NES classic ‘Punch-Out’ has an Easter egg that went undiscovered for 29 years
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Hard to believe nobody noticed this in the last ~30 years.
>An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in an interactive work such as a computer program, video game or DVD menu screen.
The headbobbing, the camera flashing etc. are hidden hints/messages from the programmer to the player, so I'd say the term fits
It's also something you have to seek out -- by going to a particular place and doing a particular thing. This is just something that happens in the game, and it happens without player triggering.
The wikipedia page agrees with me on this, as far as I can tell, if you keep reading past the first sentence (which is a summary, and as with many wikipedia summaries, is incomplete and vague). This first paragraph from the software section seems rather more useful to quote:
> In computer software, Easter eggs are secret responses that occur as a result of an undocumented set of commands. The results can vary from a simple printed message or image, to a page of programmer credits or a small videogame hidden inside an otherwise serious piece of software. Videogame cheat codes are a specific type of Easter egg, in which entering a secret command will unlock special powers or new levels for the player.
I doubt the team had the budget or bytes to obfuscate the bytecode.
Just because the two things sync up doesn't mean the code makes that obvious.
You make it sound like something one could do in a spare 15 minutes.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6821374/Screen%20Shot%20...
Of course if that makes it a hint, then it suggests the sprite right next to it (the guy on the right side of the audience with glasses) is also some kind of clue... does anybody know that one?
Seen here: https://youtu.be/U_iVHVGqMIU?t=1m16s Here: https://youtu.be/U_iVHVGqMIU?t=1m47s And, Here: https://youtu.be/U_iVHVGqMIU?t=3m27s
I would suppose an easy test is to go the full round without attacking the boss and see if that spectator does the head nod at any point other than during the super punch.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/decades-later-a-new-mi...
The developers are quoted halfway down the page as having included the timing cues for opponents intentionally.
We (the gaming community) have known this since 2009 when that interview came out, so it's kind of amusing that people are making tech-based arguments trying to debunk a cultural fact they aren't familiar with. It could have been an unintentional artifact of the PRNG, sure, but it isn't. At the very least it was intentionally not removed.
If nothing else, those cues probably helped QA quite a bit.
When you look at how older video games are developed, you almost always have to first consider what the extreme constraints are. Nowadays you can get away with paying very little mind to, say, how much disk space a video game takes. Even optical disk space matters little, as additional content could be downloaded as a part of the game installation process.
On older games, however, disk space, processor usage, RAM, everything was in terribly short supply. As a result, lots and lots of shortcuts were taken. A more well-known example is how the Mario Bros clouds and bushes used the same sprite with a different color palette. [1]
So when developing a game under those constraints, the developer would have had to be keenly aware of how much was going on at any given time and whenever possible re-use any existing processes or assets. In Punch-Out there are several things happening on the screen at once, between the movements of the crowd and the enemy. When it came time to implement the "super punch", the developer would have probably wanted to re-use any existing RNG process already being run, rather than run a whole new RNG for that action alone, in the interest of conserving resources. In this case, they could have chosen the same RNG results that drive the head-bob in the crowd NPC.
[1] http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kz7gthD7UU1qbn1vmo1_500.pn...
That it happens when you need to throw a punch is not evidence of intent, as that is a pre-determined sequence. There are likely only so many sources of random-looking behavior available, so it's quite reasonable that a background character's movement would be tied to the same source as the source that determines how often the boss is vulnerable.
edit: To clarify, the two events are clearly linked, but that does not mean they were intended to be linked. I am in agreement with Zikes' reply.
But seeing as one of the game's creators has mentioned they liked to put in contextual cues for when things were about to happen, it also seems pretty plausible that it's intentional.
>> Isn't one of the timing cues a camera flash? I forget for which boxer.
> Yup! a camera flash is for the first time you fight Bald Bull. The developer leaked that easter egg and said there was more, that's when I noticed this one.
Apparently there's a pattern of there being visual cues put in by the developers.
Original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4dybvk/i_think_i_di...
It indeed looks deliberate.
The subject of the interview suggests that there are lots of yet-undiscovered Easter eggs in the game.
I don't know if there are any tells for when to throw the knock-out blow.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/28/obscure-final-fantasy-ix-...
In 1993, Squaresoft used to send out ads to people on their mailing lists (I was one of those people). One of their little mailings included a comment about a curse in Final Fantasy II for the SNES: if you do an action 64 times, it will trigger a reboot of your game, and your save file will be lost. They never told what the action was, but they were admant on the number of times it needs to be done.
t haven't found this info anywhere. If I'm the only one that knows it, it makes me sad. Hopefully, more find it.
If I recall correctly there are a ton of visual cues in punch-out.
I found Punch-Out and Contra to both be eventually easy games. There is very little randomness and luckily the controls are very good. I remember taking a bet in college of beating contra (w/o thirty lives) after not playing. Replaying was like riding a bike.
Compare this to the ridiculous difficulty of broken games like Top Gun or the worse game every made AD&D for NES (seriously check out how f@#$ awful that game is).
After I realized that, I just stopped using it.
Really the challenge is playing at the same time with some one else.
NTSC runs at a framerate of about 30fps. PAL runs at 25fps. I have not worked on an 8-bit console. But if I were to, I would probably run a simulation/AI tick every 6 frames.
By coincidence, some background animation is going to coincide with some gameplay event.
1. Visual cues are littered throughout the entire game. Sometimes it'a camera flash, sometimes it's the opponent blinking, to give you a warning.
2. The game play design is pretty consistent. Each fight gets progressively more difficult, but there is almost always a critical weakness of each opponent. Exploiting (or even finding) the critical weakness gets harder and harder as you progress.
The most obvious example of this design was King Hippo. Using traditional fighting style made it seem like he was impossible to beat. The only way to beat him was to stun him and punch him in the stomach. If you punched left, right, left, right, repeatedly, you could knock him out in one stun cycle. Learning this as a 10 year kid was great fun and made you feel like a genius/gaming god.