8 ms·

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: h

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA

marcusverus 3y ago
Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
nocoiner 3y ago
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.
dmix 3y ago
Wow That whole yt channel is amazing, this is like crack for HN users
qingcharles 3y ago
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/cyethcv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
- 9dev 3y ago
  Cmon, give us a hint!
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    The first T is "The"
- exikyut 3y ago
  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?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    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.
looping8 3y ago
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.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  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.
- cipheredStones 3y ago
  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-discussed-this-with-several-friends-of-mine https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Well that was a fun read until it forces you to log in :(
    - traverseda 3y ago
      https://archive.is/rGPKj https://archive.is/rGPKj
    - exikyut 3y ago
      Oh no I logged in
    - atribecalledqst 3y ago
      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.
beebeepka 3y ago
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!
- CodesInChaos 3y ago
  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.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
That's very clever...
- mrweasel 3y ago
  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.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    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.
mr_sturd 3y ago
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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  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/ https://waste.money/
  - sdflhasjd 3y ago
    > 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.
    - whizzter 3y ago
      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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame) (2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-gets-younger-senate-gets-older-a-look-at-the-age-and-generation-of-lawmakers-in-the-118th-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... (3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...
CM30 3y ago
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 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-3s-metro-train/ 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-ascend-ability-exists-because-cheating-is-fun/1100-6514110/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...

marcusverus 3y ago

Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

nocoiner 3y ago

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.

dmix 3y ago

Wow That whole yt channel is amazing, this is like crack for HN users

qingcharles 3y ago

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/cyethcv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...

9dev 3y ago
Cmon, give us a hint!
- qingcharles 3y ago
  The first T is "The"
exikyut 3y ago
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?
- qingcharles 3y ago
  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.

looping8 3y ago

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.

beebeepka 3y ago
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.
cipheredStones 3y ago
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-discussed-this-with-several-friends-of-mine https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...
- Dah00n 3y ago
  Well that was a fun read until it forces you to log in :(
  - traverseda 3y ago
    https://archive.is/rGPKj https://archive.is/rGPKj
  - exikyut 3y ago
    Oh no I logged in
  - atribecalledqst 3y ago
    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.

beebeepka 3y ago

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!

CodesInChaos 3y ago
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.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

That's very clever...

mrweasel 3y ago
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.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  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.

mr_sturd 3y ago

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.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
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/ https://waste.money/
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  > 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.
  - whizzter 3y ago
    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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame) (2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-gets-younger-senate-gets-older-a-look-at-the-age-and-generation-of-lawmakers-in-the-118th-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... (3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...

CM30 3y ago

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 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-3s-metro-train/ 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-ascend-ability-exists-because-cheating-is-fun/1100-6514110/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...