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In the olden days, programmers could hide something in the code of a video game and be confident that it would never be revealed. But with the advent of the Internet, players are sharing tips, hints, secrets, hacks, and cracks at a breakneck pace. When new games are released, forums light up trying to find these secrets. Most of them get revealed within days, if not hours. But some programmers work a little harder to keep their Easter eggs from public view.
In this feature, we’ll pay tribute to those especially tough nuts. These are secrets that hid just out of reach long after the game was released, waiting for some enterprising soul to hunt them down and loose them on the world.
GoldenEye - ZX Spectrum Games
Proving that FPS games could work on consoles, GoldenEye was one of the Nintendo 64’s standout titles. Developer Rare hid all kinds of funny glitches and extra game modes in the game, many of which were found when the N64 was still a going concern. One, though, didn’t get discovered until 2012 – fifteen years after the game’s release.
Apparently Rare had a team working on exploring the possibility to emulate titles from the British home computer ZX Spectrum (launched in 1982), and the code they used was incorporated into GoldenEye. Instead of removing it for release, they just patched over it and shipped the emulator still on the cart.
Marathon Infinity - Hangar 96
Before Bungie became the Xbox’s MVP with the Halo games, they won gamers over with the Marathon series. These first-person shooters boasted lots of occluded lore, but the mystery of Hangar 96 took years to unveil.
The game has three “dream levels” where, if the player makes incorrect choices, he’ll be shuffled off to. In those levels, they can find terminals with cryptic codes on them that reference Hangar 96. If they extract hex codes from other monitors in the game’s first and last level, they can transform it into a compressed file to unlock a new multiplayer level set in that hangar.
Donkey Kong - Programmer’s Initials
A developer hiding their initials in a game’s code is one of the most common Easter eggs, dating back to Adventure on the Atari 2600. Many of these hidden credits are relatively easy to find, but the guy who coded Donkey Kong for the little-used Atari 400 home computer secreted his away so well that they weren’t discovered for 26 years.
To get Landon M. Dyer’s initials to pop up on the title screen, the player must die with a score that includes a certain combination of digits, lose their last life by falling, and then set the game to difficulty level 4. Who would have ever figured that out? Well, somebody eventually did!
Batman: Arkham City - Calendar Man’s Riddle
Rocksteady’s first Batman game, Arkham Asylum, was notable for the presence of a hidden room that took nearly a year to be discovered. This room had a map that turned out to give clues to the next game, so it’s not surprising that when the sequel came out players were desperately hunting for similar secrets.
Arkham City managed to withhold its biggest secret for three solid years, which is a miracle in the modern gaming world. If you set the date on your console to the day that Rocksteady was formed, you’ll get a message from Calendar Man that dropped some hints for the next game in the series, Arkham Knight.
Bubble Bobble - Not-Random Randomness
Taito’s Bubble Bobble is one of the most beloved games of the 80s arcade era, a charming and remarkably complex platformer with 99 levels and a ton of hidden secrets. There are so many unusual things that can happen during a game that, for over a decade, players thought it was all triggered completely at random. But when the game’s ROM was dumped over ten years later, hackers discovered that it’s way more complex than that.
Bubble Bobble keeps track of tons of player actions – how many bubbles you’ve blown and popped, how many times you’ve jumped, et cetera – and uses those to determine the power-ups that appear. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that all of this stuff was puzzled out.
WaveRace - Blue Storm Snarky Announcer
Many of the hidden secrets on this list were found simply by bizarre brute force. Take the hidden announcer in the 2001 GameCube game WaveRace: Blue Storm. At no point on any of the game’s menus is it indicated that another voice is available, but one intrepid player somehow figured out in 2009 that if you change an audio option so it appears to just be fog and then input a modified version of the famous Konami Code, it’ll replace the game’s standard announcer with a guy with a bit more ‘tude.
Why this wasn’t present as a regular game option is anybody’s guess, and it’s amazing that it was even found at all.
Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past - Chris Houlihan Room
This one is interesting, because fans knew about it before the game was even released. In 1990, Nintendo Power magazine ran a contest in which one reader would get their name included in an unannounced NES game. That game turned out to be the first Zelda on the Super Nintendo in 1992. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the winner, Chris Houlihan, got his public recognition. His name was on a plaque in a hidden room that it’s virtually impossible to access, requiring the player to glitch Link’s location to wind up there.
Splinter Cell - Double Agent Seal Rescue
Sometimes gamers need a little extra help to uncover these long-buried Easter eggs. Splinter Cell: Double Agent came out in 2006 and by 2010, one of the game’s designers was so frustrated that nobody’s found his hidden treasure that he made it public to the world.
It’s not surprising that it stayed a secret for so long, as players had to enter co-op mode and perform a variety of bizarre tasks, including using specific vending machines in order. If you do that, you’re treated to an insane fetch quest involving freeing five talking seals from captivity. You even have to romance one of them.
Trials HD - Riddle
A motorcycle racing game doesn’t seem like a prime genre to hide secrets in, but RedLynx’s 2009 Xbox Arcade title Trials HD packed a riddle so convoluted that it took a coordinated network of players several years to finally figure it out.
Many of the game’s tracks contain background art that references famous numerical sequences, the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, binary code, DNA sequences, and more. All of this is incredibly easy to miss as you ride by at high speed trying not to wipe out. The community eventually had to turn to an employee of RedLynx for help, and he provided the missing pieces in 2012 to finally assemble the solution.
Halo 3 - Birthday Message
Here’s another one from Bungie, who probably need to put a tighter leash on their programmers so they stop goofing off with hidden secrets. Halo 3 was released in 2007 to rave reviews, but in 2014 developer Adrian Perez mentioned that he had hidden a secret in the loading screen of the game for his wife that nobody had found.
That set fans of the series on a rampage to discover it, and one YouTuber found out that if you set your Xbox’s clock to December 25th and depress both thumbsticks while the game is loading, it will pop up a new screen with a ring on it. You can zoom in on the rotating ring to see that “Happy Birthday Lauren” is engraved on it. It’s not a big secret, but it stayed hidden for seven years.
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out - Bald Bull
The classic NES boxing game is all about pattern recognition and understanding how opponents telegraph their attacks. Amazingly, one of those cues went completely undiscovered for a staggering 22 years!
When you fight Bald Bull, the typical strategy is to interrupt his Bull Charge (which will kill you instantly) by punching him after the third hop. In a 2009 interview, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed that there was an easier way – by watching the background, you can see a person in the audience take a picture with the camera flash. When the flash goes off, deliver a body blow to knock Bald Bull down for the count.
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