10 Video Game Secrets That Took YEARS To Find - Commenter Edition

[Music] in the current gaming climate secrets in video games rarely stay secret for long from the moment of release titles are scoured by determined youtubers and completionists all desperate to be the first to find every hidden treat in pursuit of seeing something that might mean they get a retweet from the developer themselves however in the days before social media video game experiences were generally the personal business of the players nobody was so intent on discovering these secrets so much so that they would go undiscovered for years or even decades eventually being stumbled upon by complete accident or even revealed long after launch by the studios themselves these impressively buried easter eggs can come in the form of hidden quests entertaining in-jokes or even areas and pieces of code seemingly not intended from the finished product but still left in as the result of developers simply finding it easier to disable their access rather than remove the assets entirely it's not out of the question that this is still happening and in 20 years time an ageing rockstar programmer may well reveal through neo twitter that shooting exactly the right pebble with a small arrow by the elysian pool in red dead redemption 2 will reveal arthur's steam-powered jetpack i'm scott from wallculture.com and these are 10 more video game secrets that took years to find number 10 developer credits donkey kong here it is one of the earliest known easter eggs in gaming if not the outright first the reveal of a secret hidden in the atari 800 port of seminal nintendo hit donkey kong it may seem underwhelming today but speaks to a bygone era of gaming worlds apart from what we have now programmer landon dyer had designed the port almost entirely by himself with no support existing code and little hope for a licensing deal because of this he opted to hide a little secret inside the game's code something that wasn't known until he himself revealed it 26 years later after donkey kong's code was picked apart and the secret's conditions revealed including reaching a very specific high score losing all remaining lives in a certain way setting a particular game difficulty and sitting through the demo screen this easter egg could finally be shown the letters lmd would appear near the bottom of the title screen it's a little disappointing today when easter eggs can be anything from playable characters to entire hidden missions but considering the limitation of memory on such early platforms and the lack of credit developers were afforded at the time this is still pretty damn cool number nine a hundred percent completion doom two id software's early first person shooters are a favorite of speedrunners and completionists but it wasn't until 2018 that a legitimate 100 run of their 1994 title doom 2 was finally achieved on map 15 industrial zone secret number 4 appeared to be deliberately impossible to access without cheats for a whole 24 years this is credible considering the original devs love for hiding entertaining secrets within their titles only accessible through various console cheats however speedrunner zero master finally discovered the secret secret posting it to youtube and even prompting a congratulatory tweet from john romero the alter behind doom in the first place the secret itself was a hidden teleporter but it would not be revealed by the player touching it themselves instead you have to be pushed into a specific space by an enemy this would trick the game into shifting the player's height to the correct level as the secret was contained on a section of floor too narrow for you to access normally romero's tweet confirmed that this ridiculous method was indeed the intended way to reveal the final secret a classic move from such a legendary developer number eight the sarcastic announcer wave race blue storm released as a launch title for the gamecube in 2001 nintendo's jet ski racing title contained an easter egg that wasn't uncovered until nearly a decade later throughout the game's races an announcer will remain in constant contact with the player [Music] encouraging their progress and giving them helpful tips to stay ahead of the other races however in 2010 a poster on the neogaf forums announced that they had unearthed a new set of voice lines for the character turns out pressing the z button to change the audio visualizer in the audio settings menu then inputting a combination similar to the konami code backing out and finally starting a race we'll see the announcer replaced by an entirely different person who sounds like they've been dragged out of bed after a bit of a josh brown session the night before the new commentator will mock your choice of racer you've chosen poorly declare the turbo powerups have no effect is that the best you can do you're an and even go so far as to announce that on reaching the final lap soon the agony will end finally when winning a race this announcer describes your win as like diamonds are like diamonds kid very rare number seven diagnostic menus mortal kombat one to three of all the fighting game franchises in gaming mortal kombat is likely the one packed with the most secrets and urban legends the first game teased omak a red-clad ninja who could be unlocked as a playable character but was in fact a graphical glitch and the name omak stands for error macros to fans delight though the developers chose to introduce omak as a legitimate character in ultimate mortal kombat 3. there have been countless other characters and scenarios accessible across the series through complex button combinations and by filling bizarre parameters but one of the original arcade cabinet's greatest secrets remained hidden for 20 years in 2015 several intrepid arcade hackers completed the code for the original mk's one to three arcade cabinets and found that by hitting certain buttons in a very specific order they could unlock the game's ejb menus named after series creator edward j boone these menus allowed access to all sorts of hidden characters the ability to view character endings and even contained a galaga style shooter within strangest of all was the hello screen which appeared to show a list of people that boone just wanted to say hello to number six naughty secrets the apprentice no this is not about that tv show this apprentice is a forgotten platformer for the abysmal phillips cdi i hope she made lots of spaghetti luigi look with a cutesy art style and some slightly out of place anime girls in 2007 13 years after its original release a former cdi developer revealed that some codes have been hidden in the game that would alter the appearance of said anime girls punching in these secret button combinations on the game over screen would activate animations involving protagonist marvin oh my goodness this is awful bloodly killing some kind of monkey-like creature complete with a mortal combat style marvin wins fatality screen or you could turn one of the anime girls into various animals other codes would cause the original anime model to disappear in a puff of smoke being replaced with well that same anime kill but now completely naked because video games all of this in a cute cartoon platformer aimed and rated for children something spicy know what i mean no number five the hmcs bitter blood omen legacy of kane yes i have to have an arbitrary mention that oh my god there's still not a legacy of kane hd collection but on with the list the hmcs bitter and obscure location seemingly removed from 1996's blood omen legacy of kane was only discovered in 2010 when the team behind fan remake blood omnicide doke through the original game's files during development a surprisingly large and detailed location players using no clipping cheats were taken to the deck of a large sailing ship replete with heart of darkness artifacts alongside several pirate type enemies waiting to attack this wreckage was housed in a large lagoon type area with items hidden in cliffs and a fully accessible beach where even more enemies and treasures could be found all of this points to the idea that blood omen could have had some sort of pirate related scenario and it was likely removed as that would be inconsistent with the rest of the game's tone number four the nero family side quest final fantasy 9. less a secret than an obscure quest line that only went undiscovered in the west when reading up on the process of assessing final fantasy 9's nero family quest it's not hard to see how it managed to fly under the radar for so long this side quest was well known in japan thanks to the game's exhaustively detailed ultimania guide but western gamers had no such material to work from 13 years after ff9's release though several members of a game fax forum noticed a convoluted quest in ultimania and published its process online the quest involved meeting up with a nero family member on disk 4 engaging in a boss fight or other event going and talking to another family member then repeating the process several times over with some slight variations after this ridiculous series of back and forth errands the player is finally directed to a treasure chest containing a protect ring an item that isn't unique nor does it change really anything still at least you got to see some super secret awesome thing that only a fraction of the populists know about number three seal rescue spin a cell double agent something that may have stayed hidden forever had the developers themselves not revealed it four years after release 2006's splint a cell double agent contained a secret mission that sounds appropriate initially but turns out to be a great deal sillier than its name implies throughout the game's co-op mode are five seals in need of rescue and no they are not navy seals something which would not have been out of place in a splinter cell game instead we're talking about baby seals upon finding each of these five siblings named muffin pepperoni vanilla cookie and buddy they won't agree to be rescued until the players present them with items ranging from seal food to sunglasses no this is not a yakuza game this is actually in spin a cell double agent rescuing buddy the fifth and final seal will cause the seal princess yes it is as stupidly ridiculous as it sounds to beam down and announce that you've saved the entire universe of course all of this ends with the seals returning to their home planet number two hanger 96 marathon infinity before destiny before halo and even before oni mammoth developer bungie released a trio of sci-fi shooters called the marathon trilogy set aboard a gigantic starship called marathon the player was to defend the station from a race of alien slavers the third game in the series marathon infinity had three dream levels accessed if the player made certain choices within the main game throughout these levels were terminals that referenced the mysterious hangar 96 alongside other terminals that contained cryptic hexadecimal terms for many years this went largely unacknowledged until some players decided to dive into those hexadecimal terms combining them with a readable code they then reintroduced them to the game's files how the living hell does anyone ever think of this stuff this admittedly ridiculous method then unlocked hanging 96 as a full multiplayer map all of this is an incredibly impressive way to hide secret content and from developers to players shows an inspiring level of faith that anyone would ever figure out how to access this stuff and number one zx spectrum games goldeneye 007 widely considered one of the most influential games of all time rare's 1997 shooter served as the inspiration for countless console first person shooters for years to come aside from its polished campaign goldeneye featured a now legendary multiplayer mode and alongside a ton of entertaining cheat codes these included dk mode which gave character models ludicrous proportions similar to that of donkey kong and tiny bond shrinking the player down to less than half of their original height a much more impressive secret though wasn't discovered until many years later in 2012 a fan posted in the rare witch project forums that they discovered a fully functional zx spectrum emulator buried within goldeneye's code rare are known for having developed several titles for the spectrum in the early 1980s and during goldeneye's development they tested spectrum emulation on the n64 as a side project with 007 just happening to be the game that they tested everything in rather than remove the code before shipping rare simply disabled it leading fans to patch it back in later you can totally access this miniature spectrum on a pc or map and those are just 10 more selections of some super cool secrets that it took years to find let me know your favorites down in the comments below and please check out the watch culture gaming podcast for now i've been scott from whatculture.com and i'll catch you soon you

Channel: WhatCulture Gaming

Views: 292,954

Rating: 4.894206 out of 5

Keywords: WhatCulture, WhatCulture Gaming, Video Games, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, Switch, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Bethesda, Activision

Id: iZOE4TLr0i0

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020