10 MORE Video Game Secrets That Took YEARS To Find

2. Hangar 96 - Marathon Infinity

Final fantasy 9 zidane
Bungie

Before Destiny, before Halo and even before Oni, mammoth developer Bungie released a trio of sci-fi shooters (well aware of their their comfort zone from the start) called The Marathon Trilogy.

Set aboard the gigantic starship Marathon, the player was to defend the station from a race of alien slavers. The later games fleshed out this world, taking the player to imaginative new planets and locales.

The 3rd game in the series, Marathon Infinity, had 3 "dream" levels, accessed if the player made certain choices within the main game. Throughout these levels were terminals that referenced the mysterious "Hangar 96" and the horrors that went on inside, and other terminals containing cryptic hexidecimal terms.

For many years this went largely unacknowledged, until some players decided to extract the hex terms, combine them into a readable code and then reintroduce them to the game's files.

This admittedly bonkers action then unlocked Hangar 96 itself as a multiplayer map, fully functional and playable (without all the hideous floating body parts). It's an incredibly impressive way to hide secret content and shows an inspiring level of faith in players that they might even think to attempt this.

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Contributor

Neo-noir enjoyer, lover of the 1990s Lucasarts adventure games and detractor of just about everything else. An insufferable, over-opinionated pillock.