9 Easter eggs that were found only many years later
Translation of the article from cracked.com by Luke McKinney
Easter eggs are such interesting little things for game fans, and usually, finding them is easier than finding real eggs. For example, you might need to accumulate 10,000 coins, but there's no need to make any movements in reality. However, some of these little secrets, cheats, and glitches were so well hidden that no one noticed them for years, even though millions of gamers explored every such game inside and out. For example...
#9. Sarcastic Commentator (Wave Race Blue Storm, GameCube)
Let's start with the secret that was searched for NINE years.
The jet ski racing simulator Wave Race: Blue Storm featured a built-in secret screen for entering passwords (you had to press START+Z+X in the options), where you could unlock everything from dolphins to secret competitions. The secret that no one could find was an alternative voiceover for the commentator. The new commentator lethargically sarcastic commented on every action of the player. See for yourself, it’s true:
This cheat was activated in the sound settings, and sadly, only 3 people in the whole world play with sound settings in options: the one who programmed those options, the one who tested the options, and one who doesn’t exist.
First, you need to hold Z so that the graphical representation of sound changes from waves to rising mist (and this isn’t some nerdy speech mixed with bad poetry). After entering the upgraded version of the Konami code (L R L R UU DD AZX), you activate the sarcastic commentator who will soak you in "positivity". Apparently, it was a temporary announcer variant until a normal one was voiced, but compared to this Captain Obvious ("YOU CAME IN FIRST!"), the sarcastic one looks much better.
#8. Chris Julian’s Room (A Link to the Past, Super Nintendo)
In 1991, a boy named Chris Julian won a contest from Nintendo Power, and as a prize, his name was supposed to appear in an official Nintendo game, which at the time was the closest relative to an orgasm. Sounds really cool and fun for those born in the 90s, but if you didn’t know, the localizers at Nintendo of America hated fun. That’s why we have 40 different DS games with titles ending in Z, while a single Professor Layton took 2 years to translate.
NoA thinks you prefer what’s on the right. Unfortunately, the police knows the truth.
The NoA debugging team, founded by Mr. Grinch, removed the entrance to Chris’s room from the North American version of the game. Interesting fact: Chris’s room exists only in the North American version.
So, one team creates an entrance, another removes it. Two teams kept creating and removing the entrance; it was a real orgy of game programmers, but passive-aggressive and with the goal of making kids cry. This is exactly how orgies of programmers should be. Most of the ways to get in involved crazy combinations of explosions, accelerations, and sudden falls. But it was worth it, for the reward was... this room.
Doesn’t seem much, but in the 90s it meant more to us than puberty.
Well, at least it would have been very useful for Julian, if only anyone could find that damn room. Almost no one knew about it until the invention of the Internet, and even then, it became more or less known only around 2002. In the end, the best gift in the world for a child turned into some psychological horror that can only be encountered within the walls of a mental hospital for Japanese special effects. Instead of being the coolest kid in 1991, when everyone was enjoying the game, Julian now lives with the thought that the secret of little Chris is constantly being studied by dark spirits of the Internet.
#7. Passwords for Everything (Metroid, NES)
Metroid used a password system, a truly amazing step forward compared to other NES games, where you had to start from the very first level. It was truly a satanic gaming ritual, during which you sacrificed your life until you learned to save your character's life, by which time it was too late. One password unlocked all weapons and Samus's abilities, while another "unlocked" armor. Guess which one was found first.
Sexy!
These passwords were not just secret. They were impossible to find. The password system could be hacked, but had a special comparison mechanism for discarding incorrect options, and these passwords were discarded by the mechanism. They were, damn-it-finally-we-can-use-this-phrase, the unlock code embedded in the system. Even if you acted in reverse, restoring the entire scheme of the password system from one password (and people did that because exploring the code of an 8-bit game is obviously more interesting and important than finding a cure for cancer), you still wouldn’t have known about their existence.
And that’s why the Easter egg NAPRAS SWORD (which was opened by entering the code NAPRAS SWORD0:000000000000), giving infinite health, Ice Beam, and a bunch of other things, was never discovered until very recently. The developers never announced the existence of the code. They didn't hold leaks or clever promotions, because back then it was crazily ancient times, where:
People got excited over half-naked 8-bit characters.
Games had things put in without consulting the marketing department.
Only one of these statements is true. Programmers liked that kids spent their youth playing the same game over and over, hoping to see naked bodies smaller than a postage stamp, when in fact they could just type in the secret code and see everything without any problems. Or just draw themselves nipples on their thumbs.
The influence is still visible.
#6. Play as Master Hand (Super Smash Bros Melee, GameCube)
The method to trigger this glitch is so absurdly complex that our generation was allowed either to find it or invent a free renewable energy source; obviously, we picked the wrong option. Thanks, gamers.
It took 7 years to find the glitch because it’s not quite an Easter egg - rather a result of a bug allowing you to enter the game without selecting a character. Usually, Nintendo, if they can’t come up with a character, uses the strategy of "let’s just use Mario", but this time they decided to let the universe laugh at any player unlucky enough to find this glitch.
The catch is, that activating this glitch required deleting your friends' names from the game, which also unlocked the single-person melee mode. It’s as depressing as it sounds: you sit alone in Nintendo’s abyss of loneliness.
We could believe Nintendo’s claims that it happened accidentally if that glitch didn’t unlock a secret boss. The game rewards anyone who deletes all their friends with a boss modeled based on the only thing that would ever have sex with such a person.
Gorrrrri!
Not just a hand, but "Master Hand".
And now the glitch seems so simple.
So either it’s an attempt to lock the player in the "not just random, but we’re trying to make you think about your life" Desert of Eternal Loneliness, or a clever, suggestive masturbation thing that spits electricity at you after you’ve acknowledged that you have no friends.
#5. Wesker's Desk ([Resident Evil 2](/games?search=Resident Evil 2), PlayStation)
We can’t know exactly how long gamers searched for this secret, but let’s hope it was a very, very long time.
When you pick up an item in [Resident Evil 2](/games?search=Resident Evil 2) (and in any RE, actually), there are 3 possible outcomes:
If you’re lucky, the item will be useful.
If you’re unlucky, you’ll waste your time reading about how the item is useless.
If you’re very unlucky, it will be a document.
Anyone who examines the desk in RE at least 2 times did it accidentally.
Now imagine how this insane secret was found. It can be found in Wesker's desk if you inspect the desk FIFTY times. The first 49 times you get the message that there’s nothing interesting here.
However, if you are very, very persistent, much more persistent than a sane person should be, the reward for you will be an Easter egg. Not the biggest reward, considering
that by this point the game will have become your official home, part of your personality, and a serious mental
disorder. After examining the desk you will get (after developing, of course) "Film D", which represents...
Photoshop of Rebecca in a basketball uniform.
You can assess the quality of this Photoshop by the pixels and just how much your eyes and brain hurt from just looking at THIS.
Although Easter eggs are cool, specifically this one was a disappointment, especially for the person who found it first. Imagine how he did it, did he inspect every desk in the game 50 times?
It’s like finding El Dorado and discovering that the Golden City consists of a bunch of Ferrero Rocher wrappers.
#4. Arkham City Plans ([Arkham Asylum](/games?search=Arkham Asylum))
In the game that sold 2 million copies within just 2 weeks after release,
you wouldn’t expect to find some long-hidden secret. But the developers of Batman:AA placed a secret room in the game that remained unfound for 6 months until they announced its existence.
6 months doesn’t seem that long, but consider that at the time everyone who loved Batman
or games (i.e., basically everyone) was playing B:AA, without a break. A small justification is that to discover this secret you needed to blow up a completely random, unmarked wall without any hint of its location.
The marketing department at Eidos was slowly losing its mind at the fact that their incredibly elegant marketing trick remained undiscovered (the room contained hints for a sequel, Arkham City) and eventually just called a well-known
gaming site and told them about the location of the Easter egg.
Batman considers yet another horrifying plan that will make thousands of people suffer, and still
won’t kill the one who devised it.
If you still haven’t found/know about this room - here’s a video.
#3. The Citadel (GoldenEye, N64)
The first level of GoldenEye includes a secret island. If you played without cheats (i.e., devices like GameShark), then you definitely have never been there.
At the end of the level with the dam (i.e., the first level), there’s a fork in the road with two possible paths: go left, jumping straight into one of the best Bond scenes, blowing up a huge chemical weapons factory filled with Russians,
like an explosive flying angel of coolness and death, or go right to look at the gray endless ocean. That’s the way we need. Look through the sniper rifle scope towards the ocean, far far away you will see a tiny island that you can’t reach.
Using GameShark, you can turn on "noclip" mode, which will allow you to fly across the water straight into Wonderland.
What you’ll find is unbelievably cool, there’s a real turret with a giant machine gun:
Unfortunately, "looking cool" is the only purpose of all this goodness. Before you lies a half-formed idea that was never realized. "The Citadel" was supposed to be an extra part of the level, but as the deadline approached,
a combination of lack of memory, lack of time, and the understanding that they had already created the best console shooter at the time forced them to cut some things. But instead of
completely removing the island, they just removed the boat that was supposed to take you there, mistakenly assuming that gamers would be too busy with the incredibly cool shootouts on the dam to notice a little island in the distance.
#2. Developer's Initials (Donkey Kong, Atari 400)
This is truly an exceptional Easter egg, and not because it contains something special, but because it remained hidden for 26 years!
Long ago, when companies kept programmers in cages and "getting a chair" was considered a promotion, Atari hired Landon M. Dyer to port Donkey Kong to the Atari 400. They had the license, arcade machines were jingling across America... and that was about it. Landon’s first task was to waste a bunch of quarters just to figure out what this
Donkey Kong was.
The next 5 months he spent reinventing the game on inferior hardware, alone, and ultimately got so deep into the Matrix that he couldn’t resist hiding his
initials in the code.
I’m afraid this is it.
And when we say "hidden," we mean he buried them so deep that they couldn’t be found for 25 years. And even then, we only learned about the existence of the Easter egg because Landon himself told everyone about it, except by that time he forgot how to unlock it in the game.
No, honestly. This is the Easter egg.
Well, someone did manage to do it. All it took was sifting through 25,000 lines of assembler code, and through them finding out how - it’s a truly insane combination, you need to hit a high score
with 37, 73, or 77 in the fourth and fifth positions, lose all lives, with the last one from a fall, then reboot the machine on level 4 difficulty and wait. By this time, you’d be so engrossed in the game
that you could officially marry it.
Hey, but the main thing about Easter eggs isn’t the essence, but the search. Or something like that.
#1. Kill Your Friend (Duck Hunt, NES)
In Duck Hunt, you can control the duck.
And now, depending on where you lived in 1985 and if you could read, you either say "Well, duh, it’s written in the manual," or the far more common "DAMN I’VE BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME FOR 10 YEARS, HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?!"
Well, this is a shooting and killing game, for real men, and real men don’t read manuals (there was even a mode for shooting clay pigeons, just to prove that it’s fun to shoot only living things). And many of us didn’t know how to read yet back in 1985.
Unfortunately, our inability didn’t allow us to enjoy shooting at living things that also had malicious voices like our friends. All you needed to do was grip the handle of the gun tighter and plug in a second joystick in "Single Duck" mode.
Which now controls the duck. Now go retrieve your NES from the attic and give it a try.