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NES classic ‘Punch-Out’ has an Easter egg that went undiscovered for 29 years
- ant6n 11y agoIf anybody remembers "PlayFun" by Tom7 (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/), which learns playing NES games by locally trying to optimize a bunch of objective functions based on lexicographical ordering of the bytes of the NES Ram. That system probably would've found the easter egg, because it can look into the future to find the best moves. Tom7 did try Punch-Out, but his AI-player lost the game before reaching the bosses mentioned in the easter egg: https://youtu.be/YGJHR9Ovszs?t=4m39s https://youtu.be/YGJHR9Ovszs?t=4m39s
- rorosaurus 11y agoIf I remember correctly, my favorite part of his program was how it couldn't figure out how to remove rows in Tetris, so it simply paused the game right before GAME OVER to maximize its score over time. :D
- mikeash 11y agoThe easter egg isn't the fact that there's a moment when you can knock out your opponent with one hit, that was already known. The easter egg is the small visual cue in the background that indicates when to punch. I assume that this program would learn when to punch, but if it's running the simulation forward to figure it out then it would just be doing it because it works, not because of a visual cue.
- gburt 11y agoI think this is just a coincidence. There's probably co-incident timings that cause his duck motion to happen at the same time as the punch.
- throwanem 11y agoIt happens at the same time you need to throw a punch in order to land it on the boss, not at the same time the boss is about to throw a punch. It's not periodic, so the idea that the displayed behavior is mere coincidence is implausible at best.
- Zikes 11y agoI think what gburt is trying to say is that the timings for the head-bob and the boss's vulnerability are probably driven by the same RNG results, and thus are coincidental rather than intentional. This doesn't imply that they don't always align 100%, only that the developers may not have put purposeful thought into their coincidental timings.
- talmand 11y agoBut these are super punches by the boss that may knock the player out in one hit, so it isn't a common punch for the boss to use. If I remember correctly, the timing and number of times the super punch is used is loosely based on how well you are doing. I remember feeling that if you are winning handily the super punches come out sooner and more often. I would suppose an easy test is to go the full round without attacking the boss and see if that spectator does the head nod at any point other than during the super punch.
- scott_s 11y agoThat would not disprove what Zikes is proposing. Zikes (and gburt, and myself) are saying that it's possible the two actions are coincidentally linked. We are not arguing they are not linked, just that the fact they are linked does not necessarily mean they were intentionally linked by the developer. We all agree on the events in the game, we're talking about intent. The only way to know would be to ask the developer.
- geoelectric 11y agoThis doesn't take all that much speculation. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/decades-later-a-new-mike-tysons-punch-out-easter-egg-has-been-found/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/decades-later-a-new-mi... The developers are quoted halfway down the page as having included the timing cues for opponents intentionally. We (the gaming community) have known this since 2009 when that interview came out, so it's kind of amusing that people are making tech-based arguments trying to debunk a cultural fact they aren't familiar with. It could have been an unintentional artifact of the PRNG, sure, but it isn't. At the very least it was intentionally not removed. If nothing else, those cues probably helped QA quite a bit.
- kbenson 11y agoFrom the original reddit post, highest comment and highest reply: >> Isn't one of the timing cues a camera flash? I forget for which boxer. > Yup! a camera flash is for the first time you fight Bald Bull. The developer leaked that easter egg and said there was more, that's when I noticed this one. Apparently there's a pattern of there being visual cues put in by the developers.
- scrollaway 11y agoOriginal video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR37cPR_1_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR37cPR_1_4 Original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4dybvk/i_think_i_discovered_a_new_easter_egg_in_mike/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4dybvk/i_think_i_di... It indeed looks deliberate.
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- mattdotc 11y agoThat's a reasonable reaction, but take a look here http://nintendoeverything.com/punch-out-has-a-22-year-old-secret/ http://nintendoeverything.com/punch-out-has-a-22-year-old-se... The subject of the interview suggests that there are lots of yet-undiscovered Easter eggs in the game.
- Avshalom 11y agoMore likely than coincidence it was put in by the devs so they would have an easier time winning fights and play testing later ones.
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- HemanHeartYou 11y agoWait, no on else knew about this?
- maerF0x0 11y agoWhy couldnt someone just reverse engineer the source code? It seems to me conditional jumps would be a good start and maybe work backwards from things that look like auto wins. I doubt the team had the budget or bytes to obfuscate the bytecode.
- andylei 11y agoyou'd have to know to look
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThe machine code may still be obfuscated, but not for the sake of obfuscation. Cartridge ROM space was tight, so you end up with lots of tricks (like overlapping graphics and code) in some NES games to save space. That's not to mention the scarcity of clock cycles and RAM.
- runevault 11y agoFor all we know the code isn't explicitly tied together, so you'd have to find two things going off (probably) the same condition, and they even then might be going off two different (yet related) conditions that are non-obvious just looking at the code. Just because the two things sync up doesn't mean the code makes that obvious.
- dave2000 11y agoI imagine the average game - in assembly language - has several conditional jumps.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago> Why couldnt someone just reverse engineer the source code? You make it sound like something one could do in a spare 15 minutes.
- calsy 11y agoWhy haven't we landed a man on mars yet? I mean its just a rocket and a man, how easy.
- cha5m 11y ago
- ourmandave 11y agoIn the coin-op arcade Punch Out the opponents eyes flashed yellow just before they threw a punch (or started a sequence). That's also true in the last Wii version. I don't know if there are any tells for when to throw the knock-out blow.
- jmduke 11y agoThis reminds me of a couple years back, when an entire sidequest was discovered in Final Fantasy IX (thirteen years after the fact!): http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/28/obscure-final-fantasy-ix-sidequest-uncovered-and-detailed/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/28/obscure-final-fantasy-ix-...
- anonbanker 11y agoWhat's amazing about that is that they brought back the 8^2 curse of extinction. In 1993, Squaresoft used to send out ads to people on their mailing lists (I was one of those people). One of their little mailings included a comment about a curse in Final Fantasy II for the SNES: if you do an action 64 times, it will trigger a reboot of your game, and your save file will be lost. They never told what the action was, but they were admant on the number of times it needs to be done. t haven't found this info anywhere. If I'm the only one that knows it, it makes me sad. Hopefully, more find it.
- pc2g4d 11y agoSo the ducking head tell is supposed to be an Easter egg? Doesn't really fit the definition in my mind. Or am I misunderstanding? Hard to believe nobody noticed this in the last ~30 years.
- stormbrew 11y agoYeah, this definitely seems like a wrong use of the word easter egg to me, and I'm trying hard not to let it bother me.
- a_bonobo 11y agoWikipedia's definition: >An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in an interactive work such as a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen. The headbobbing, the camera flashing etc. are hidden hints/messages from the programmer to the player, so I'd say the term fits
- chrismcb 11y agoExcept it isn't hidden.
- duaneb 11y agoGames often provide cues. Subtle is different than hidden.
- stormbrew 11y agoEhhh.. What's meant by "message" in that quote is usually something more like an actual textual message from a developer, like "Stormbrew was here!", not a visual cue for the game itself. Easter eggs are meta, this is not. It's also something you have to seek out -- by going to a particular place and doing a particular thing. This is just something that happens in the game, and it happens without player triggering. The wikipedia page agrees with me on this, as far as I can tell, if you keep reading past the first sentence (which is a summary, and as with many wikipedia summaries, is incomplete and vague). This first paragraph from the software section seems rather more useful to quote: > In computer software, Easter eggs are secret responses that occur as a result of an undocumented set of commands. The results can vary from a simple printed message or image, to a page of programmer credits or a small videogame hidden inside an otherwise serious piece of software. Videogame cheat codes are a specific type of Easter egg, in which entering a secret command will unlock special powers or new levels for the player.
- justin_vanw 11y agoWell, 'undiscovered' means nobody can find a reference to it on google. My cousin noticed this around 1989, I very clearly remember him yelling at me when I did it wrong. He didn't bother to put a dated reference to it on the internet at the time...
- felix_thursday 11y agoHa! Strange that this is a new find. I got more than one "easter egg" like this simply by writing a letter to Nintendo America back in the day, and asking for help. They'd usually write you back with suggestions like this.
- freshyill 11y agoThe one time I ever called Nintendo was when I stumbled across the Chris Houlihan Room in Zelda for SNES—and they didn't know what I was talking about. I was half disappointed and half impressed to have stumped a Game Counselor. I wanted to know what the hell I had found! http://zeldawiki.org/Chris_Houlihan_Room http://zeldawiki.org/Chris_Houlihan_Room
- dandelany 11y agoHaha! Yeah, I'd bet money that this has been found by dozens, if not hundreds of people independently over the years. The entire trick to winning the game (as my ridiculously-talented ex-roommate once taught me) is to watch carefully for subtle timing cues and use them to punch at the correct moment - if you do it right, you can win very consistently. So people have been scouring the pixels for these kind of cues since the game first came out!
- lillesvin 11y agoYou can even do it [without sight](https://youtu.be/CvzIb53Lcno https://youtu.be/CvzIb53Lcno). And yeah, TAS'ers, speedrunners and others have been analyzing these games bit by bit (literally) for years. I'd be surprised if this hadn't been found before.
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- pkaler 11y agoThis is probably just a coincidence. NTSC runs at a framerate of about 30fps. PAL runs at 25fps. I have not worked on an 8-bit console. But if I were to, I would probably run a simulation/AI tick every 6 frames. By coincidence, some background animation is going to coincide with some gameplay event.
- hackcasual 11y ago60fps and 50fps interlaced respectively. NES games ran at 60fps. There is some randomness to when Honda's window opens and the background animation always happens in sync
- jeff_tyrrill 11y agoNES games ran at 60fps progressive (240p). This is a mode in which the CRT does not alter the scanline position each field.
- zerohm 11y agoI completely disagree. 1. Visual cues are littered throughout the entire game. Sometimes it'a camera flash, sometimes it's the opponent blinking, to give you a warning. 2. The game play design is pretty consistent. Each fight gets progressively more difficult, but there is almost always a critical weakness of each opponent. Exploiting (or even finding) the critical weakness gets harder and harder as you progress. The most obvious example of this design was King Hippo. Using traditional fighting style made it seem like he was impossible to beat. The only way to beat him was to stun him and punch him in the stomach. If you punched left, right, left, right, repeatedly, you could knock him out in one stun cycle. Learning this as a 10 year kid was great fun and made you feel like a genius/gaming god.
- rcthompson 11y agoSo it's just a quick-time event with intentionally the worst UI ever.
- pg_is_a_butt 11y agoan easter egg is something you have to find by taking action to find it... this is NOT an easter egg, morons. this is GIVEN to you. this is easter ham. idiots. all of you.
- EA 11y agoThere's a baseball legend that a MLB team used to light up a certain light bulb on a sign/scoreboard in their stadium to tip off the pitch their batter was about to face.
- gdubs 11y agoPunch-Out was really well designed. It was also incredibly hard. I finally beat it in college, and I still feel proud of that accomplishment.
- siculars 11y agoWho's read "Ready Player One"? Cause that's all I'm seeing here. Also, can't wait for the movie!
- agentgt 11y agoGreat nostalgia! Sort of reminds me of the incessant photo flashes during the fight with Mike Tyson when he is about to punch you (speaking of which I never got to fight white Mike, I only beat the original). If I recall correctly there are a ton of visual cues in punch-out. I found Punch-Out and Contra to both be eventually easy games. There is very little randomness and luckily the controls are very good. I remember taking a bet in college of beating contra (w/o thirty lives) after not playing. Replaying was like riding a bike. Compare this to the ridiculous difficulty of broken games like Top Gun or the worse game every made AD&D for NES (seriously check out how f@#$ awful that game is).
- zerohm 11y agoI'm pretty sure I heard the phrase, "there's no way you can beat Contra without the cheat code" in college as well.
- NittLion78 11y agoI knew that was garbage when I would use the cheat and would routinely finish the game with more than 30 lives. After I realized that, I just stopped using it.
- agentgt 11y agoYeah once you get the Spray Gun or whatever the S gun is called you are pretty much golden. Really the challenge is playing at the same time with some one else.