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Comment by LeonenTheDK | Hacker News Reader

I love little game dev anecdotes such as these. Interesting relics of the development process.

One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA

My favourite easter eggs are:

I remember playing through the first F.E.A.R. and noticing a coffee machine in an office kitchen. It had an unknown brand name on it so I checked it against the game's credits and it matched up with one of the game's artists.

My favourite, though, was playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and finding three sea shells on the wall next to a toilet.

There are a lot more well known easter eggs in games of that era, especially in games by id software where staff would put each other's pics in hidden places in the game.

Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.

But that's still alive in indie games today. Check out the games developed by "New Blood Interactive" for example Dusk, it's full of throwbacks and memes to classic games from the '90's. You can find them on Steam or at https://waste.money/

> Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.

Only committee-approved and/or mandated easter eggs permitted. Don't forget to catalogue them all so the social media team have more content.

It's all fun and games until you leave a literal sex-game(1) in there prompting geriatric lawmakers(2) to get into the action (3).

(And yes, I've worked in games myself so I 100% see the reason why they left it in disabled, iirc there is 2 or 3 levels with geometries but broken scripts included on disc in the largest game I worked on)

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)

(2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get...

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...

Although in this case, it wasn't even an actual easter egg, just removed content still on the disc.

Yep, which makes them features rather than easter eggs. Easter eggs should be subversive and unapproved.

It's a loss for sure, but at least they still appear in some indie games.

Been trying to load that website for the past 24 hours, it keeps timing out :(

Cyberpunk also has the 3 sea shells reference

What is the significance of 3 sea shells?

It's a meme from the movie Demolition Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnuOa7tDco

It's a reference to the 1993 Stallone Movie Demolition Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)

A cop gets "frozen" as a punishment and when he gets reawoken the world has changed. Including the toilets. They now use 3 seashells instead of paper.

He doesn't know how to use the 3 sea shells hahahahahahaha. I can see how that could be confusing.

This is the correct response.

Cyberpunk also has the red pill / blue pill and deja vu cat from the matrix.

A little fun fact about Cyberpunk for those who haven't played: Every quest in the game is named after an old song.

Also in fear is that red headed engineer with the giant RTFM belt buckle. Love that.

Yeah these anecdotes are great. One of the ones I found amusing was how the windmills in Perfect Dark were reskinned autoguns/turrets, presumably to implement the movement aspect more easily.

As a result, if you get too close to it with cheats or glitches, the whole windmill will turn and fire at you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00LITqBDEg

Also Fallout 3's train mechanics, which were implemented as a piece of wearable armour:

https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout...

And the Ascend ability from Tears of the Kingdom was a developer tool that got repurpose into an in game ability when they realised it'd make the caves much more convenient/enjoyable to navigate.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...

Here's an easter egg in GTA that almost no-one has seen. I can't reveal its meaning. There were sacrifices :p

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...

Cmon, give us a hint!

The first T is "The"

OK let's make this interesting then, hopefully you can at least answer this: is there anything out there that might help someone intrepid enough to work out at least the general gist?

And where do they look? Game data? Obscure forum comments?

What is weird is that everything to do with the meaning of that has been purged from the public Internet. Not by any conspiracy, I guess it just never made it into any indexer.

I think it got removed from last year's remake.. probably because the new guys didn't know what the hell it meant. Like the people that paint over Banksy art.

My favorite is about the latest Pokemon game that has a fully rendered ocean at all times, which ruins the game's loading time and is, if I remember, never explored.

Or the Crysis 2 ocean designed to slow down and GPUs at the time because they did not overdo tesselation. Good old nvidia and crytek.

A Tumblr post which goes into how truly insane this is, and offers a possible explanation for how it got to be that way:

https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...

Well that was a fun read until it forces you to log in :(

https://archive.is/rGPKj

Oh no

I logged in

I rebelled. On the console I set the display property of the #glass-container element to "none", hiding the popover window:

document.querySelector("#glass-container").style.display = "none";

Then since scrolling was disabled, I just used the window.scroll() function to scroll down and see the small parts of the article that I wasn't able to read before the popup appeared.

This works because Tumblr doesn't actually remove the parts of the article it doesn't want you to see from the HTML output, so it's still perfectly viewable if you can get past the popup. This is not generally the case though, for example most news sites actually remove the text you're not supposed to see if you don't log in.

If I could figure out how to re-enable scrolling, I'd have a recipe for a pretty delicious Greasemonkey script.

Dear tumblr -- Sincerely fuck off with this bullshit, thanks.

Use ublock:

  www.tumblr.com###glass-container
  www.tumblr.com##body:style(overflow:auto !important)

Disabled scrolling is almost always implemented by setting the `overflow` CSS property to `hidden` or `none`. You can add a UBlock filter for a specific site, as the sibling comment suggests, but on the fly you can also just use the console to filter for elements with that property and disable it or set it to `auto`.

This is what happens when you let the intern make the ocean with no oversight. "Hey, the ocean is too curvy." 100x Earth -> "Better?"

How is this still a problem? We’ve been building large open worlds for ages now. At what point did some developer decide to always render the ocean and this never got addressed?

The Switch era of Pokemon games, aside from some interesting spinoffs, has really been slapdash work. They know it'll sell, so it's always minimum effort. The biggest upset is still that newer games no longer support having all pokemon in them.

It's not like it's a massive effort to support those mons - they haven't been doing significant 3D model updates since the 3DS era already.

It's definitely a lot of work to have all pokemon. They all need stats. They all need a habitat. They all need a moveset evolution. And if you fuck up even one a ton of fans that really like that pokemon are upset. It's disappointing but I really understand why they don't do all pokemon.

>They all need stats

>They all need a moveset evolution

Neither of these have to shift a substantial amount between generations. The current stats & moves structure solidified by gen 4 already.

>They all need a habitat

No they don't. Trade them in and out of Home/Bank/whatever to move across generations, trade with other players, etc. This was standard flow up until the latest few generations.

There is not much extra game design consideration needed until you're talking about new features. But a good percentage of mons are still in the new games, so is it really that much extra effort to balance when you have new features in play? It can be as simple as just not giving older mons the same new abilities. Not every one got mega evolutions, for example.

Gamefreak are just lazy. Employee reviews seem to confirm this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFWjhfhJJqE

It's so frustrating seeing as Pokemon is literally the biggest franchise in the world, bigger than Mickey Mouse(!!!!!), and yet the switch games feel like they were put together by a team of 10 programmers on a budget. I know Gamefreak doesn't own pokemon, but jesus christ whoever approved the latest games for release should be fired.

Or actually, maybe they should be given a promotion because despite all the bugs and poor performance the game still sold incredibly well, so why spend any more money and time on development if it clearly doesn't matter.

I can't decide.

At first I was deeply annoyed that this was presented as a video (why don’t you just tell me what it’s about?!), and then after about five seconds I was enthralled. Great watch.

Like another poster said: brilliant.

Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

Wow That whole yt channel is amazing, this is like crack for HN users

Can't watch the video right now. Is it Sonic 3D Blast (always loved this game) or some different, newer title? Time for another replay!

Yes it is. Whenever the game crashes it showed a congratulatory message and the level select screen, so sega's QA wouldn't notice that it crashed. Hitting the console can cause such a crash.

That's very clever...

It's clever, but also a bit disingenuous. Sega wanted really high quality games and the developer gets annoyed by the bug reports and tries to work around the strict testing.

There are no feedback for the developers once the game is out, they don't know if these bugs are triggered or how frequent, so they could be sending out defective games and the process that would have caught this has been circumvented. It's kinda of a dick move by a developers who feel like they know better.

It prevents crashes, allows graceful recovery by resetting the game state and is certainly the most creative use of exception handlers that I've ever seen.

It is almost 2024 and there's production software out there with "catch all and do nothing" exception handlers. Software that assumes memory allocation never fails.

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