10 Video Game Secrets You Weren't Supposed To Find
1. A Picture Of Someone's Ass (Halo 2)
Out of all the video game secrets on this list, this is probably the most costly, and certainly the most bizarre. And just to get this out of the way upfront... it's a picture of someone's butt, hidden deep within Halo 2.
This strange story starts during the development of the game. Steve Ballmer - the CEO of Microsoft at the time - stopped by Bungie for a quick visit, only for Lead Engineer Charlie Gough to moon him as a joke. Someone took a picture of the incident, and the photo began circulating at Bungie. But how did it end up inside Halo 2?
Well, one of the file formats that Bungie staff encountered while building the game was .ASS, and any error messages that popped up while working with these files became known as .ASS errors. Before long, someone attached the butt picture to this error, and it stayed like that all the way through the development and shipping of the game.
Nobody at Bungie expected people to find the image, because it was buried deep within the game, attached to a rare error message. But of course, someone did. When this happened, Halo 2 was recalled, its ESRB rating information was updated to reflect the nudity, and the game was delayed, all at great expense to Microsoft - it's speculated that it cost them around $500,000.
So the next time you go digging around in a game and you find a picture of someone's bare cheeks, just take it straight to the publisher - they'll probably pay you a lot of money to keep it quiet.