘ that turns the top-left pixel of the screen different colors depending on whether or not the cursor is over a bomb.
a cheat code for the window’s game minesweeper
click xyzzy then hit enter and shift.
pull your cursor over the game and the top left part of the screen(tiny, only 1 mega pixal) should either be white or black.
white-no mine
black-mine
hit xyzzy enter and shift