10 More Video Game Easter Eggs Nobody Understands
There's always time for toast, apparently.
You won't find a gamer who doesn't love stumbling across an Easter egg. The nature of video games as a free-flowing, exploratory art form gives developers the ability to hide clever references and sneaky surprises for only the luckiest and most dedicated to discover.
And then it goes without saying that said discoveries will make their way online in record time.
The overwhelming majority of video game Easter eggs are either silly jokes, wink-wink references, or intriguing expansions of the franchise lore, but sometimes they're made with one major goal in mind: confuse the hell out of everyone who finds them.
That's absolutely true of these 10 video game Easter eggs, each of which mustered bemusement and perhaps a little fear in players over what fresh strangeness they'd just uncovered.
Some are brand new, while others have been taunting fans for literally decades at this point, but all of them remain crucially unexplained by those who actually made the game.
And so, we as fans are left to speculate on what exactly inspired them to hide these deeply weird, unnervingly surreal, and straight-up cuckoo bananas secrets within their art...
10. The Hidden Marine - Halo: Combat Evolved
The Halo franchise is no stranger to oddball, head-scratching Easter eggs, and the original game features a peculiar secret that continues to baffle over 20 years later.
At the start of the level "343 Guilty Spark," players can cause a glitch by throwing a plasma grenade while onboard the Pelican. Doing so will allow you to stay on the ship as it flies off, eventually resulting in you being dropped from the Pelican outside of the level's bounds.
Wander around in the foggy abyss for a while and you'll eventually find a solitary Marine, modelled after infantryman Private Mendoza, standing eerily still. If so inclined, you're free to shoot and kill him, perhaps in an attempt to free him from this ominous prison.
In 2011's Anniversary remake, the Easter egg remains due to the remake being built upon the original game's foundations, except this time the Marine is hilariously positioned behind a tree, making him a little trickier to spot.
It's been theorised that Bungie may have wanted to load Mendoza's character model at the start of the level before he appears later on, and the out-of-bounds area of the map was a safe way to do so while concealing his presence from players.
But of course, players will always find a way to get behind the curtain and see how the sausage is made.