8 Video Game Easter Eggs Made Out Of Spite
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00:00 Who doesn't love a good video game easter egg from time to time, right? After slogging your
00:04 way through endless dungeons or exploring vast open worlds, isn't it nice to stumble across a
00:09 secret or reference to the wider video game industry, or something to lighten the mood,
00:13 or even just offer a little pat on the back for an area well explored? Well,
00:17 sometimes you might regret looking under every pixelated pebble, as the devs - or
00:21 just one dev in particular, maybe - might have taken it upon themselves to place a little nugget
00:25 that is less shiny and more absolutely stinky. Insults, complaints about co-workers, or rants
00:31 about their bosses - all of these examples prove, above all else, that while the end
00:35 result of a video game is meant to be entertainment, the process behind the curtains are anything but.
00:39 So let's have a look at them, shall we? As I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com,
00:42 and these are 8 Video Game Easter Eggs Made Out of Spite.
00:45 8. Read Between the Lines - Cannon Fodder
00:49 When you look at the titles under sensible software's belt, you might actually start to
00:53 realise - shock horror - that they don't actually make titles as sensible as their name would
00:58 suggest. Far from it, in fact, as the likes of Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder ended up being
01:02 the most ridiculous of spectacles for all the right reasons. Cannon Fodder especially took the
01:07 world by storm, thanks to its rather worryingly cute approach to war, which would see players
01:12 escort a group of commandos through levels jam-packed with explosives and enemies with
01:16 the sole goal of 'try not to get everyone killed'. And it seemed like this tongue-in-cheek approach
01:20 to dark comedy infiltrated every aspect of the development process, as the team hit a number of
01:25 rather rude and taunting messages to both the player and their publisher Virgin Interactive.
01:30 The latter was mocked by having text written all over their logo advertising 'free sex',
01:34 which you could only find if you took the Splash logo and inverted the colours and contrast,
01:38 and the former coming in the form of the player being utterly ridiculed by the game's end screen.
01:42 Take a look at it. Can you see it? No? Well, why don't you just read the first letters of 'far
01:47 out', 'unreal', 'crazy dude', 'cool babe', 'yippee' and 'outrageous' and 'er', and you'll
01:51 see that it spells… well, yeah.
01:53 7. Secret Level Meltdown - Gex
01:57 While a lot of other examples on this list are of developers expressing their frustration at the
02:02 player or their bosses, very few of them actually led to anything more than maybe content for
02:06 vultures like ourselves to pick clean in such lists. However, in the case of Justin Noor,
02:11 it cost him his job. To better explain, we need to look at the rather tumultuous development that
02:15 Gex went through. With the budget running low, staff shortages, and looming deadlines,
02:20 it seemed that the team was always under the hammer 24/7. The game received substantial
02:24 cuts and entire sections such as a sci-fi theme were dropped entirely, despite assets for them
02:29 already existing. Therefore, unbeknownst to much of the team, a 'secret team' was formed which used
02:34 the cut assets to make secret levels and areas that the player could access through cheat codes
02:39 and hints. So far it sounds pretty acceptable, right? Well, apparently one day Noor came in to
02:43 find that one of his levels was edited without his permission, and took such personal affront to this
02:48 that he decided to reinstate the cut level as a secret, but also include a ream of dialogue that
02:53 told the player that this section was cut because the publisher didn't value the player. He even
02:57 went one step further, including a phone number for a rep at the company, and told the player to
03:01 phone them and give them a peace of their mind for cutting such excellent content. Things didn't end
03:06 well for him as the secret was soon found during playtesting and the company fired him for
03:10 endangering relationships that the company had with Panasonic, for which this game was going to
03:14 feature heavily on their 3DO console. 6. Give Me A Bonus, AHH! Pachycom
03:21 Now while the Famicom might have come along and quite literally changed the game and saved the
03:25 entire video game market in the process, it wasn't all gold and glory for the devs working
03:29 on titles for the system, as anyone who found the 'Give Me A Bonus' rant in Pachycom could tell you.
03:35 While it's unclear which developer left the message, one thing is for certain,
03:39 and that's that they were not very happy in the slightest. In this mammoth-sized text file,
03:43 which took up nearly 5% of the game's entire storage space, the developer rages about their
03:47 employers and how they've changed things at a moment's notice, and also how they wanted a
03:51 completely different audio track for the game. They conclude this tirade, which also includes
03:55 some rather blue-coloured masturbation jokes, with a call for a pay bump before screaming
03:59 to themselves, and now those lucky enough to have found this message via a hex editor.
04:04 It's pretty clear that the dev never wanted these messages to be found originally, but
04:07 hilariously enough, when the MSX version of the game was released, another, albeit shorter,
04:12 message was also included in the game's files.
04:15 5. Destroying Billboards - Mercenaries 2
04:18 While this might, on the surface, not appear to be much of an easter egg, seeing as the game
04:22 literally instructs you to do so, much like the onion and a very specific ogre, this entry has
04:27 layers, all of which spoke of real-life tears behind the scenes. Did I just make a Shrek joke
04:32 in 2022? Apparently so, good times. You see, for some greasy reason or another,
04:37 Pandemic Studios were tasked by EA to include billboards within the otherwise outstanding
04:41 sequel that were used to promote real-world items, thus turning this carnival of carnage and chaos
04:46 into the wheel of capitalism. As you can imagine, this move likely left a lot of devs feeling hard
04:51 done by, that their game was now being seen as little more than a glorified advert in the eyes
04:55 of their publisher, and so went about making things right the only way they knew how, by letting you
05:00 destroy each and every one of these billboards, and rewarding you for doing so. As part of the
05:04 'Digital Man' trophy, players were challenged to, alongside unlocking every secret component
05:09 and all shop items, the complete and utter destruction of the 40 in-game billboards.
05:14 Thanks to them adding in this requirement alongside so many other pieces, it was impossible
05:18 for EA to notice the dig, but a dig it was nonetheless.
05:21 4. Timmy Vermicelli - Driver 3
05:25 It wasn't exactly a secret that Atari had quite a lot of contempt for the likes of Grand Theft Auto,
05:30 who in their eyes were the ones to beat when it came to pumping out their sequel to the beloved
05:34 Driver series of games. Yet while much more attention should have been spent on, you know,
05:38 making sure the game bloody worked, the devs decided to knuckle down and make their intentions
05:42 known by routinely mocking the current crown holder GTA however they could. Their most blatant
05:48 and altogether petty dig came in the form of Timmy Vermicelli, a parody of Tommy Vercetti from GTA
05:53 Vice City so thinly veiled you'd think it was made of pure ghost. Here, Timmy was a hidden pedestrian
05:59 that could be found in all three cities, and would reward the player with special perks if he could
06:03 be cleared out of said areas. Subtle it was not, get rewarded for killing GTA, and because perks
06:09 such as not damaging your own vehicle when crashing into others were so good, it was clear that the
06:14 devs wanted you to seek out this large-handed loser. As a final jab, Timmy is shown to be wearing
06:19 inflatable water wings, a reference to the fact that Tommy can't swim in the GTA games. It's a
06:24 shame then that it was GTA that was the one left floating after the tidal wave of disaster that was
06:29 Driver 3 launched and promptly sank. Number three, what is the square root of a fish? Skullgirls
06:35 Encore. Now this easter egg falls into a rather strange place on the old spite-o-meter, as on the
06:40 one hand this secret was included only on cracked versions of the almighty Skullgirls video game,
06:45 meaning that you'd have to be pretty spiteful to the devs lab Zero Games in order to find it,
06:49 however it also turned out that this easter egg of sorts was actually put there by the devs
06:53 themselves as an anti-piracy measure to stick one to those looking to play for free.
06:57 Just a few days after the game was released, Lab Zero were flooded with strange images and
07:02 questions based around a text message that popped up after beating the game. The message read "What
07:07 is the square root of a fish? Now I'm sad", and seemed to have no answer that could be found within
07:11 the game itself, and players, as one would expect, wanted to know more. But the answer was a bit of a
07:16 shock when Lab Zero responded on Twitter stating "Oh that? It means you should probably buy the
07:21 game instead of pirating it", leading to much ridicule of the players in question. A fair play
07:26 to Lab Zero for dealing with it in a relaxed manner, but the real meaning and the ire that
07:30 must have been felt by the devs is no joke at all.
07:32 2. Ha Ha Ha Room - Dirty Harry
07:36 Do I feel lucky, Will? Do ya? Punk?
07:40 We all know these famous words, spit out with the utmost spite by rock-jawed Clint Eastwood in the
07:45 all-timer of a film Dirty Harry, but it seems that this oft-quoted cinematic milestone takes
07:50 on a totally different meaning when it came to the Dirty Harry video game that came out for the NES.
07:55 For here, it seems that your luck has truly run out should you end up in the now infamous Ha Ha Ha
08:01 Easter Egg Room, which one can accidentally stumble into while exploring one of the many,
08:05 many apartment blocks in the game. In this room, the door to leave has been replaced with a bare
08:09 wall with Ha Ha Ha written on it, meaning that escape is quite literally impossible,
08:14 and will force anyone looking to leave this prison to reset the game entirely.
08:18 It's one thing to include a joke room or secret that pokes fun at the player,
08:22 but to bar all progress entirely and force a complete restart is a pretty vicious move,
08:26 no matter how you cut it. Thankfully, the room only appears near the start of the game, but still,
08:30 absolute boo all over this.
08:32 1. Created by Warren Robinette - Adventure
08:36 So, how could an Easter Egg comprising solely of the words 'Created by Warren Robinette'
08:41 ever be construed as a secret made out of spite? Well, my friend, this is an example of a developer
08:47 hitting back at his bosses in a manner they specifically told him not to. You see, at this
08:52 point in time, publishers Atari were, well how best to put this, the actual worst. Not only were
08:57 they spending ludicrous amounts of money like it was going out of style, but precisely zero of these
09:02 record-setting profits were being given to the developers. In fact, it seemed as if the higher
09:06 ups truly wanted to keep their power and control on top of the mountain, as they demanded that no
09:10 developer ever be credited in their games. As you can imagine, this didn't go down well with some of
09:16 the devs, especially Warren Robinette, who took it upon himself to include an Easter Egg in the
09:20 Atari 2600 title, Adventure, as a digital middle finger to his employers, declaring that he made
09:26 the game in question. What makes this even more impressive is that it was also one of the first
09:30 examples of a video game Easter Egg in general, making it a spiteful moment in history done to
09:35 highlight the injustices of those at the top of the industry at the time.
09:39 And there we go my friends, those were 8 video game Easter Eggs made out of spite. I hope that
09:42 you enjoyed that and please let me know what you thought about it down in the comments section
09:46 below. As always I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Twitter @RetroJWith0, or you
09:50 can swing by Liv and Let's Dice where I do all of my streaming outside of work, and it'd be great to
09:54 see you over there my friends. But before I go, I just want to say one thing, I hope you're treating
09:58 yourself with love and respect because you deserve all the best things in life and do not let anything
10:02 or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright? You're a massive ledge and I want you to go out there and
10:06 utterly smash it today. As always I've been Jules, you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll
10:10 I'll speak to you soon. Bye.