4 Strange, Hard To Find Easter Eggs In Classic Video Games
We've talked about well-hidden secrets in video games that took forever to find and left nothing but frustration in their wake. But, sometimes, instead of causing you to bang your head against the wall, game secrets are so odd they force you to wonder about what other crap have developers kept locked away inside Pandora's Xbox ...
Horizon Zero Dawn's Pervy-Ass Fossil
Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape where dinosaurs came back in the form of hyper-advanced robots that destroyed civilization and forced nuanced storytelling to go extinct in their place. Like all open-world games, it provides you with a ton of sights to see during your explorations, including this:
The out of bounds player discovery can't be the result of a misplaced game asset, as the highly detailed and seemingly fossilized humanoid isn't seen anywhere else in the game. The ashy look and frozen in time stance made people wonder if it was a historical reference to the victims of Pompeii's volcano?
More precisely, a reference to this victim.
Hell yeah, that's Pompeii's masturbation man! He became an Internet sensation for seemingly deciding that if Death was coming for him, then he was cumming for Death first. Although experts now say he was not masturbating at the time of his fiery demise, the Internet cites just "really wanting him to have been" as a source, so we may never know the truth.
While the developers haven't confirmed that it's a reference to Pompeii's second to last hot eruption, the damning presence of a box of tissues ...
... combined with how quickly developers removed it from the game upon discovery, pretty much prevents even experts from denying it's referencing at least some masturbator.
It Took Players 24 Years To Find DOOM 2's Final Secret: Peace
The advent of in-game achievements inspired gamers to complete all the menial tasks in a game to win e-medals that fooled them into thinking all the hours spent playing instead of pulling a Pompeii hadn't been wasted. While developers nowadays make games that any player can beat to 100% completion provided they're patient enough, that hasn't always been the case.
Doom 2 was meant to be the exact opposite of that. Its last secret wasn't supposed to be hard to find; it was supposed to be impossible to find. John Romero, Doom 2's Level designer extraordinaire and coiner of the expression "John Romero is about to make you his bitch", stated that he made it so that only people who resorted to cheats could get to it, and it worked for over 24 goddamn years. But a player named Zero Master found a way to do it without dooming himself to a life of hax. He did it by patiently waiting for a demon to gently push him through a door and into the secret area -- yes, he beat DOOM through pacifism.
(Starting at 3:00)
Though, in hindsight, we totally get how this took so long to figure out for Doom players.
Impressed with someone figuring out how to unlock Gandhi-mode, John Romero tweeted out to congratulate Zero Master on the massive achievement and, in the process, made our hearts his bitch.
P.T. Sever Revealed Its Scariest Secret
In an interview about the making of Silent Hills, director Hideo Kojima said he wasn't making a game that'd make players pee themselves (that's Death Stranding); he was making a game that'd make players shit themselves. Though Silent Hills ended up canceled, P.T., its demo, lives up to the hype so effortlessly that its developers didn't even need to reveal its spookiest secret.
Shortly after the game starts, players will pick up a flashlight, and that's when things start to get really creepy.
This is when players start to get haunted by "just the wind," and by that, we mean Lisa, a ghost that'll randomly pop up to say "Hi!" and kill their asses.
It was only nearly five years after P.T.'s release that hacker Lance Mcdonald probably gave himself the biggest scare in gaming history. Lance managed to unlock the game's camera and found out that Lisa latches herself to the players' backs as soon as they pick up the lantern. And never lets you go, always watching, always ...
... following players wherever they go without them noticing.
Wait! Please don't close your browser just yet; this has nothing to do with the reality show. It's just as bad, though. The Apprentice is an old game for the now-defunct and never-really-alive Phillips CD-i.
It looks like a kid's game and was sold as one, despite featuring spoofs of Mortal Kombat's "fatalities" and "animalities" and an incredibly weird secret where seemingly young girls show up naked and in sexually explicit poses without any sort of censorship.
The sad, depressing "nudality" was so hard to find -- or players cared so little about the game -- that one of the game's own developers waited for a decade to come out of the woodwork to reveal it to an unsuspecting world ... that absolutely did not give a shit.
Even sadder, sprite animation, like the style used in the game, is different from 3d animation in the sense that you have to draw each frame you want to present. This makes it all the more awkward to find out that there was actually a lot of hard work put into various pervy poses to make an audience that can see Geralt in The Witcher raw dog everything that moves with minimal effort collectively shrug.
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Top image: id Software, Konami
