6 Video Game Easter Eggs Developers Didn't Want You to Find
Gamers love searching for Easter eggs, developers love hiding them, and both are nurturing an epic vitamin d deficiency. Hidden gems that range from ghost stories to dick islands can be locked away from prying eyes during the development process, and we've made it our mission to tell you about them. That way, if you ever play these games, you can skip past all that lame 'questing to save the world' crap and get straight to the secret swearing, gore, and pixel sex.
SiN Lets You Watch the Villain Masturbate
The advent of 3-D graphics led to an explosion of block-breasted sex objects that took over the gaming scene despite looking partway between mud flap silhouettes and a shovel, and 1998's SiN was no exception. Say hello to the game's poorly spelled and even more poorly proportioned antagonist, Elexis Sinclaire.
Who'll live on in Rule 34 after all games are forgotten.
Elexis is a sensual, over-the-top dominatrix with the personality of two balloons stuck on a broom. She spends half the game trying to destroy the world and the other half tricking you with her vagina. Despite several teases, the game has no nudity, but the developers weren't the sort of people to let a virtual sex doll go to waste.
One level takes you through Elexis' compound, where you can find a hidden security camera feed of her lounging in a hot tub. You get to watch the back of her head as she gyrates around and an audio clip of a moaning woman that was probably ripped from a porno. The scene only lasts a few seconds, but how weird is it that the developers thought gamers would love to watch the character who's been trying to kill them and take over the world jill off? It would be like rewarding dedicated Mario fans with a glimpse of Bowser's throbbing boner.
"Sorry, but our dignity is in another castle!"
Dedicated horndogs can activate "no-clip" mode, which allows you to move through walls. This lets you access the hot tub, which is normally cut off from the rest of the level. Using your newfound ghost pervert skills, you can see the animation that the previous camera shot obscured in its full Sears catalog-caliber eroticism.
It's worth noting that SiN was rushed into stores with flaws and game-breaking bugs. But the developers had their priorities straight! Rather than make their game playable, they spent their time adding a secret, poorly animated scene of a woman masturbating. Because they knew that watching some blocky, awkward hands rubbing over oblong genitals while their partner stares straight ahead -- their face a mask of frozen, unblinking apathy -- would help prepare a generation of gamers for the real sex they would eventually experience.
Unlike the 8,000 layers of copy protection that modern games use to lock you out of the actual game you just bought, you could look at everything that was on an original PlayStation CD simply by sticking it in your computer. That's obviously the first thing you'd do when handed a copy of Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour because otherwise what are you going to do? Play it? You know it's a game about golf, right?
That's only 50 percent more fun than actual golf.
Besides, if you skipped the "game" and went straight to browsing the file directory, you'd discover something far more entertaining. See, most old CD games had large dummy files designed to fill any leftover disc space, but someone working on 99 PGA Tour either didn't know how to make one or just flat out didn't care. They figured they had exactly enough space fit the five-minute South Park pilot "Jesus vs. Santa Claus" on there, so that's what they did.
They renamed it ZZDUMMY.DAT and chuckled all the way home, sure that their ruse would never be discovered -- after all, what late '90s video game player was nerdy enough to own both a PlayStation and a computer?
Obviously, it was quickly discovered. Now, if you've ever seen an episode of South Park, you know that the show's violent and profane tone doesn't exactly jive with the golf demographic. Understanding that children who had been gifted a golf game were suffering enough without having to watch Santa get the shit beat out of him, EA recalled 100,000 copies of the game. Reviews for the corrected version of the game presumably went down once critics realized that cartoons are way more fun than pretend golf.
While we've told you before about some of the awesome ideas that were cut from GoldenEye -- because we could seriously talk about GoldenEye all day -- we've yet to discuss the coolest cut feature of all: the fact that the game once contained not one Bond, but four. There was going to be a multiplayer mode called All Bonds, where four players could each play as a different Bond actor: Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Sean "I'm the only real Bond" Connery.
"Dibs on not-Moore!" "Dibs on not-Moore!" "Dibs on not-Moore!" "Dibs on not-Moo-FUCK!"
Word on the Internet is that you could even play as alternate Bonds in the game's bonus levels. It's not clear why the mode was cut, although we're guessing it was either due to legal issues or an elaborate plot by a bitter George Lazenby. Luckily, the other Bonds weren't removed, just made inaccessible. Some of the hidden content can still be accessed with a GameShark, and in 2004, fans made an awesome mod that finally allowed the lost Bonds to be properly played. Because we were the ones who brought this up to you, we officially now and forever call dibs on not-Moore.
Freddi Fish Will Murder Her Friends to Get Ahead
For those of you who killed time at school exclusively via Oregon Trail, Freddi Fish was a plucky young sea creature who hung out with her best friend Luther and solved simple puzzles in order to teach kids about math, English, and why no one plays adventure games anymore.
It dropped test scores by 10 points.
One of the puzzles in Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds involves a standoff with a hungry eel named Eddie. You have to give him a sandwich to get past him, but in a deleted scene, Freddi has a very different solution in mind. She offers up Luther to Eddie as a sacrifice, and the villain is all too happy to oblige. He eats Luther right in front of Freddi, complete with gross crunching sounds and gushing blood like something out of Watership Down. At the last moment it's revealed that Freddi's just daydreaming, and when Luther asks her what she's thinking about, she responds with a coy "nothing." But that doesn't unsee the blood, Freddi.
The scene can only be accessed by messing around in the game's files, but not only is it fully voiced, it's also acted out in all the foreign languages. This suggests that the idea got pretty far in development before someone realized that having one of the game's main characters get gruesomely devoured would probably net some complaints from kids playing the game (well, more likely from the parents -- children are pretty resilient; they mostly just quietly internalize those scars).
The working title was Freddi Fish and the Grim Lesson About Mortality and Betrayal.
After the credits wrap in Front Mission: Gun Hazard, there's a bonus cutscene. Because we can't read Japanese, we're going to assume it's a teaser for the next action-packed war game. It starts with the loud sound of helicopters, but if you listen closely you can hear some indecipherable dialogue underneath them. At first you assume it's just generic radio chatter, but then you're pretty sure you hear somebody drop the N-bomb.
Most gamers probably chalk that up to their overactive imaginations, but some fans accessed the game's debug menu and listened to the voice clip alone. It says:
"We're gonna burn your building down, you fuckheads. C18's watching you, you communist, ni**er-loving, Pa-."
The cut-off word is "Paki," possibly because the developers were trying to hit slur bingo.
Phew, good thing they cut that off. That could have got offensive.
It's a clip taken from a longer phone call made by a member of Combat 18, a British neo-Nazi group. Why the hell is that in the game? The fan subs we played with weren't great, but we're pretty sure the giant robots we piloted weren't a bunch of racist soccer hooligans.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Reveals How Horrifying Lightsabers Actually Are
The family friendly nature of most Star Wars video games means we rarely get to see the lightsaber used to its full potential. Every fight involving a laser sword should result in a dumpster full of cauterized limbs and a series of torsos that now know better than to fuck with a Jedi. But that's not what we get in the actual games -- we get a bunch of chumps falling down wholly intact, like we accidentally set our lightsaber to stun. On the surface, 2003's Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy was no exception. Then the fans set about righting that terrible wrong.
They didn't need to spend hours creating an elaborate mod -- they simply had to open up one of the game's files and change a couple of numbers around. That's because, much like how the force is inside all of us and if you concentrate hard enough that pen will totally fly over to you right now (try it, we know you're going to -- we'll wait), the ability to dismember your foes was inside the game all along. You just had to unlock its potential.
"Looks like I got a head in this fight! Man, and who says a Jedi isn't funny?"
We guess the absence of dismemberment in the final game is understandable. Not only would it have been rated M, but carving up your enemies like a bunch of jive turkeys is rather un-Jedi-like -- it's hard to look at a tower of screeching torsos and not wonder if you're actually the bad guy. But at least the developers kept the option buried in the code, allowing fans to finally live out their Sith fantasies.
Come on, the Sith have always been way cooler. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Scott E. Baird can be found praising Highlander 2 on Twitter here.
For more easter eggs, check out 5 Insane Video Game Easter Eggs You Weren't Supposed to Find and 7 Creepy Video Game Easter Eggs We Wish We Never Found.
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