15 Video Game Mysteries Answered Years Later

Video games are a treasure trove of secrets and mysteries just waiting to be discovered. With the advance of technology and social media, its pretty common for players to share secrets they've found tucked away in their favourite games with the wider community. This then triggers plenty of speculation and discourse, often widening a game's lore and sending players down rabbit holes that can sometimes be surprisingly deep.

So deep, in fact, that some of these puzzling quirks don't actually get solved until years later, if at all. For the 15 entries on this list, it took years for players to finally figure out the meaning behind these mysteries....

Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie remain some of the greatest 3D platformers ever made. Dense with secrets from start to finish, the original game sees you exploring a witch's castle hunting for Banjo's kidnapped sister. It's not an easy game to complete, and it's even tougher to 100% with the amount of collectibles on offer. 

For those that did 100% it, they were shown a mysterious sequence involving two coloured eggs and an ice key hidden away in the game's numerous worlds in unreachable areas. This led players to ask an obvious question: how the heck were they supposed to collect these items? It turns out that there were a total of six coloured eggs and the ice key hidden away, with hackers eventually discovering codes that allowed players to access them.

Eventually, years later, one of Rare's developers Paul Machacek explained they had designed 'Stop N Swop' as a way for N64 games to communicate with each other. The idea was that players would swap cartridges while their N64 was still running (likely after collecting those items), quickly swapping it for the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, fast enough that information would be retained and used between the two games. Unfortunately, this was far more ambitious than the technology would allow, so it became an urban myth until years of investigation and Rare's later comments during interviews revealed the true plans.