7 Secrets Hidden In Video Game Demos
A free game? Don't mind if I do.
If there's one thing that gamers love more than beating a particularly tricky boss, or coming out on top of a tense firefight, it's uncovering a juicy secret or hidden area.
Whether intended by the devs or not, these golden nuggets that lift the curtain are treasured by fans who feel like they've got a peek inside their favourite titles and are sometimes rewarded for doing so!
Yet let's dial things back a bit, and take a look at some games before they were fully formed and what secrets they might be hiding. Demo discs were commonplace back in the day, and downloadable sections in the modern era still act as a marketing tool for upcoming titles.
Yet as you might expect from games that are often still in development at the time, there's a tonne of content hiding just beneath the surface that either won't make it into the final release or even sheds light on events we will experience on release day.
So let's take a look at times where video game demos hid extra content, personalised messages, and even full standalone titles!
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7. Play Wipeout! - Official PlayStation Magazine, Issue 1
It might not look like it today, but when gamers the world over laid eyes on the original WipeOut game, it felt like you were looking into the future itself. It was incredibly slick looking and the speed with which the racers moved seemed faster than light.
Obviously, by today's standards, it's pretty tame, but you have to remember the tech limitations at the time! In fact most players couldn't wait to get their hands on Wipeout as soon as it was unveiled in the Official Playstation Magazines first issue and so slammed the accompanying demo disc into their machine to jump into the cockpit only to be met with disappointment.
You see the demo included here was labelled as a "rolling tech demo" which would play out a race which the player could watch but not take part in. It was still pretty cool but a bit of a let down all things considered. However, for those paying attention to the magazine itself, it turns out that you could actually take control of the vehicles if you performed a cheeky bit of disc swapping!
A tiny article in the magazine stated that all you had to do was load up the demo, switch out the disc for Demo 1 - which came bundled with all PS1's at the time - and boom, you could play through the race months before any such playable experience would become available.