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| strange and funny unused content in video games | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 10 2014, 12:10 AM (1,615 Views) | |
| Crash | Jul 10 2014, 12:10 AM Post #1 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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It goes without saying that when a game is being developed, less than 100% of the content made is actually used in the final product. Sometimes an idea doesn't work out and is scrapped, or deadlines come up, or system limitations get in the way. A lot of this content ends up deleted from the game's data altogether, but most games, at least in older systems, are hiding a few interesting nuggets in their code. The Cutting Room Floor is a website/wiki dedicated to uncovering these secrets and cataloging them for all to see. They also document regional differences between European, Japanese, and American versions of games, as well as prototypes and revisions to re-releases or reprintings (for example, the Arabic chanting in the Fire Temple that was removed from revision 1.2 of Ocarina of Time). Occasionally even stuff that's actually in the final product, but well-hidden or little-known, is listed too. Obviously there's lots of pretty normal stuff that just got removed for one reason or another. In Mega Man 2, at one point there were what appear to be Metool dispensers in Crash Man's stage: Super Mario World has fully-coded half-size doors that you must be small Mario to enter: (Romhackers make full use of that one.) In the Japanese version of Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter there is a secret character called Norimaro. He has a humorous, but unused, Hyper Combo where he fantasizes about various Capcom characters and then has a nosebleed, which looks like it would have been intended as an anti-air attack:![]() ![]() ![]() Interestingly, he was also almost completely localized for the worldwide release of the game, but Capcom must have cut him late in localization. In Castlevania Symphony of the Night, it's fairly well known that there were two additional familiars added to the Japan-only Saturn version. Their coding is present even in the US/European Playstation versions though! Furthermore, if you sat down in a chair while you had the Sprite familiar, you were supposed to hear this song sung by the Sprite. So there's plenty of interesting stuff like that you can find, but what's really amazing are the hidden strings of text found in many games' code. Sometimes this stuff was just thrown in because they needed to pad out the filesize for whatever reason. Sometimes they are comments from developers trying to figure out some kind of error. Sometimes, especially in early games that didn't have credits because companies were afraid their competitors would headhunt their employees, developers would hide their own credits as plain text in the code. And then sometimes, a programmer hides something ridiculous in the code because they thought nobody would ever find it! Let's take a look at some examples: This is from the arcade version of Donkey Kong, inviting anyone able to find this message to apply as a programmer, as they obviously have some skills:
Ikegami Company is the group that did the actual programming work for Donkey Kong (and several other Nintendo arcade games) while Nintendo itself primarily handled just the design aspects. They hid their name/logo in some other places in the game code too. There are silly little messages like this one in NASCAR Arcade:
The music file for Combo Racer has a frank message from the composer:
Speaking of European PCs, there are a lot of pretty funny instances of hidden messages addressed to the hacker groups that would crack games and illegally distribute them in games for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Amstrad, etc. Line of Fire:
Alien Breed: Blood Money:
One of the programmers on Spider-Man (the good one on Playstation) is very upset with a co-worker's coding ability: A pleasant message found in The Last Battle:
Infamous kusoge Super Monkey Daibouken is already shitty enough, but this hidden message is just the icing on the cake: Wonder if he still has a job in the industry . . . The programmer for Pachi-Com on Famicom goes on a pretty big tirade, complaining about changes the company made him add to the game and even explaining a way to change it back to how he originally had it. He questions some of Nintendo's system architecture choices. At the end he adds this: And sure enough if you check the MSX version there is another hidden message . . . The largest of all hidden developer messages is found in The New Tetris on N64, found and posted online only three days after the game released. It's way too long to post here so click the link to read it. It includes Rants, McRants, Mini-Rants, and several pieces of ASCII art including a pot leaf and the N64 logo. If you thought some of that was crazy, now we're going into absolutely insane-tier stuff. First is the programmer working on Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast, who left instructions on how to make a Sega Genesis emulator in a plaintext file that was explicitly addressed to a popular piracy group at that time. A few days later, that group released a ripped version of the game that you could load any Genesis ROM onto and play as if it were part of the original game itself! Turns out this was the programmer's last game with Sega, and the game was released on the very day Sega announced the Dreamcast was ceasing production, so he decided to leave the fans a little treat on his way out. Next is Mario Kart Arcade GP. In the game's files this image can be found: ![]() What makes this so bizarre is that this is a photograph taken in Russia during the Beslan school hostage crisis, where over 1000 people, mostly children, were held hostage for three days by a group of militants, ending with the death of more than 300 people. Why the hell is this image in a Mario game???? Front Mission: Gun Hazard is a Japan-only sidescrolling spinoff of the Front Mission strategy rpg series. At the end of the ending credits, a voice sample can be faintly heard. For god only knows what reason, this sample is taken from a threatening phonecall a UK neo-nazi extremist group made. It's very racist and vulgar so I won't repost it here, just click the link above if you want to hear it. Why in god's name would they use this voice sample in their game?? The mother of all hidden messages comes to us via Atlus and their visual novel/adventure game Erika and Satoru's Dream Adventure. This message is actually completely viewable in the final game, but the method to see it is incredibly obscure. First, you must finish the game. The game ends on a photo of the characters and the word "END." If you let the game sit here for 18 minutes, the photo turns black and white. After waiting another 18 minutes, the photo turns sepia. After another 55 minutes the music completely stops. If you press a button combination on both controllers at this point, new music will start. Then pressing another combination of buttons will begin the message, complete with what I assume is a graphic of Hidemushi, the author of this message, posted here in all its glory: After this if you press yet another button combination, a final message to a family member appears.
Post any other hidden messages you know about, or any other interesting finds you see on the website! |
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| Dracobolt | Jul 10 2014, 12:17 AM Post #2 |
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Incorrigible
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This is actually really cool. I was aware that some games had this sort of hidden content, but I'd never bothered to look into it. It's funny what they'll put when they think that no one/only the most dedicated of gamers will see it.
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| Deleted User | Jul 10 2014, 04:24 AM Post #3 |
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Deleted User
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Rofl Majora's Mask has a ton of really cool unused content. I remember reading through this page a while ago and a lot of it is really neat. I especially like the unused dialogue. lol Honey & Darling... |
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| Phoenix7 | Jul 10 2014, 05:21 AM Post #4 |
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Odyssey, ya see~ Odyssey, ya see~
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Wow @ 'dat Hyper Combo Mother 3 has some unused content that really fascinates me, especially like how the final boss fight was apparently meant to be even darker, and many of the changes in story and structure, including from the N64 version they were working on. Can be found here, but beware spoilers. |
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| Super Slash | Jul 10 2014, 07:11 AM Post #5 |
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I like this website a lot, and I find myself using it when I'm bored. You always find the most interesting things on it though, Crash. The MM and Mother 3 stuff look awesome as well. Will definitely take a look when I have more time. |
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| ShinyGirafarig | Jul 10 2014, 11:15 AM Post #6 |
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Giraffes are adorable.
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![]() Eagle's motorcycle supposed to be in the Advance Wars 2 gallery. |
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| Crash | Jul 15 2014, 09:37 AM Post #7 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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Here's a thing I didn't know about, the Greatest Hits version of Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon adds several new music tracks to the game, for levels that reused music in the original release. I only have the black-label original so I've never heard these songs before. Strangely, the European equivalent of Greatest Hits, the "Platinum" release, does not have the new music despite coming out later. |
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| Crash | Aug 11 2014, 04:06 PM Post #8 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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A new discovery: the Gamecube version of Pikmin has a Windows executable file on the disc that allows the game to be played natively on a Windows PC. Keyboard controls are coded in, and many debugging features are accessible. Of course Gamecube emulation is now good enough (better than N64 emulation even!) that you can probably just pop in your GC disc and emulate the game just fine, so this isn't really a useful way to play the game. |
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| Crash | Nov 14 2014, 04:04 PM Post #9 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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Genesis and Mega Drive games were typically region-locked. Mickey Mania displays this screen if you try to play the Japanese version on an American Genesis or European Mega Drive, fairly standard for most of these games:![]() But if, using an emulator or a hardware modchip, you change the region of your system to Japan after you have reached that screen, this message appears and then the game begins: ![]() SNES version of Bust-A-Move contains this message and reference to Sailor Moon:
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| Kula Diamond | Nov 14 2014, 04:18 PM Post #10 |
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atlus tracts
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lmao the mickey mania one best |
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| King in the North | Nov 14 2014, 05:40 PM Post #11 |
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Very cool stuff. The original FFX "beta" is kinda weird. No hidden code or easter egg stuff though, would go into cut/changed content I suppose. Things like Tidus and Yuna with black hair, fully moveable 3D camera, hair and clothes physics, online features... [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72vckLXI7x4[/youtube] |
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| ZFallen | Nov 14 2014, 09:41 PM Post #12 |
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There's data allowing Tidus to wield the buster sword :3 http://youtu.be/J-1JV6b4Yp4 (Apologies, I'm using my phone) |
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| ShmittlesThePoe | Nov 14 2014, 10:15 PM Post #13 |
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Pirate Wavemaster
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omg, spending time on that site is like spending time on tropes. endless chains of interesting facts. Donkey Kong Country was a good read. |
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| Crash | May 8 2015, 02:53 PM Post #14 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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This might be one of the best. Because Game Boy Color game "DynaMike" did not use the full RAM of the cartridge, and the programmer did not blank out that data or put something else there to replace the excess, leftover files from other things he was doing while programming ended up leftover in the final game. Chief among these is some leftover files from a porn website! The game never actually released publically though, so maybe a final check of the code would have prompted a removal. NSFW text details within: https://tcrf.net/DynaMike |
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| Kula Diamond | May 8 2015, 02:59 PM Post #15 |
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atlus tracts
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obby |
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| King in the North | May 8 2015, 03:04 PM Post #16 |
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Lol. Well. You do what you gotta do. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5JzQudbKsk[/youtube] |
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| Crash | Aug 4 2015, 10:31 AM Post #17 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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A few examples of games ripping off Super Mario Bros. sprites and just slightly altering them for their own games: http://tcrfwiki.tumblr.com/post/125847049003/no-relation I can't remember what game it was, but I read an interview before where someone mentions that they just copied percussion samples from Super Mario Bros. 3 for their own music. I'd bet that if someone went looking they'd find way more examples of copying or slightly altering stuff from Mario games in these early consoles. |
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| Crash | Jun 6 2016, 01:03 AM Post #18 |
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Wheey! I've became a human being!! I am very handsam!
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M.C. Kids is a McDonald's-branded platformer with the rare distinction of being actually good. There is a secret that was improperly coded and was thus essentially hidden for 24 years, until its recent discovery. After beating three super tough secret levels with all collectibles grabbed, you're supposed to receive unlimited lives, but then Ronald realizes he messed up and didn't actually give you unlimited lives like he said! |
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Super Mario World has fully-coded half-size doors that you must be small Mario to enter:
(Romhackers make full use of that one.) In the Japanese version of Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter there is a secret character called Norimaro. He has a humorous, but unused, Hyper Combo where he fantasizes about various Capcom characters and then has a nosebleed, which looks like it would have been intended as an anti-air attack:

















![]](http://z1.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)

1:41 PM Jul 11






