Welcome to the skeleton wars.
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00:00Whilst cheat codes in video games seem to be a thing of the past,
00:03over the years we've only seen a rise in easter eggs.
00:06From little nods and winks to hidden rooms and menus,
00:09sometimes discovering something tucked away in a game you love
00:12gives you another layer of appreciation for it.
00:15Some games that we all thought we knew have surprised us years or even decades later.
00:20With that in mind, these easter eggs are some particularly sneaky ones.
00:24I'm CypherWhatCulture.com and these are 10 secret video game easter eggs left by developers.
00:29Number 10. Psych the Hedgehog's Hidden Credits
00:32It's hard to imagine now, but not all that long ago,
00:35it wasn't unusual for video games to have limited to no credit.
00:38In fact, the term easter egg was birthed by developer Warren Robinette,
00:42bucking this trend to hide a room in the Atari 2600 game adventure
00:45that displayed his name against his boss's wishes.
00:48Many publishers wouldn't budge on the stance and those that did, such as Sega,
00:52had a habit of asking programmers to use nicknames and pseudonyms for their staff roles,
00:56rather than real names.
00:58With the looming release of Sonic the Hedgehog soon to be the crown of the Mega Drive,
01:02The Blue Blur's co-creator, Yuji Naka, was displeased with the idea
01:05that his team would go without the recognition he felt they deserved.
01:09In a fashion like Robinette before him,
01:11Naka went against his superiors and slipped a little something-something in as a gift to his co-workers.
01:16Thus, through a series of long-winded button inputs,
01:18Sonic players could boot up a secret staff role that contains the real names of the men
01:22who worked on this 16-bit classic.
01:25Story details on this are light, but it can be assumed that Sega found this easter egg pretty early on,
01:30as it's only possible in the first print version 0.0 of the Japanese version of the game.
01:36Later revisions and international releases saw the secret credits removed.
01:40Number 9, The Last of Us's TV easter egg.
01:43There are an infinite number of ways to hide things in games,
01:46through invisible walls, behind button combinations or simply in the code itself,
01:51but very few games ask players to reset at a very specific point in order to show them something neat.
01:56That's why this The Last of Us secret went unknown for seven years,
02:00before one lucky player found it by chance.
02:02During the prologue, the game will save as the player, controlling Joel's daughter Sarah,
02:07reaches the bottom of the stairs of the family home.
02:09If the player then quits the game before progressing the story and reloads,
02:13upon ascending the stairs and entering Joel's bedroom,
02:16a still image of a cordyceps-infected ant is seen on the TV instead of the normal static.
02:21It's a clear nod to the clicker enemies of the game,
02:24and the odd little easter egg was acknowledged by developer Kurt Maginow as his creation,
02:29who joked it was probably a bug, to be honest, in a tweet.
02:32Like many obscure secrets, it serves no purpose other than for a moment of,
02:36huh, neat.
02:37Now if people can figure out if there's an easter egg to make that prologue play to its completion
02:41without making my heart break, then we'd be in business.
02:44Number eight, Fallout 76's Skeleton War.
02:47Many of the best worlds in video games use documents, files and diaries scattered throughout the experience
02:52to offer the player more information and to invest them further into the universe.
02:56It's also a great place to insert humour if your game is so inclined,
02:59and the Fallout series is no stranger to documents both foul and fairly hilarious.
03:03Some developers can't help but sneak a few winks and nods in, however.
03:07It's one thing to pay homage to your favourite games, books, movies and so on,
03:11but one file in Fallout 76 did something unique and paid lip service to, of all things, a tweet.
03:16The file Skeleton Extraction Guide is a fairly macabre document that details proper procedure on how to prepare a skeleton for mounting,
03:24presumably on your wall like some kind of perverse trophy.
03:27However, the file ends with a hilarious line,
03:29Note, if your tombstone does not read Rest in Peace or some variant thereof,
03:34you are automatically drafted into the skeleton wars.
03:37Zach Wilson, who worked on Fallout 76, took ownership of this file,
03:41and used it to immortalise one of his favourite tweets from the very popular at drill account.
03:46As far as we're concerned, this is comedy and good advice.
03:49Number seven, World Championship Soccer 2's developer rant.
03:53Every now and then, frustrated programmers will find spiteful ways to lash out at their employers
03:58or the bad experiences they've had working on a project.
04:01There's plenty of stories of developers leaving messages in places that they thought would never be seen.
04:05One of these can be found in the code for the 1994 sports title World Championship Soccer 2.
04:10With FIFA International Soccer having released the prior year, competition in the sports game space was heating up,
04:16and one mystery programmer was definitely displeased with how WCS2 might stack up against it.
04:22He was so committed to this rant, in fact, that not only did he drop it into the game's code,
04:26but he also altered it, swapping letters here and there so that it would go by without being spotted,
04:30despite being all in heavy, angry caps lock.
04:33The profane message is a bit too strong for us to repeat here,
04:36but let's just say whoever it was was pretty upset that the cheap f***ed game
04:40can't even come up with a real password system.
04:43Well, congratulations to you, mystery programmer,
04:45because whilst World Championship Soccer 2 was indeed eclipsed by the emerging FIFA franchise,
04:50you at least gave us something memorable to laugh at about 25 years later.
04:55Number six, Grand Theft Auto 5's black cell phones.
04:58GTA 5 will probably go down in history as one of the most successful games of all time,
05:03still making sales numbers today, even nine years and two console generations on from its debut.
05:09It's stuffed with plenty of content to keep players coming back for more,
05:12and like many of the other games in the series,
05:14is loaded with fun nods and secrets in its sprawling open world sandbox.
05:18One such secret took three years for players to find,
05:21and presumably they did so by pure chance,
05:23as it requires bashing what appears to be a seemingly nonsense series of numbers into their phone.
05:28One triple nine three six seven three seven six seven is the magic number,
05:32and calling it causes the player's in-game phone to essentially change from day mode to night mode,
05:38swapping the background to black.
05:39Oh, and also it triggers a random explosion above the player's head for some reason.
05:44To this day it's not clear what the point of this is,
05:46with some players theorizing it was an unfinished cheat code,
05:49part of a cut mission, or something even more sinister,
05:52as some claim that dialing the number while standing on rebel radio tower causes eerie morse code to play.
05:58Some believe that one triple nine three six seven three seven six seven is code for one triple nine EMP drop,
06:04or the definitely spookiest sounding one triple nine Emperor.
06:09The truth is out there.
06:11Maybe.
06:12Number five,
06:13Mortal Kombat secret menus.
06:15It's one thing for a video game to have a secret that goes undiscovered for years,
06:19but it's another altogether when it's something tucked under the hood of multiple games.
06:23In 2016,
06:2420 years after the release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3,
06:28keen-eyed fan of the series,
06:29Your MK Arcade Source managed to unearth a secret menu known as the EJB menu,
06:35named for creator Ed J. Boone in the first three Mortal Kombat titles.
06:39It's no wonder that the menus were never found,
06:41considering they all require extremely fast inputs of codes of up to 20 characters long,
06:46although the exact length and input differs between the games.
06:49At first it seems apparent that this menu is more designed for those working on the project.
06:53Each one has various options that can be keyed on or off,
06:56such as unlocking or locking characters,
06:59turning off fatalities,
07:00difficulty adjusters,
07:01and simple diagnostic tests.
07:03However,
07:04a final option,
07:05at least in the original Mortal Kombat marked as Hello,
07:07includes a list of names,
07:09presumably Boone's family and friends,
07:11proving that it was designed to be shown to at least a lucky few.
07:14And now,
07:1520 years later,
07:16we all get to see it.
07:17Here's to you,
07:18Ed,
07:19and whoever all these people in your list are.
07:21Number four,
07:22Resident Evil 4's Mystery Man.
07:24One of the many keys to a great horror game is isolation,
07:27and whilst it amped up the action compared to its predecessors,
07:30Resident Evil 4 kept its cast small and tight,
07:33and dropped the player in an environment that made them feel alone and outnumbered.
07:37Nearing the final act of the game,
07:39after helicopter pilot Mike crashes to his death to prove our earlier point,
07:43lay dormant a secret that took 12 years for players to find.
07:47By equipping the tricked up sniper rifle with the extra powerful scope,
07:50it was possible to see a figure standing in a building in the far distance.
07:54This surprising discovery led modders to break the camera of the game to go take a closer look.
07:59What or of who they found still remains the topic of debate.
08:03The identity of the Japanese man in a fetching green parka throwing his two thumbs up,
08:08even several years later,
08:09is still a mystery.
08:10Our best bet is a developer sneaking himself or a colleague or a friend onto the disc as a prank.
08:16Still, he's a happy fellow and his bright albeit odd appearance certainly brings some levity to a game
08:22all about body transforming parasites and death.
08:25Number 3, Halo 3's Happy Birthday Message.
08:29Halo 3 was one of the Xbox 360's biggest tentpole offerings,
08:32concluding Master Chief's original trilogy and supplying a multiplayer experience
08:36that kept many gamers entertained until the early morning many times over.
08:40With the number of hours that the game's 14.5 million copies had plunged into them,
08:45it's surprising then that one of its secrets lay dormant for eight years.
08:49In fact, its creator had to allude to it himself,
08:52as players hadn't organically come across it in the first five years since shipping.
08:56In the frequent Q&A mailbag sessions that Bungie would post on their site,
09:00longtime Halo developer Adrian Perez said that a specific date and loading screen
09:05could trigger something he had coded into the finished product.
09:08By changing the Xbox 360's internal clock to December 25th,
09:12booting up a campaign mission and holding down both thumbsticks,
09:15players can be treated to... a zoomed out loading screen?
09:19Ah, that's not all that special.
09:21However, written into the halo that forms as the mission loads is the message,
09:25Happy Birthday Lauren, an ode to Perez's wife.
09:28This is the gaming equivalent of buying your partner a plane with a banner behind it,
09:33except this banner is immortalized in every copy of an award-winning FPS title.
09:38How sweet.
09:39Number 2, Discworld's F-bomb.
09:41Discworld's hidden gem of an easter egg went undiscovered for 20 years for numerous reasons.
09:46It's only on the PlayStation release,
09:48it takes getting to Act 4 of the game to hear,
09:51and it also takes some pixel-perfect point-and-click accuracy.
09:54When the villagers fill the town square,
09:57the player must click rather precisely on the pupils of two specific townsfolk,
10:01and then drag the cursor over the bosom of a particularly, uh, top-heavy lady.
10:06Rincewind the wizard, as played by Eric Idle,
10:09will then rather suddenly blurt out the line,
10:11I want to be the first person in a game to say f***.
10:14What makes this all the more astounding is that gamers had to work backwards to find this easter egg.
10:19In the sequel, Rincewind proclaims the same line, albeit censored,
10:22and is told that he in fact has already done this,
10:25and that no players wrote in to call it out,
10:27so it must have been too well hidden.
10:29Considering that Discworld comes from the mind of the surreal and irony-laden works of Terry Pratchett,
10:34most assumed this was just a weird gag.
10:36However, when home technology caught up,
10:38dedicated fans worked through the code to find this historical easter egg.
10:43And number one, Chris Houlihan's Secret Zelda Room.
10:46In 1990, Nintendo Power Magazine fan, Chris Houlihan,
10:50apparently won a competition that allowed his name to feature in an upcoming Nintendo title.
10:55That game would be The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past,
10:58and whilst they got their reward, it wasn't made known to the public.
11:02Well, ever, really.
11:04Nintendo, for whatever reason, never acknowledged the easter egg,
11:07and it remained a secret about the game for two decades.
11:10It was up to internet fans to discover the Chris Houlihan room in the 2000s,
11:14after finding text in the code that proved its existence.
11:18Chris's room is hidden in the trunk of a tree,
11:20and requires the players to essentially glitch or trick their way in,
11:23commonly using the Pegasus boots or bombs to shunt Link inside.
11:27In the room, they'll find a good helping of blue rupees,
11:29and a text box that proclaims it's Chris's top secret room.
11:33Stranger than Nintendo never mentioning it, in fact,
11:36is that Chris Houlihan himself remains an enigma.
11:39Whilst winners of similar contests, for the likes of Turok and Mega Man,
11:43have come to tell their story, try as they might,
11:45the Zelda community has never managed to locate Mr Houlihan,
11:49whose name is inscribed in one of the SNES's all-time greats.
11:53And that's our list.
11:54Let us know in the comments below what you thought of it,
11:56and your favourite video game easter eggs.
11:59I'm CypherWattCulture, and have a good week.