Some secrets in games are just not found by the fan community. Eventually, developers may give up and drop some hints. So the topic of today's article on Wiser Mind is 10 secrets that were never found in video games.
Now, like I said, this isn't stuff that nobody knows about. It would obviously not be an easy thing to do if we didn't know a secret exists to talk about it. So we're kind of talking about stuff, like I said, that the fan communities found, but not without a little help from the developers. So these are secrets and Easter eggs that people are aware of now, but the only reason anyone actually found them is because a developer basically ended up telling them what the secret was.
#10 "Titanfall 2's" "Timecop" secret.
 |
Originally released back in October 2016, this little Easter egg remained undiscovered for years until a developer at Respawn named David Bartle decided to tweet out a clue as to how to find it. The Easter egg was actually created by the lead designer of the game, Jake Keating, and Bartle actually got his blessing before posting the hint. The hint said, "I booted the game, loaded the closest checkpoint to the place, repeated certain actions a lot, and BAM, open sesame!" Now, that's not explicitly revealing what the secret was, but it's a clue that's pretty substantial, actually. The secret's hidden in Mission 5, "Effect and Cause," the one with the time-swapping mechanic, and if you activate the device 88 times while standing in front of the door, it'll open and reveal a secret room containing an Easter egg from the movie "Timecop." Mission 5 is the time level, so why not?
#9 BioShock 2
this is a very specific Easter egg that was hidden and only just revealed recently by an anonymous developer on 4chan. And this is one instance where we can't say with absolute certainty the secret was for sure revealed by a developer because we never really got their name, but it's something I've never heard of before and requires a player to perform some really specific actions to replicate. What you have to do to trigger it is to lower your health to one by setting yourself on fire with the Incinerate Plasmid, then put down a fire right at the start of a cutscene when you meet Andrew Ryan in person. So the game then bugs out and sends you to a Vita-Chamber outside of the map, and if you've got all captions on, you see a message that says this: "BUG THIS. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, PAUL HELLQUIST DID NOT DO HIS JOB. LOVE, KLINE." So it's less a secret and more of a bug message that the developers left in the game, but it's still a pretty interesting find. Paul Hellquist was actually the lead designer of the game, and the Kline in the message is Chris Kline, the lead programmer and technical director. Apparently, Hellquist promised to make certain objects less error-prone, and Klein was skeptical, so he left this message in the game for testers to find. It wasn't actually even supposed to be in the main game, but for whatever reason, it's still accessible, at least in the remastered version.
#8 the hidden Mars Rover in "Mass Effect 3"
another relatively recently revealed Easter egg, this time done by cinematic designer Richard Boisvert. This one sat undiscovered in "Mass Effect 3" for about 10 years before the dev just decided to spill the beans, revealing you can trigger a secret by walking through the solar panels at the start of the Mars mission in a specific way. It's just complicated enough that it's not something someone would trigger naturally. If you pull it off correctly, a little Mars Rover will pull up to you and give you a nod. It's a small thing, but the fact it went totally undiscovered for so long just shows how many little secrets are probably still hiding in games, even in ones as popular as "Mass Effect 3," where you'd think players would've data-mined them to hell and back and found just about anything in it. But no, there's clearly a ton to find out there, even if it's not all mind-blowing or in-depth. Regardless, it's still really interesting.
#7 in "Batman: Arkham Asylum," Warden Sharp's secret room
one we gotta mention. It's one of the most infamous secrets of all time for the simple reason the players were just not able to find it. Players knew there was some kind of big secret hiding in the game somewhere, but nobody was able to find it, and the developers at Rocksteady were like, ugh, and just simply revealed how to get to the secret room during a Game of the Year podcast that they released on the now dead "Arkham Asylum" official website. If you know anything about the game, you probably heard about this already, but the secret is that there's a hidden room in the warden's office that can only be accessed by using three explosive gels on this random wall. That's actually how they managed to keep the room secret for so long. One is not enough. You had to clump three together to blow up that wall and get into the hidden room. Inside contains the blueprints for Arkham City, which is meant to be a teaser for the next game, but no one found it before the sequel got announced, so eh. I could be getting the timeline wrong here, but either way, it's one of the best hidden teasers for a sequel ever, even if it was so incredibly difficult to find that nobody saw it.
#6 is "Halo 3's" Happy Birthday message.
This one was revealed a while back. It took more than seven years for fans to find, though. "Halo 3" originally came out in 2007, and a video revealing this secret was posted in 2014. The Easter egg is actually found in the game's loading screen. To trigger it, you have to set the day to December 25th on the Xbox dashboard while being disconnected from Xbox Live, so you probably need the original version of the game to pull it off. With the date set, you'll load a campaign mission and hold down both thumbsticks to reveal the message, which says, "Happy birthday, Lauren." The Lauren of the message was the wife of Bungie programmer, Adrian Perez, and he's the one responsible for the Easter egg. If you're curious who actually revealed it, according to the Halo fandom wiki, a 2012 mailbag feature that was run by another Bungie guy, this guy named John Cable, first hinted at the existence of the secret, and a later mailbag reply by Adrian Perez gave a more explicit hint.
#5 in "Batman: Arkham City,"
I guess, say what you want about the developers, but they really know how to hide a secret. "Asylum" had one that fans just couldn't figure out, and they managed to repeat that with "City." The actual tease for the next game that involved the Scarecrow was found pretty quickly, but this little tease from Calendar Man remained hidden way longer. It took a mysterious video from a YouTube account named JG Jour to provide some major hints that there actually was something hidden with Calendar Man. How do we know this account was run by developers? Well, we don't, but there are a few reasons why most assume it was. The biggest clue, of course, was the name. JG Jour is French for day, so that's Julian Gregory Day, the Calendar Man's actual name. Players had to figure out how to actually trigger the mysterious message partially shown in the video and eventually discovered that if you set the console clock to December 13th, 2004, that's when you get the message. The significance of the date is that's when Rocksteady Studios was first established, and the unique dialogue talks about how the Calendar Man was there from the beginning and the end.
#4 a secret within a secret in "Serious Sam."
For years, there was a secret in the original "Serious Sam" players knew about but didn't actually know how to trigger legitimately. It's a secret within a secret, and it can only be found in the secret level Sacred Yards, which when found, allows players to skip a big chunk of the map and complete it without having to kill any enemies. The thing that really kept this secret hidden was that it didn't really count as a secret. In 2014, a YouTuber named SoliasYosei managed to partially figure it out and actually ended up getting a job at CroTeam, the game's developers in 2015. That's when he got a chance to talk to the CEO of the studio Roman Ribaric, who also happened to be the lead designer on "Serious Sam." He revealed he created this secret as a way to get around all the puzzles in the level for players who just wanted to get straight to the action. According to this Kotaku article, Roman eventually got Solias to figure the secret out. This obscure secret is unique because it actually took one developer explaining it to another developer before it was fully figured out.
#3 in "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!"
probably one of the oldest undiscovered secrets out there. There are not really secrets like this that are legally adults. Revealed during an Ask Iwata interview with Makoto Wada, one of the developers of the NES version of "Punch-Out!!," and he actually admitted there was a secret tell during the Bald Bull fight. Whenever Bald Bull punches, a light from the audience reveals when to punch. If you punch just as it flashes, you will always hit a body blow. It's an incredibly specific thing, and after this little reveal, players managed to find other hidden tells that you could find for other players in "Punch-Out!!" "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!" is another game that seemed like everyone had it figured out in 2009, but no, this is a developer holding onto a secret for over two decades. I have to imagine this is a thing people had figured out sooner, maybe even just intuitively and didn't realize it, but it wasn't until this interview that the secret was really legitimately known. "Punch-Out!!'s" is one of those old-school games that's still really fun to play even now, and secrets like this are just one of the many reasons why.
#2 is "Blood Omen,"
a really obscure one that took a really long time to be revealed, so much that it actually has "Punch-Out!!'s" 22 years beat. In "Blood Omen," you play as Kain, a vampire in a kind of dark version of "Legend of Zelda." One hidden thing that people had known about for years was this pirate ship called the HCMS Bitter, a place you could access through hacking but wasn't a legitimate part of the game, at least that's what everyone thought for two and a half decades. In an interview with Denis Dyak from a few years back, he revealed there actually was a way to get to this pirate ship legitimately, but the process was so convoluted and strange that nobody actually managed to do it in all of this time. It took a few dedicated fans to bust open the game files and brute-force the answer, but they did manage to figure out what you're supposed to do, and reading about it, you can definitely see why Noah managed to find it. You had to trigger four invisible switches hidden in obscure parts of the world, which were, like I said, invisible and always placed out of bounds, so finding them without some kind of help was pretty much impossible. So it only took 24 years and a little prodding by the developer, but people managed to finally get on this stupid boat legitimately. I hope it was worth it.
And finally at #1 is "Homefront: The Revolution."
If you've been following gaming news the last few years, you probably know about this one, but it's so good, and the story of how it was found is so interesting, that it deserves a callback. One well-known Easter egg in "Homefront: The Revolution" was if you found a particular arcade cabinet, you could play an updated and remastered version of "TimeSplitters 2," the cult classic "Goldeneye"-like game. And everyone thought that the secret ended there, but back in 2021, a developer named Matt Phillips revealed it was possible to play the entire game within "Homefront," not just the first two levels. You'd think that would be the end of it, just a cool reveal of a huge secret hidden in a random game, but no. The funny thing is Phillips actually forgot the code to access the full game. Apparently, he gave the code to a friend to leak it on a Discord channel, but they called him a liar and banned him. Fans eventually managed to work out what the code was and revealed it to the developer, who confirmed it. You just use the code while you're on the story menu and you unlock the rest of the game. It's easy to joke about how this is a great secret, but it's such a shame you have to play "Homefront: The Revolution" to play it.
That's all for today. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think, of course, you can bookmark our site Wiser Mind for easy access later if you wanted to read some great articles in your free time