10 MORE Video Game Secrets That Took YEARS To Find
9. 100% Completion - Doom II
id Software's early first-person shooters are a favourite of speedrunners and completionists, but it wasn't until 2018 that a legitimate 100% run of their 1994 title Doom II was finally achieved.
On Map 15 (Industrial Zone), Secret No. 4 appeared to be deliberately impossible to access without cheats for a whole 24 years. This is credible, considering the original devs' love for hiding entertaining secrets within their titles only accessible through various console cheats.
However, speedrunner Zero Master finally discovered the secret's... secret, posting it to YouTube and even prompting a congratulatory tweet from John Romero, the auteur behind the influential early iD titles.
The secret itself was a hidden teleporter, but it would not be revealed by the player touching it themselves. Instead, they had to be pushed into the secret's space by an enemy - most likely a Pain Elemental. This would trick the game into shifting the player's height to the correct level as the secret was contained on a section of floor too narrow for the player to touch.
Romero's tweet did indeed confirm that this esoteric method was indeed the intended way to reveal the final secret - a classic move from the legendary developer.