Shocking Easter Eggs in Kid Games Analyzed & Ranked

Is it just me or does it feel like the game developers of our childhood didn't really give a [bleep] they were making games for kids? I think we all remember a moment in a videogame that shocked us beyond belief. Well just be fortunate you weren't one of the kids who found one of these easter eggs because if you did I'm sorry. Lion King. So I scoured the internet for this one and I couldn't find it at all, not surprising because this was always pretty obscure. Fortunately I was able to go from my memory and I managed to crack the code. If you go in the options menu right from the start of the game there's a sound test where you can preview a multitude of stellar MIDI recreations of songs from the original soundtrack as well as original tracks that range from great to not so great. Hoo Hah falls towards the latter but let's give it a play. Okay so it's pretty standard stuff, but something freaky happens at random when you perform the following actions: When you back out to the main menu and go back into the song to listen, sometimes you'll hear something entirely different. Whoa. Right off the bat it's a lot creepier. There's a layer to the song now that wasn't there before. But wait. Suddenly it jumps in this way, way creepier part. Woah, wha wha.. what is it backwards? I don't get it. I could see if maybe this was a cut version only because music this experimental probably would have been terrifying to children and unfortunately all the information about this is completely scrubbed from the internet so we're at a complete loss of explanation. Hopefully we can figure this one out. Spiderman. Okay so this one isn't too bad but it's definitely funny. Spiderman for the PlayStation was an incredible game developed by game design gods Neversoft, the creators behind the Tony Hawk series and in true Neversoft fashion there was content featured in Spiderman that may have been slightly inappropriate for a kids game. I think we all remember a few similar moments from Tony Hawk. That was Tony Hawk. We're talking about Spiderman a much more kid-friendly franchise. Now here's the password screen. Now, no. I'm not gonna input a code that's gonna unlock footage of Mary Jane getting our hero's Spidey Sense tingling. "Spidey Sense Tingling!" Instead I'm just gonna enter a swear word. Yep that's it. Again it's not really that bad but I remember I never showed this one to my parents as a kid because I knew I would get in trouble for entering the swear words in the first place. Ultimately what we have here is an easter egg that encourages children to enter swear words for an amusing animation. Again it's not that big of a deal compared to other things I'm going to show you on this list but definitely a ballsy move for a kids game. Freddy Fish and The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds. You may remember this game from playing it in the computer lab if you were a child in the 90s. "You've got mail!" So the last one was sort of cute but this one is something else. If you add EddieEatsLuther=1 to the file a hegames.ini you're suddenly treated to this disturbing scene involving the usually lightly antagonistic character Eddie. "Watcha thinking about Freddie?" "Oh nothing Luther." Holy hell Freddie! Keep your imagination to yourself you got a twisted mind you son of a psycho fish! Anyway according to animator Tom Veer this scene was animated as a means to blow off steam in the development process. That's why you animated it then why is it fully voice recorded ... in several different languages? [dutch dialogue] WHAT? Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. Harvest Moon is a really light-hearted calming game for children that teaches how to harvest crops and manage a family property, which is why it's incredibly shocking there's an extremely weird easter egg in this game. At any given moment in this game this television interacts exactly how you would expect a TV to interact but if you interact with it exactly 4:44 a.m. Um.. okay that's pretty strange. To make matters even worse this is apparently a reference to the fact that the number four is associated with death over in Japan. Wow. Are they trying to traumatize kids? Banjo Tooie? Banjo Tooie a is childhood staple for many children in the 90s and it was a famous shock to the industry when developer a rare took a more adult direction with their later title Conker's Bad Fur Day. If anyone had looked a tiny bit closer at their brighter more cutesy colorful titles such as Banjo Tooie at the start, they would have realized the signs were always there. When you're in Terrydactyland, if you can get high enought in the air and then angle your camera just right you can see this. So here's a little question for you in the comments: do you think kids would have caught on to this? Did you see this as a kid and think anything of it? Maybe kids don't really have as dirty of a mind as I think but I'm probably gonna say if I saw this as a child I probably would have raised an eyebrow. Splatoon. This is another bitterly dark Easter Egg for a bright and colorful game intended for children. Players found in Splatoon if you wait around in this room for over ten minutes a large barrage of creepy moans and screeching metal noises take over the audio of your game. What? What's the meaning here? There's no other moment in this whole game that approaches this level of darkness. The most disturbing thing for me is the fact that a few creators were asked about this and they weren't even aware of it. They had no idea why somebody working on their game went ahead and programmed this very strange and unusual detail. Very weird. Tiger Woods PGA Tour. So this one's rather unbelievable and a little famous so you may have heard of it before. If you were to take Tiger Woods PGA Tour for PlayStation and put it in your computer you would find a file on your computer called ZZDummy. If you were to open it with a media player you're suddenly treated to the pilot episode of South Park. Now why in the world would that be fully accessible on a game marketed to children? I found out there actually is an explanation for this out there. As the name ZZ dummy suggests the South Park video was intended as a dummy file meaning that the folder that this file was found in required some sort of file or data inside of it in order to properly function in ordinance with the game's programming. The programmer who did this actually admitted to the publisher EA that they didn't know how to create a proper dummy file for the game so they simply took a South Park video on hand and changed the extension to .DAT which is an extension typically used for dummy files. Unfortunately according to Retro Junk a mother purchased Tiger Woods for her son at Christmas and both of them not knowing what a PlayStation was put it in their PC and stumbled upon this file. I'm gonna guess that in that instance either became traumatized or a giant fan of Matt and Trey and now sees Book of Mormon every year. The mother of course though was far from happy and complained to EA. This ended up with EA recalling the thousands and thousands of Tiger Woods' debut video game. This was a huge blow to Tiger Woods who to this day has maintained an untouched upstanding career and image - oh hold on. No.. no.. that's, that's not right. Secret Writers Society. This is one of the most notorious offensive Easter eggs in all of history. Huge shout out to The Obscuritory for recently documenting this as it was incredibly hard to document this until they found a copy that actually had this egg on it. Secret Writers Society was an edutainment product designed to teach children how to type. This is probably about as innocent as we can get on this list. Secret Writers Society had a feture where a child could type out a long-form paragraph and then have the game speak it back to them. Once it's talking if you hit the playback button the second time and hold it down, the game suddenly starts swearing at you. The Obscuritory actually says they thought this is a lot subtler than they were expecting. Is this subtle? I don't find this subtle at all. Ass ass[bleep] ass[bleep]. Yeah so the story goes a parent review site actually found this egg in a review copy early on, contacted the developers who said they were unaware of this feature. They ended up claiming that this was a bug where the game was accidentally reading off a list of all the games filtered words. Yeah.. a developer has come forward since and said that he was paid by the Yes Men who dismantle the media for activist purposes. They also claimed responsibility for the Simcopter Easter Egg that I discussed in my video 6 Easter Eggs That Got People Fired. If you're interested in that story go ahead and check out this video and if you're enjoying my content please subscribe! Thanks a ton you guys your support's amazing. So back to the story. This developer said this was a statement against parents who set their children in front of screens and expect them to do the parenting. Right... don't you think that's a little heavy-handed for a game that's teaching typing? That's sort of a skill every kid needs nowadays and I'm not sure how you teach that without a screen in front of them. This move would have been more appropriate for children's programming in my opinion but nevertheless still a very Tyler Durden thing to do. California Speed this has to be the darkest Easter Egg I've ever seen in a game for kids - let alone for anything period. In this bright and colorful game intended for children there's a hidden message lurking that seems only possible in a creepypasta. If you choose the level Mojave Desert and slightly veer along the edge of this course you can spot a billboard in the corner of your eyes that says this: Sometimes God takes mommies and puppies away and sometimes just sometimes I do. Holy [bleep]. I remember for the longest time people were freaked out about this. People were like is this poetry? Is it a reference for something? Is this guy actually insane? Well luckily for you I'm not leaving you in the dark on this one I actually did investigate this Easter egg myself for a piece that I wrote. My first instinct was to watch the credits of the game and I found three listed texture artists, these are the people responsible for colorizing and putting images over all the rendered objects in the game. Clearly this had to be the work of one of them. I went down the chain and over the course of a couple months all the people involved in the game were very cooperative but they had no idea about this Easter Egg. However one of the developers was very sure of which developer would have the answer. I reached out to him and very thankfully he gave me this very funny explanation. I'd love to tell you there was some sort of mythical reason behind this that would get people excited but it's fairly mundane. For the majority of the team California Speed for the N64 was our first project directly out of school. We crunched as hard as we could, as stupid as you can crunch. We made dumb decisions, defended those decisions, hated ourselves for those decisions, and then figured out how to fix what we could and ship the game. California Speed originated as a coin-op game and as such featured some billboard art that was only relevant to the coin-op world, as for other Midway coin games for example. Some point probably 8 p.m. on a Saturday while we were crunching, the artists were asked to stop what we're doing and make effort to change all these textures because we are console and not coin op. Unfortunately, as we were in a tight situation to even get the most basic of the game stood up on the N64, we didn't have anything handy or relevant to put on the billboards. So I plugged in a placeholder billboard texture so [bleep]ing stupid there'd be no way it could possibly confuse for a real shipping asset. Connecting the dots from there is pretty straightforward, we crunched super-hard, we shipped something unholy and we went on to bigger and hopefully better things and now 18 years later I'm informed via YouTube that my placeholder texture never got replaced. So fortunately we get a bit of relief on this one. Morgan here gives us a very logical explanation why something so creepy was left in this game. Sometimes developers need to kick other developers in the high gear and sometimes that requires desperate measures like putting a placeholder graphic that clearly needs replacement. Unfortunately for Morgan no programmer ever caught on that that graphic may have needed replacement and did not belong in a children's game. The Apprentice. Okay so this is by far the most inappropriate thing I've ever seen in children's game and I had never seen this before until researching this video and I'm just absolutely shocked by this. On the game over screen on the game again intended for children, if you enter codes such as up-down left-right you're suddenly treated to these animations. Wow okay um let's get that off the screen. The fortunate upside to this Easter Egg is that no child likely ever found it. In fact nobody found it. It wasn't until 11 years after the release developer went on a forum in 2005 under the alias CDI developer and revealed the secret Easter eggs for older audiences to check out for themselves. I guess the developers of The Apprentice can be thankful that this game was not a success and ended up avoiding a Hot Coffee like incident that Rockstar had over GTA 4 where they face public scrutiny over a piece of content that was hidden inside of the game's code. Keep in mind that was a game that already features Grand Theft Auto. The Apprentice here is a game made for children! These developers had some serious Kahuna's! All right thanks again everyone another week another video I hope you enjoyed the content please subscribe if you're interested in more I have a whole list of ideas I'm just gonna keep going down as long as people keep wanting to hear it. Thanks again for all the support guys! Love to hear in the comments what you thought. Please let me know if you've ever found anything else in a video game that really disturbed you a lot. I'd love to do another video like this if you have any more examples. Again, got more for you coming! Stay tuned.

Channel: oddheader

Views: 2,489,625

Rating: 4.5856643 out of 5

Keywords: best easter eggs 2018, best easter eggs, wtf easter eggs, inappropriate easter eggs, dark easter eggs, creepy easter eggs, creepy gaming, lion king easter eggs, disturbing, lion king, spiderman easter eggs, spiderman, ps1, n64, freddie fish, harvest moon, splatoon, secret writer's society, shocking easter eggs, hidden, secrets, easter egg hunter, inappropriate, california speed, 90s games, shocking moments, top easter eggs, Nintendo, Playstation, Tony Hawk

Id: xaOHjykS-xg

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Clbull]

As much as I feel those Easter eggs weren’t that creepy, your channel and your vids are actually pretty good. How the fuck do you have so few subs?

[u/Tao_of_Krav]

Liked and subscribed, I really enjoy all of your videos and hope to see a lot more in the future

[u/chirpykippo]

ahaha i loved the billboard one, that genuinely creeped me out. the effort you put into this is amazing!

[u/appuri]

really liked the harvest moon easter egg, would've loved to have seen it as a child

[u/dangdirty]

That TLK music has been stuck in my head for awhile now and it bothers me lol. How did you even learn of it in the first place? I actually looked around to see if other people had found it and found nothing.