After having a bit of a nostalgic trip today playing old stuff from my past, I came across a little game called "Gold Train" which was on the covermount of a magazine called Your Commodore. I always loved the game, but felt it was strange that it had no sound effects or music. It was like it was unfinished. After a bit of digging today in the code, I discovered that one of the magazine's writers did the game in 1984 and it was meant for Interceptor Software, but they never finished it.

That information is something that has been hidden away in the game all this time, and it got me wondering if there are other games which have hidden details or mysteries behind them? Do you know of any?
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Hi Frank

I've got one or two pink floyd albums were you can play it backwards to get a secret message Does that count ?

Yeah - I'm sure there's plenty of games out there with stuff hidden in them. Press a certain key and you can activate an hidden scroll message,etc. Quality control during games testing wouldn't detect these little add ons. Consider it a programming perk or qwerk. I know one or two programmers who said they did this sort of thing for a laugh.

Do we get a prize for the best hidden message found ?
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I missread that one - you mean messages like

" This Software house is useless. I resigning after this game. MD is a complete bastard. I've been shafted with these royalty rates and I've had enough. Getting a new job stacking shelves in Tesco - I'll be better off"
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Not quite ... keep trying though

I guess that in a way, this is asking what "Easter eggs" have you found in games, but which details something about the game that you would never have known unless you hacked around.

For instance - Spellcast in GTW contains some unused sprites, and also according to a contributor, pointers to different levels which were never built. Gold Train had the details indicating that it was infact a Interceptor game, or should have been (Which wouldn't have been clear unless you found the hidden message). The slagging off by a coder could be interesting too

Something else that could be slightly unrelated to this topic - but with previews of games that are 1 level only - are there any more levels locked away? ... Does the Fuzzball demo and other unreleased game previews contain more than they show? Extra levels not pointed to?

One example is that although Arnie 2 was completed and released, the CF covermount demo had a trick of moving through the barb wire wall at the start so you could complete the first level and get onto a very bugged second level. If you played the game properly, it would not allow you to get far in the first level).

It's something geeky which interests me, and especially with GTW's in particular as it helps to unlock details about a game which wasn't previously known.
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I've looked through a games with a hex editor and it's suprising how many have comments in them such as "detect block routine" or something still there. Is it possible they didn't use a compiler and put in those hints by hand?
I read years ago of a game that had a poem in the ASCII dump, but I can't for the life of me remember what game it was.

Disk version of The Eidolon has unused monster file, "BI". You can hack level files to see it in action.



It is even featured on the game cover

Marble Madness had some unused code that supported a four-player version.

http://www.protovision-online....wstart.htm

Thats really cool ... this is the kind of stuff I mean, plus odd looking creatures/sprites which were not used in games aswell.

If anyone knows of anything else, post it here
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The original release of Robocop still had a sprite editor within the code and a lot more besides. I think a lot of the crap was taken out in the budget release.

Also, a Remember crack contains an end sequence that was not activated in the original release. Unfortunately, I can't recall which game it is. No doubt someone can enlighten me...
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I'd never get time to do that sort of stuff.

If I did the first games I'd try out for hidden gems would be Demo games. Reasoning behind this is that such games could be incomplete and still going through the final fiinishing touches. From a programming point of view it would be easier to assemble the full program and change the code a little just to end the Demo after the first level.

ie JSR LEVEL 2

becomes

JSR END DEMO

What you've got is the full game with some code alterations to stop you playing the full game. Depends on how lazy the programmer is. It would be a ballache to assemble and link a dedicated demo version.

Good chance there are unused sprites galore and test routines still in these games.
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Well, check this out for "Lazy"... ... The programmer simply blocked off part of level 1 so you could not progress further.

Use the cheat to get through the fence, and invisibility... this is the end of Arnie 2, minus the rocket though (Shoot the blank spot where it should be). Same end sequence ... its the full game pretty much

http://gtw64.retro-net.de/arnie2demo.vsf (Vice Snapshot)
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Cobra has sprites that never appear; a cat and a bald enemy.

1942 has unused sprites of a platformer character (somewhat similar to the knight in Ghosts'n'Goblins if I remember right) running & jumping. Quite weird for an overhead airplane game..

How about setting up a site called 'Sprites that weren't'?


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