I remember playing through the first F.E.A.R. and noticing a coffee machine in an office kitchen. It had an unknown brand name on it so I checked it against the game's credits and it matched up with one of the game's artists.
My favourite, though, was playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and finding three sea shells on the wall next to a toilet.
There are a lot more well known easter eggs in games of that era, especially in games by id software where staff would put each other's pics in hidden places in the game.
Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.
But that's still alive in indie games today. Check out the games developed by "New Blood Interactive" for example Dusk, it's full of throwbacks and memes to classic games from the '90's. You can find them on Steam or at https://waste.money/
It's all fun and games until you leave a literal sex-game(1) in there prompting geriatric lawmakers(2) to get into the action (3).
(And yes, I've worked in games myself so I 100% see the reason why they left it in disabled, iirc there is 2 or 3 levels with geometries but broken scripts included on disc in the largest game I worked on)
Yeah these anecdotes are great. One of the ones I found amusing was how the windmills in Perfect Dark were reskinned autoguns/turrets, presumably to implement the movement aspect more easily.
As a result, if you get too close to it with cheats or glitches, the whole windmill will turn and fire at you:
And the Ascend ability from Tears of the Kingdom was a developer tool that got repurpose into an in game ability when they realised it'd make the caves much more convenient/enjoyable to navigate.
OK let's make this interesting then, hopefully you can at least answer this: is there anything out there that might help someone intrepid enough to work out at least the general gist?
And where do they look? Game data? Obscure forum comments?
What is weird is that everything to do with the meaning of that has been purged from the public Internet. Not by any conspiracy, I guess it just never made it into any indexer.
I think it got removed from last year's remake.. probably because the new guys didn't know what the hell it meant. Like the people that paint over Banksy art.
My favorite is about the latest Pokemon game that has a fully rendered ocean at all times, which ruins the game's loading time and is, if I remember, never explored.
Then since scrolling was disabled, I just used the window.scroll() function to scroll down and see the small parts of the article that I wasn't able to read before the popup appeared.
This works because Tumblr doesn't actually remove the parts of the article it doesn't want you to see from the HTML output, so it's still perfectly viewable if you can get past the popup. This is not generally the case though, for example most news sites actually remove the text you're not supposed to see if you don't log in.
If I could figure out how to re-enable scrolling, I'd have a recipe for a pretty delicious Greasemonkey script.
Dear tumblr -- Sincerely fuck off with this bullshit, thanks.
Disabled scrolling is almost always implemented by setting the `overflow` CSS property to `hidden` or `none`. You can add a UBlock filter for a specific site, as the sibling comment suggests, but on the fly you can also just use the console to filter for elements with that property and disable it or set it to `auto`.
The Switch era of Pokemon games, aside from some interesting spinoffs, has really been slapdash work. They know it'll sell, so it's always minimum effort. The biggest upset is still that newer games no longer support having all pokemon in them.
It's not like it's a massive effort to support those mons - they haven't been doing significant 3D model updates since the 3DS era already.
It's so frustrating seeing as Pokemon is literally the biggest franchise in the world, bigger than Mickey Mouse(!!!!!), and yet the switch games feel like they were put together by a team of 10 programmers on a budget. I know Gamefreak doesn't own pokemon, but jesus christ whoever approved the latest games for release should be fired.
Or actually, maybe they should be given a promotion because despite all the bugs and poor performance the game still sold incredibly well, so why spend any more money and time on development if it clearly doesn't matter.
It's definitely a lot of work to have all pokemon. They all need stats. They all need a habitat. They all need a moveset evolution. And if you fuck up even one a ton of fans that really like that pokemon are upset. It's disappointing but I really understand why they don't do all pokemon.
Neither of these have to shift a substantial amount between generations. The current stats & moves structure solidified by gen 4 already.
>They all need a habitat
No they don't. Trade them in and out of Home/Bank/whatever to move across generations, trade with other players, etc. This was standard flow up until the latest few generations.
There is not much extra game design consideration needed until you're talking about new features. But a good percentage of mons are still in the new games, so is it really that much extra effort to balance when you have new features in play? It can be as simple as just not giving older mons the same new abilities. Not every one got mega evolutions, for example.
How is this still a problem? We’ve been building large open worlds for ages now. At what point did some developer decide to always render the ocean and this never got addressed?
At first I was deeply annoyed that this was presented as a video (why don’t you just tell me what it’s about?!), and then after about five seconds I was enthralled. Great watch.
Yes it is. Whenever the game crashes it showed a congratulatory message and the level select screen, so sega's QA wouldn't notice that it crashed. Hitting the console can cause such a crash.
It's clever, but also a bit disingenuous. Sega wanted really high quality games and the developer gets annoyed by the bug reports and tries to work around the strict testing.
There are no feedback for the developers once the game is out, they don't know if these bugs are triggered or how frequent, so they could be sending out defective games and the process that would have caught this has been circumvented. It's kinda of a dick move by a developers who feel like they know better.
It prevents crashes, allows graceful recovery by resetting the game state and is certainly the most creative use of exception handlers that I've ever seen.
It is almost 2024 and there's production software out there with "catch all and do nothing" exception handlers. Software that assumes memory allocation never fails.
The blog post says small, medium, large, this shows about 8 different sizes, which is... even funnier somehow. The designers needed to see all the options in game.
I'm pretty sure it was just 3 sizes in III. Maybe once they realized they left it in, they decided to keep it a an Easter egg and fully committed to it.
But... I don't remember it like that in SA on the PC at least. Weird. And I'm very sure III even had an option in the graphics settings to enable widescreen support, which was pretty odd. Why not just assume square pixels and figure it out from there...
I don't think it adapted at all to 16:9. It is just stretched.
Even PS2 games that had the option for widescreen sometimes left out things like menus and the HUD. It was pretty hacky, but I played PS2 on a 4:3 screen for years before I had anything else. Never seemed like a big deal.
I'm kind of annoyed they didn't standardise options for it on that console. Some games set it in the menu, others had a (bespoke) button combo you had to hold down while you started the game. Having a PAL system, it was interesting how hit or miss switching to 60hz mode was on various TVs, when EA racing games would prompt me about it.
When we shipped the first The Division someone compiled a whole list of comments from code that said things like "Fix by <date 2 years earlier>", "DO NOT SHIP THIS CODE", "Temp fix", "No idea why this code works, will refactor later", etc etc etc.
What I find most strange is that this was never validated by anybody. The company simply trusted the developer, the developer put it in, and nobody said anything. It just worked and everybody was happy.
In web dev people struggle to put text to screen. The struggle is real. Everybody has opinions on what the code should look like, how it should work, and will scrutinize each word to death. All of that internal pain is on top of megabytes of giant layers of abstractions that likely went through the same ass pain. Ironically, almost nobody in web dev (maybe about 4% of the people doing this work) actually has any idea what they are doing. Its almost as though people are posturing to justify their existence.
I think that assumes more than what the author intended. Just because they didn't mention it, doesn't mean what there weren't any validation /process in place.
Having worked in software for a while, I realise now the answer to questions like these is almost always "there were more important things to worry about"
I was working on an F1 game back in the PS1 game. The studio wanted to fire one of the track texture artists. They pulled him up for a texture that was on the back of one of the break boards...
'whats this?'
Now given it was like a 16x16 texture, he could have said anything..
'its <name> as a stick man with his ** out!'.
Handed them the ammo.
However, related to the moon, we did a demo / prototype one time, and put it into a soft QA cycle before sending to publishers. One of our QA (rightly, but sigh) raised a bug saying the moon was upside down, and given the location of the game, it would be rotated.
I think it was pretty standard, even used for testing.
God mode for example, that allows to fly through the map, is the OG of fast travel.
Nowadays computers are so powerful you can have full blown editor doing essentially all the cheat codes, but back in the day, you'd want to be testing the construction of X, something you don't have money for, so you'd press a few keys to change hex values and you'd have (maxvalue - current cash) instantly, so you could test more effectively.
Cheat codes would be hidden enough that regular players wouldn't find them but not impossible that players could use them.
I think the logic is, you've paid for the game, you should be able to access all the content.
Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.
My own experience testing video games back in the mists of time was you get assigned Level Nine, for example, and the entire game is a crashy stuck-in-the-floor mess where all of the low hanging fruit has already been reported. Without a cheat to get you to Level Nine you'll never even be able to do your "commute" there, much less do your job.
I remember back in the day a memory editor for DOS.
It was a TSR (terminate and stay resident, esentially a background process) that you'd load before firing up the game.
Once in the game, at any time you could press a hot key (F12, I think) and it would freeze the game and open a TUI with a hex editor where you could search for values (money, number of lives, whatever else you could think of), change them and go back to the game.
Us slightly younger folk got to do similar stuff with cheat engines on consoles like the PSP. You'd configure a 'plugin' to be loaded by the CFW with the game, press some key combo to freeze the game and go fishing for cheats in memory (or use previously saved ones).
That kind of fiddling was such a big part of my developing an interest in computers and building a solid understanding of how all the magic works internally, it's a bit of a shame that kids nowadays can't really jump into fiddling around like that since the devices they'd play games on are much better locked down (or on PC, require you to already know what you're doing to be able to snoop around in another program's memory).
All the Game Genies sat between the cartridge and console and intercepted and replaced accesses to specific ROM addresses. It didn't have the ability to access memory. Other devices like the Pro-Action Replay could modify memory and acted more like a TSR.
I remember there were tools where you filtered all the matching values, then went back to game and played a little, came back filtered again, until one value stood out.
I remember doing this with the built-in tool of some emulator. They would let you filter by exact match and you could filter it down again after changing the value (losing a life).
But for stuff where exact matching wasn't practical like say a more or less continous health-bar, you could instead filter by searching for values that decreased / increased / didn't change.
Of course you would also have to guess at the data type but there weren't that many likely choices.
This is it. You'd mark the memory locations, go back to the game, repeat the search and filter down.
Either that, or you'd just go about trying one by one until you found it, then tried to figure out a pattern of what was around it and make notes on a paper for next time.
> Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.
Interesting enough, you can often find the equivalent of cheat codes in the accessibility settings. Celeste is a good example.
Another reason for cheat codes: you can give them to reviewers, so they can look at all the content, without having to beat the game the normal, slow way.
Accessibility options can help a bit, but aren't implemented widely and aren't anywhere near as powerful as cheat codes and console commands. Being able to move between stages, spawn or remove objects and characters, or even just get your character unstuck can let you work around what would otherwise be game breaking bugs and provide many hours of entertainment.
I heard that some games added cheat codes so that they could sell those guide books with all sorts of cheat codes in them. I remember seeing them at my scholastic book fair in elementary school.
In no particular order:
Borderlands;
Destiny;
Tom Clancy’s(R) The Division; Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4;
The Outer Worlds;
Skyrim if you’re inclusive with the definition of shooting;
Pokemon Snap 2 if you’re extra inclusive with the definition of looting.
Why would you even dump your loot in Borderlands? Money is absolutely meaningless in that game. You look at the comparison box to see if there are more green arrows and if not you leave it.
Well you see I grew up in a poor household so now I have scarcity mindset/hoarding mindset and I NEED to keep everything what if it's useful in the future or I can sell it for two bucks or or or or....
I like borderlands but good god is it a slog for me to play because I have to pick up ALL the loot and kill ALL the things and do ALL the side quests so now I'm 40 hours in on my first play through and haven't even beaten the game yet while all the normal people are talking about the new mechanics in super ultra extra hardcore vault hunter mode newgame++++
I downloaded a mod for Fallout 4 to make most things weightless so I could actually play the game instead of picking up every single 10mm round when I don't even use pistols.
I definitely hear you. I have a Skyrim save that still has ~18k "weight units" of loot that I need to sell. I recently started sizing it down from ~42k units. I used to just dump it all in a chest near the vendor I use when I need to clear space in the player inventory but then I installed a mod that lets me open an inventory with a spell. I could leave that 5 weight, 1 gold-value item behind but that's literally leaving money on the table.
You rarely visited shops then. Countless times I watched a top tier gun timing out in 3 minutes and I’m short on money.
Also, BL guns have lots of hidden parameters which may or may not correspond to (or be enhanced by) your build. Playing by green arrows alone is pretty… casual.
> The collision in a game is usually different from the visual polygons. This is because collision detection is relatively slow. A building with 10,000 visual polygons may have only 1,000 collision polygons. As a consequence, the map may have holes that you cannot see. This is what's going on when you fall through the map.
> This makes it very hard for the testers to test the collision on the map. During gta4, the testers found it particularly hard as characters could fall through the map depending on their animations and there was no way they could touch every bit on the map.
> This is why they asked for a rag doll gun. Alexander Roger created a special gun that instead of bullets would fire rag doll characters. The testers could go round the map and fire rag dolls at every building and hill side. --https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/bugs-bugs-b...
I don't think it was until I started learning programming in school and fully understood what "debugging" meant that it started to make sense what the purpose was of the "debug mode" that video game strategy guides would show me how to unlock. I thought it was there for the players to find and entertain themselves, like cheat codes.
Only later did I realize that stuff like model viewer, events viewer, stage select, etc. was all stuff developed for/by the QA team.
Reminds of a pro-tip some wizard told me when I was a wee lad in year 1 of my career as a software dev:
Leave some glaringly misplaced or ugly in the UX, the boss/client will ask you to change that and won't nitpick other things that aren't worth the time. A kind of bait if you will for nitpick feedback.
I first read about this trick in a Heinlein novel, and it involved shipping logs if I recall correctly. Luckily I caught it early in my career - leave in an easy mistake that is trivial to fix and harms nothing. It 100% works. The nitpicker feels like they won and you don’t waste time watching them spend hours pouring over everything.
Similar thing in Terminator: Skynet back in the day. Shoot at the moon and you get an "Ow!" message appearing in your status area. A few more potshots and it literally falls out of the sky - great stuff ;)
To add to the replies, the funny part is that they made two entire, much bigger sequels/expansions based on the same engine (and very similar mechanics/assets). So not only did this make it into the final release, but was rolled forward to two other entire releases.
What if someone tries this IRL and the moon actually jumps closer and makes the shooter pass out so it stays there and the tidal forces rip apart the crust and we all die. Don't encourage them.
i've been in similar situations, you try that, but when they see it in the "wild" (while actually playing the game, using the app...) they change their mind.
The 3 ways to go about it:
1. give them something real to play with, like this
2. overrule them and tell them it's done
3. tell them it's baked into a 3rd party library you're using and will take a month to change
I think from a game design standpoint there will be times when the game will intentionally set things up so the player will see the moon (e.g., meet someone here, cutscenes plays, player is now at a stakeout with the moon in the background), making the moon adjustable allows the artists to make their decision without needing to bother the programmer, especially if the cutscenes and camera framing aren't done yet.
They knew what the options looked like, there was disagreement on which was better, and apparently no one in a position to simply issue a decision to end the debate.
One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA