10 Video Game Secrets Devs DIDN'T Want You To Find
Jedi Outcast's hidden lightsaber physics were incredible.
Who doesn't love a good Easter egg?
Ever since 1980, when programmer Warren Robinett left his name for players to discover in Atari's Adventure, game developers have delighted in leaving little secrets for players to find. Who can forget Hitman: Absolution's homicidal ice cream truck? Or the giant, beating heart at the centre of GTA IV's Statue of Happiness?
However, not all video game secrets were meant to be discovered.
There are a variety of reasons a game may include more than its developer intended. Sometimes code gets left behind because it would have taken too long to remove (like with San Andreas' infamous Hot Coffee, or Goldeneye's sadly cancelled All Bonds mode), so the programmers bury it and hope for the best. Other times, an unforeseen glitch flares up and catches the eye of the gaming public, as was the case with Pokemon's MissingNo.
And sometimes, it's just sheer stupidity and/or laziness on the part of the developers.
And on that note...
10. Random Number Generator - Raving Rabbids 2
The wonderful RockPaperShotgun recently posted on a twitter thread where game developers admitted their game design sins. The result was a list of shortcuts, bodges and hacks designed to make sure games shipped on time, and there were some doozies on the list.
Our favourite: Raving Rabbids 2's laziest minigame.
For those who don't know, RR 2 was a dull mishmash of minigames starring Ubisoft's eponymous lagomorphs. Poorly reviewed and swiftly forgotten, it's hard to feel sorry for its fate when you realize how slipshod its construction really was.
Developer Antoine Henry admitted that RR 2's infamous "Concentrate" minigame - which told players to hold the Wiimote up to their foreheads and concentrate to accumulate points - was entirely random. The devs were running out of time to fulfill the mandated minigame quota, and so cobbled together what was essentially a random number generator at the last minute.
Amazingly, they got away with it. Antoine said he was stunned to see guides for the minigame cropping up, as players convinced themselves that the slapdash minigame had hidden depths waiting to be plumbed.
It didn't.
As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, shovelware is just shovelware.