6 Gaming Secrets That Took Forever To Discover

6 Synnergist's Final Secret Took 25 Years To Be Found

Synnergist is the first game from Vicarious Visions, the company responsible not only for finally breaking the recent curse of terrible Tony Hawk games, but doing it in 2020, of all times. Not much separates Synnergist from other point and click adventures of its time. At least, aside from the fact that one of the creators explicitly said that the game's biggest secret, one so big it'd solve all of the game's questions, was still out there.

Since 2014, a few users from the RPG Codex community had gone full-on Robert Stack in trying to solve the mystery.

All it took them was analyzing the game's animations to an almost frame-by-frame degree, reverse engineering the gameplay, randomly clicking a photo frame seven times, and six years of their time (so 25 years total after the game's original release), and the secret was revealed and, as was promised, so was everything else.

When players perform every single ridiculous step correctly, a digitized version Karthik Bala, the game's director, comes out of a drawer and tells players all the details one could possibly know about the game's story and themes.

Bala finishes off by saying he has one Synnergist special design manual to gift to anyone who proves he's cracked the code. They just have to send proof to his email address. The name of Bala's domain back in '96, you ask? @TheMatrix.com.

5 Someone Found An Over A Decade-Long Gestation Period For A Beautiful Doom 2 Baby Demon

Meet the Icon of Sin, the super-demon responsible for hell-spawning the hell-spawns players go up against in Doom games.

The Icon of Sin is Doom 2's final boss. Its masterplan is literally giving birth to demons that'll hopefully prevent the main character from shooting it in its comically overexposed brains. It's a very hard boss, but just like we use large stockpiles of beer to overcome real-world brains, we can use large stockpiles of bullets to overcome digital ones.

If you think Sin's strategy isn't flawed enough already, YouTuber decino found out that, due to some very odd coding, one of the Sin's babies has a gestation period of nearly 11.6 years. So about 11.6 years way too late for anything other than a B-grade revenge-themed sequel.

4 NieR: Automata's Hidden Cheat Let's You Skip Almost All Of NieR: Automata

NieR: Autotmata is a title from 2017 whose greatness can only be compared to its bonkersness. Automata as a phenomenon is so ridiculous that players went to great lengths to discover that it features 26 different endings (many of which just complete troll fuel), and the only thing they got from it was director Yoko Taro teasing them for still having more crazy crap to uncover.

In January of 2021, however, video game hacker Lance Mcdonald found out a way to skip the entire game as soon as you beat the first boss -- and not as a glitch.

Lance's method is totally intended as an official cheat, albeit a secret one. Please don't let the credibility of this powerful feature be tainted by how it's hidden away inside some random-ass barrels. Upon revealing his discovery on Twitter, Mcdonald got a reply from Yoko Taro congratulating him for finding the last secret.

Taro concluded with the strange smiley face you can see in that tweet, one which laymen could see as the start of another mystery, but we know that's just Taro's actual face.

3 Players Find Paper Mario's Secret Area 16 Years After Release, Game Isn't Happy

Games usually reward players for uncovering their secrets. When they don't, it's usually because they weren't really secrets, but unfinished blocks of game drifting in the void, not meant to be found. But even when players accidentally stumble upon forbidden knowledge not meant to be unearthed, most games don't really lash out at players as if they'd just opened the Ark of the Wariovenant. 

But Paper Mario isn't most games. Poor Stryder7x thought he'd found something never before seen in the game's 16 year-long history when in reality, he was entering a cursed zone.

On top of a completely glitched out area, he found new lines of dialogue that sound less for a game staring an Italian NYC plumber and more for an Italian NYC mobster. Like when it tells you that it'd be a shame if this message should happen to interrupt your game ...

Or when some NPCs recommended the player to "get in contact" with someone to help "fix" their problems ...

Interpreting that as a message left by the developers and not a trap set-up by lesser-known characters Sopranio and Don Corluigi, player Stryder7x reached out to Nintendo and is currently hoping the reply arrives sans horsehead.

2 A Modder Found out Zelda Breath of the Wild's Characters Are Part Of The Wii Avatar Race

For the few of you who don't happen to be experts in the field of genetics, the Miis are a type of innocent creature Nintendo creates and modifies on-demand to serve as the avatars for owners of Nintendo systems.

While the Miis are quite popular, it still came as a bit of a shock when modder Alice found out Nintendo was also breeding them to create NPCs in huge hits like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While the NPCs don't look exactly like the Miis do, there's a degree of compatibility between the two, meaning you can export the old ones to the new game.

To varying but always acceptable degrees of success

Alice says the NPCs from BOTW are an advanced form of the original Miis. This either confirms the existence of the Nintendo Gaming Universe or Ninteugenics -- whichever sounds more marketable.

1 Luigi Finally Found In Mario 64

Mario 64 is one of the most beloved games of all time because it has everything players like in a Mario game: great platforming, revolutionary camera, inventive level design, and the absence of Luigi.

The truth is that Luigi is so sorely missed that his strange absence has had players speculating on him being hidden somewhere inside the game for over 25 years now. Back in July of 2020, following a "gigaleak" of Nintendo data, fans finally managed to find Luigi inside a beta version of the game and put him back together. He looks just like you remember him.

Actually, that's not the real thing. Sorry, we figured out you could stand to wait a little while longer. Behold, the real Luigi Mario 64

This world-shattering event naturally sent longtime fans into a frenzy ...

... but it went mostly unnoticed by the masses, as the news came out at a time in our history so weird that even the Pentagon's confirmation that UFOs are totally real got overshadowed by whatever dumb apocalypse we were dealing with that week.

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Top image: Nintendo