My favourite easter eggs are:
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.
Cyberpunk also has the 3 sea shells reference
What is the significance of 3 sea shells?
He doesn't know how to use the 3 sea shells hahahahahahaha. I can see how that could be confusing.
This is the correct response.
It's a meme from the movie Demolition Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnuOa7tDco
It's a reference to the 1993 Stallone Movie Demolition Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
A cop gets "frozen" as a punishment and when he gets reawoken the world has changed. Including the toilets. They now use 3 seashells instead of paper.
Cyberpunk also has the red pill / blue pill and deja vu cat from the matrix.
A little fun fact about Cyberpunk for those who haven't played: Every quest in the game is named after an old song.
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/
Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.
Only committee-approved and/or mandated easter eggs permitted. Don't forget to catalogue them all so the social media team have more content.
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)
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)
(2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get...
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...
Although in this case, it wasn't even an actual easter egg, just removed content still on the disc.
Yep, which makes them features rather than easter eggs. Easter eggs should be subversive and unapproved.
It's a loss for sure, but at least they still appear in some indie games.
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.
A Tumblr post which goes into how truly insane this is, and offers a possible explanation for how it got to be that way:
https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...
Well that was a fun read until it forces you to log in :(
Oh no
I logged in
I rebelled. On the console I set the display property of the #glass-container element to "none", hiding the popover window:
document.querySelector("#glass-container").style.display = "none";
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.
This is what happens when you let the intern make the ocean with no oversight. "Hey, the ocean is too curvy." 100x Earth -> "Better?"
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 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.
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.
I can't decide.
Or the Crysis 2 ocean designed to slow down and GPUs at the time because they did not overdo tesselation. Good old nvidia and crytek.
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?
Here's an easter egg in GTA that almost no-one has seen. I can't reveal its meaning. There were sacrifices :p
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
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.
Cmon, give us a hint!
The first T is "The"
That's very clever...
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.
Can't watch the video right now. Is it Sonic 3D Blast (always loved this game) or some different, newer title? Time for another replay!
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.
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.
Like another poster said: brilliant.
Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
Wow That whole yt channel is amazing, this is like crack for HN users
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00LITqBDEg
Also Fallout 3's train mechanics, which were implemented as a piece of wearable armour:
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout...
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.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...
Just for nostalgia, I'd like to shake the hands of the programmer/team who added the code allowing cheatcodes.
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.
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.
Fun days!
How would you figure out which memory location stored a given thing, e.g. # of lives?
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.
Indeed. I wrote an article a while back showing this in action with a Gamecube game running in an emulator: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...
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.
AFAIK Cheat Engine[1] is the standard approach. There are some cool tutorial videos on YouTube.
Hex editor with Ultima III I think we’d search for our character name and then start twiddling values until mom called us for dinner.
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).
The memory cheats is how Game Genie worked!
On the playstation you would load the GG as a disc and then pop it open and load another disc, it felt like absolute hacker magic.
That’s what game genie was for cartridges too. You plug the game into the game genie into the console
I forgot about that one! That was super nerdy and neat. Thanks!
That technique worked in Windows 95, too. I used to "cheat" on Diablo 1 using WinHex to max out my gold and modify some item stats.
Can't tell you how many games I've played like this:
- shoot. loot.
- fast travel, dump loot, fast travel return.
- shoot. loot.
...
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.
That’s rational and a fair critique. On the other hand, I can make the money number bigger. I’ll let you guess which wins out in my case.
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.
Also, games were often not really multiplayer in those days so there was no impact on other players.
These days multiplayer is always roped into it like with GTA V just so they can milk those sweet microtransactions.
idkfa
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.
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.
They should have left this one in:
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...
Seems like drawing the collision geometry would have been more efficient. Not as fun, though.
Id love to see that on someones resume.. "directed to fire bodies at various hillsides to detect collision holes"
You're lucky - it's the same man ;) https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-trouble...
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.
If you want to see what this looks like in action, you can see it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcd6jEEKQU
But why it's an ellipse? Surely that should be fixed first, rather than the size.
It was round in 4:3. The game doesn't adapt that well to being played in 16:9
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.
It stretched the textures, but not the models. The models were the correct aspect ratio even in widescreen.
It seems that the scope is almost round in the video. It's slightly wider than it should be.
This particular video has been stretched, annoyingly.
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.
Widescreen support in ps2-era gta leaves things to be desired.
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...
SA on the PC and SA on the PS2 are very different beasts
The widescreen setting in the menu adjusts 3d rendering (and not even in the best way imaginable), a lot of other things are unaffected by it.
The video is in the wrong aspect ratio.
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.
this is hilarious!
A complete tangent, but I am reminded of a young man's wistful philosophical musing many summers ago in Iraq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIhQllAP5uY
No code lives longer than something that is a temporary fix.
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.
It was highly amusing to read.
Working on Mafia 3 there were comments to the effect of “Fix after Gamescon”…from Mafia 2.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
-Old Russian Proverb
“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” – Milton Friedman
Though it seems he wasn't the first to use the phrase: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50691/did-milto...
Relevant poem from The Codeless Code:
http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234?lang=nl
Even references the moon!
That's true of more than just software
An SRE in a company I worked used to say that naming something temporary ___ is the best way to ensure that no one touches that code.
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.
This site has like no sense of humor...
Yes. Deliberately. While not explicitly against the guidelines, jokes are generally considered to not contribute to the conversation.
Jokes are the conversation. The rest is just noise.
just because you see a joke you don't like doesn't mean the whole site has no sense of humor
I, for one, thought the entire weekend drama was hilarious
Man you beat me too it. I was just wondering the same thing. It's one of those things in science that it's better not to test and find out.
What is "SA" as referred to in the conclusion?
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.
Not only was it left in the code, it was even changed to allow multiple size levels. gta 3 only has a toggle, two sizes.
San Andreas, as in GTA: San Andreas
San Andreas
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.
Nitpick: poring
:)
Can't he just have shown screenshots of different sizes of moon lmao.
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
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.
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.
This is the moon version of the folklore Jobs build a calculator app.
I thought of the same thing!
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Const...
Except executed successfully?
I wasn't expecting this explanation. I always thought it was just a silly "shoot the moon" gag.
Yep, it was the first thing I read today that gave me a genuine chuckle.
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.
I didn't know Vermeij was posting these, thanks for sending this link. All posts seem recent
Yep, he started just under two weeks ago! https://twitter.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1723424031808839801
I think the answer is:
if(time() > 10_years_in_future)
duck.enable();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"
Lol I always thought this was a deliberate Easter egg
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 ;)
Good to know! It never occurred to me. When I get back to San Andreas tonight I'll have to try that.
I suggested to make the size of the moon changeable in the game. This way they could decide in their own time and let me know the conclusion.
Like the Calculator Construction Set on the original Mac: <https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...>
Kludge = easter egg
Good old memories of GTA, but I always expected to be blinded by the moon and the sun when I zoomed in with binoculars or a sniper.
this is just hilarious and not at all what I expected
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.
Having the artists tweak it via sniping is hilarious
Usually you would do that by just adding a console variable they can tweak
Excellent. Possibly also counts as malicious compliance.
A blog isn't enough for this kinda stuff, I've love to read the book on the entire early days of what became Rockstar North.
This is the quality content i come to HN for. Less gossipp about openai please.
I adore the fact that it was left in for three games because "well they never got back to me".
Another one worth sharing: treasure fox in TES: https://kotaku.com/yes-skyrims-foxes-do-lead-you-to-treasure...
I love little game dev anecdotes such as these. Interesting relics of the development process.
One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA