Post spots in retro 3D games you can't actually go to, serve no purpose and are otherwise entirely unexplained and unreferenced by anything or anyone else in the game but clearly were supposed to be something.Picrel: Quest 64 is basically an entire videogame of this concept but my favorite example from it is this big, dilapidated, almost haunted house looking building in one of the endgame towns. It's the only one like it in the entire game and it's tucked away in the far back corner of this town and gated off with no way in. You never go back to it later on and none of the NPCs mention it, there's not even a sign in front of it you can read. It's just there. Shit like this happened a lot in the early 3D days and it's always been interesting to me.
>>12144247Could very well have been something earlier in development, or more likely intended to serve some purpose which never wound up getting added to the game.For me, it was the little door-like area in this room in Kirby's Adventure, stage 2-5. There's two fireball enemies in this room, one of which is in the little door, but as a kid I was absolutely convinced that there was some way to get to and enter that little door.
>>12144247>>12144659I can't think of anything at the moment, but I really love stuff like thisIt really gets your imagination going
>>12144247that's where the fire nigga from the tunnel used to stay at
>>12144247The original everquest was full of stuff like this. For example, kind of famously, in one area there is a giant dillapidated chess board (it's in a place called butcherblock mountain.)There is a bit of a schism in how this stuf is looked at, because everquest 2 does explain some of the stuff, but a lot of fans don't even really consider that canon to classic everquest, which is also getting content to this day that a big chunk of the fan community don't care about.The "vanilla" servers, as they are, are composited from available information and the client, but the original server states are long gone, so a lot of the recreations are from memory, it's really interesting that this game exists as a patchwork of memories and available information.If anyone wants to give it a go, look up project 1999, there is still a dedicated community and the game is incredibly interesting.
why was it empty? perfect place for a key but nah. annoyed me to death as a kid
>>12144247Thus little area with the ice key blocked off in Banjo Kazooie. I tried so hard to collect everything in that game, but I just couldn’t do it.
>>12145319iirc it was supposed to be collectable through the Stop'n'Swop feature which turned out to be technically unfeasible.
>>12145319funny enough it was collectable, same as the door in the sand world, the little shark island in the crab world and all the other eggs. blew my mind how people figured out the cheat codes years later.
Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver has a lot of that
>>12144247Goldeneye dam island was literally that
>>12145327It was technically feasible and it even worked out great but nintendo saw the code in the bootloader in donkey kong 64 during prerelease reviews and told rare they weren't allowed to do it.The thing about the transfer window being shortened in later N64 revisions wasn't the main issue, nintendo just didn't want people yanking out their cartridges really fast and potentially damaging the system and having to deal with that
>>12145328It was most likely by data mining the game. Either that or the developers eventually leaked them.
>>12145328>>12145624These cheat codes were encrypted in the ROM so it wasn't possible to just datamine them by reading raw text, whoever found them likely had to do some disassembly first
>>12145319>>12145328>>12145624>>12145631living on gamefaqs during n64 era was insaneicekey was first found by using a levitate codethe sandcastle codes were found by subdrag and icemarionintendo later put the codes in the magazineif anyone is curious, stop n swop works in bk1 and was never altered to not use it
>>12145642Back in the gamefaqs days everyone was finding out about these mysteries but nobody had the skills to actually look into the code properly, it's insane how much the tech advanced in the past 10 years to allow us to get to debunk all these things in detail.It's also pretty cool that Nintendo NDAs expired and now we have ex-rare devs literally posting info about this stuff in youtube video comments, for instance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHQbswTkEjQ&lc=Ugz2Rz91ub59Mk3s0Z94AaABAg&pp=0gcJCSIANpG00pGi>So this is NOT the way you’re supposed to do this. Removing/inserting carts with the power on can damage carts and console. This was a significant factor in Nintendo telling us to take the feature out of DK64 and scrap it altogether. SnS works by (1) Switching the console OFF, (2) removing a SnS game cart and inserting another compatible SnS game cart, (3) Switch the console back on again. The carts must only be exchanged with the power OFF! Anyway, this is the first time this feature has ever been seen working in any form outside Rare in Twycross/UK. We had planned for 6 Rare games to work with SnS, and if you collected all 6 then the last game would send a “super-code” back to the first one (Banjo Kazooie) to complete the circle. Zelda was never intended to be one of those games………. (PS, i write this as a Rare employee who was a member of the Banjo development team and the actual inventor of Stop ‘n Swop). Enjoy, but please be careful with your equipment folks.
>>12144659Neat but not 3D>>12145169Not 3D>>12145319Explained in game after you get 100% and kind of also in Tooie, we also know what it is now and it was intended to be gotten so I'd say this doesn't count.>>12145187>>12145593This is more the kind of thing I'm talking about. The Goldeneye one not exactly since it's pretty obvious it's just background detail, but the Diddy Kong one absolutely. Something clearly was supposed to go there, there's no reason for it to exist otherwise.There's plenty of stuff in these games I guess that yeah you can't go there but it is just for flavor or background set dressing. Perhaps I should have described better in the OP. The big distinction I'm looking for is the attribute of something very obviously supposed to happen at these locations that probably got cut during development, like clearly you'd get an item here, or maybe this is where a cut dungeon or area was, or a cutscene, etc. Why is that random hole in the wall there in Diddy Kong Racing? Seems like its where youd get a key just like in the other tracks. Why is there a random haunted house in that village in Quest 64. There aren't any others, the village itself doesn't have a haunted theme and you can go inside literally every other house or building in the game even though most of the time they're completely empty.
>>12145656And forgot the juicy part:>When we tested it on that revision of the N64 hardware we had reliable results up to about 23 seconds of power-off time. If more games had come out using the feature, and we had to tell people about it then we’d have claimed a 10 second limit to give a big buffer. Quite honestly, 5 seconds would be enough for someone to lazily cut power, remove/replace carts, power on again. Nintendo didn’t spot what we were doing when we were getting certification for BK which is why the feature is fully enabled there, however our next release was DK64 and they spotted the DK64 cart “doing something weird” at boot up, asked us what it was, we explained SnS to them and they said “NO”. Can’t blame them really. If that hadn’t happened then DK64 would have connected to BK, and then Banjo Tooie after it. I don’t 100% recall what the other 3 games of the 6 we envisioned would be, but Perfect Dark and Conker were contenders. Possibly Jet Force Gemini as well but i don’t recall exactly when we released that one. Anyway, go easy on your hardware and have fun folks……..
>>12145656https://patents.google.com/patent/US6820265B1/en
>>12145658>The Goldeneye one not exactly since it's pretty obvious it's just background detailI think I recall somebody finding out the code had a bunch of deleted actors as well as a working (or perhaps broken) machine gun on the island
>>12145112Neverwinter Nights also had a thing for giant chessboards. They were used in 1 or 2 puzzles, but if you looked in the toolset EVERY level had a chessboard biome. I've seen them in other RPGs too. Kinda weird how they showed up in a ton of RPGs/MMOs in the 2000's era then disappeared completely. Must be a hold over from old fantasy novels.
>Road in the desert in SA ends at this building, never occupied, cars never in the parking lot, AI cars don't even approach the roadWHAT IS IT
>>12146157It's the unfinished Stop N Swop where you can "swop" to characters from the other GTA games. The concept was done much gayer in GTA 5.
>>12144659Isn't it supposed to be a fireplace?
>That one tiny island above the top secret area
>>12146215wasnt that the laser suit island?
>>12146135i could not wrap my head around the random ass chessboard that didnt end up mattering whatsoever.
Army Men 3D, with the mysterious key in the bedroom MP level being the most obvious example.Context: There's a key on the multiplayer map "Clean Up This Mess" with a key pickup placed hidden away from the main battlefield. As far as I'm aware, nobody has found a use for it.Additionally, in the single-player campaign, many of the maps have stuff placed far out of bounds that the player can't interact with or see unless they get OOB. The maps tend to be extremely large, but with only a small section of the map being playable.
whatever was going on behind that door
Too lazy to find and post image but Phantasy Star Online was the king of this. No matter how much you explored you always felt there were hidden areas and secrets tantalisingly out of reach. Particularly in 2nd level, caves, there's a room with one of those bizarre enemies that merges together, and a door you can't go through iirc. Same on Lower Mines, extremely liminal and spooky environments.
>>12146243wasnt it solved at the end of monkey island 2?
>>12144247This weird cave entrance in Bomberman 64.
Wow and EQ have alot of places that have nothing in them, most likely to be used for future stuff that never got implemented. Its fun to explore them
This random number with an arrow in Silent Hill 2.I don't know if it was meant to unlock a new area or something but it's strange since this number is unique and is not mentioned at all in the entire game.I've only seen someone mentioning it on Reddit.
>>12144247iirc Quest is like that because they ran out of both time and budget. They were going for something great but just didn't have enough resources. You can sort of see the vision even though the game is half baked
>>12146998is this number mirrored and upside down?
>>12144247I find gta3 to be a good example. I always want to explore all the building interiors and stuff, but it's just not meant to be. Basically most 6/7th Gen games with cities in them are filled with inaccessible areas.
>>12145658>The Goldeneye one not exactly since it's pretty obvious it's just background detailNot according to the developers:>There was talk about being able to drive a boat there, but we never got around to implementing the boat…>I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps in when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.
>>12146998Given the amount of detail and thought put into SH2, I wouldn't be surprised if it had significance at some point. Then again it could very well just be random decoration. It's quite far into development so I would assume it's there, but it could be worth checking the dumped preview proto of the game to see if it's in there.
>>12147098Maybe. It also seems that there's a "0" number on the top of that window. It's weird.>>12147172Never looked into that preview proto. I'm gonna check it out, thanks anon.
>>12144247>Picrel: Quest 64 is basically an entire videogame of this conceptI'm playing this right now and this is too trueEven with 100 spirits scattered to find in this world 70% of it is desolate and completely without purpose. Just empty houses, empty fields, long stretching cavernous paths of nothing but random monster encounters.It's eerie because it feels like it's supposed to be more.There's this guy tucked away in one of the many usually vacant hotel rooms, same height and stature as brian, and he was clearly conceived as an important rival magician character, but he has 1 line of dialogue and a small appearance in a cutscene towards the end.Not just him, but literally every npc has a unique model and name. It feels like there was originally intended to be a lot more character interaction and reward.It fills me with wonder what this game could have been if they just let it cook a bit longer.
>>12144247OoT has a number of such spots, but probably the most mysterious is the underwater path in Zora's Domain leading to a strange square alcove. It's too deep for Young Link to reach even with a Golden Scale, and Adult Link normally can't go down there because the water is frozen. Through a glitch, it's possible to go under the ice and walk down there with the Iron Boots, but there's absolutely nothing there, and no one knows what it would've originally contained or why it's there.
In Daggerfall there are two big mountains in two random locations on the map out in the middle of the wilderness, one in Tigonus and one on Direnni island. These two locations and the cliffs of Menevia on the western edge of Menevia are the only places in the base game with enough elevation change for you to be able to fall off and take damage without jumping. There is nothing at either location.It's extremely bizarre because Daggerfall has numerous hard to find locations out in the middle of the wilderness like witch covens that you either have to travel to with directions BoF3 desert style, or levitate around in concentric circles looking for to find them, but those have no cool elevation changes. Other than the cliffs of Menevia (which is pretty close to towns), you're just not gonna find this stuff unless you read about it online.The base game also displays glitched towns on the world map on the far east side of the world that don't exist, you can't move your mouse far enough over to attempt to fast travel to them, and you can't walk to them, because they are beyond the world boundary. North of the river (Wrothgarian Mountains), you are blocked by an invisible wall. South of the river, there is a sharp terrain elevation increase which coincides with the invisible wall.You can't really observe this in game, but if you convert the heightmap to a human-readable format, there's a daedric character randomly placed in the Wrothgarian mountains formed with elevation changes.Oh yeah, and also Cybiades, an island with nothing but one dungeon on it that no quests point to, so you can never learn its location or fast travel to it. Only way to go there is to water-walk or levitate MILES across the ocean from the mainland.https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:PlacesYou can see both mountains, the cliffs of Menevia, and the Daedric rune valley here:https://i.imgur.com/gp9qAIe.pnghttps://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:CybiadesDon't ask about the Furniture Stores.
>>12146190Is that true?
>>12147690That's a spoopy image. Begs for a creepypasta legend to be attached to it.
>>12147707It's moreso that the entire portion of the game between San Fiero and Los Venturas is unfinished. I vaguely remember there being action replay codes to turn on additional gangs that had territory there.>>12147710Wait until you find out that there's a literal hole in the invisible wall somewhere in the extreme southeast of the map where you can get out of bounds and see... things. There are only a few posts on the internet talking about it.
>>12147717Interesting. I'm quite convinced that Elden Ring referenced this with those blue streaks of light in Liurnia.
>>12147609As a self proclaimed lore master of OoTs development and earlier forms(I'm the guy that bought the F-Zero cart that had all the 1997 assets on it, mentioned it in the beta thread thats up rn) one mystery I have never been able to crack is Zora's Domain. It's really odd how you beat the Forest and Fire Temple and bring life back to those respective areas but Zora's just stays frozen and nothing happens. I have never found any sort of pre-release material or game code or anything that even suggests it was supposed to ever go back to the way it was and frankly it leads me to believe that the devs genuinely just forgot or ran out of time. There's actually a lot of evidence that suggests it was one of the last major additions to the games world, early versions of Hyrule Field don't even have the exit that's supposed to lead up to it, Jabu Jabu was originally located in Lake Hylia according to map data, and the Ice Cavern was supposed to be a full sized proper dungeon. To me it seems like an idea they had that they liked enough to move forward with but haphazardly threw together because it was a late addition, they decided they didn't want to finish the ice dungeon so they chucked in what they had as an excuse to get the iron boots(which further screwed over the ice arrows which is why they randomly got moved to the Gerudo Training Grounds), moved Jabu Jabu there to give it a little more purpose and either ran out of time or just thought it was good enough with that random cave underneath the ice and Zora's Domain never getting unfrozen left behind as consequences.The largest portion of the game's development in the final year was simply shuffling things around so the way you go through the game was coherent and the addition of Zora's Domain seemed to throw a real wrench into that. Interesting stuff nonetheless.
Killer7 famously had two thirds of its plot cut/never finished, with tons of content showcased in trailers never making it into the game proper.
>>12147904I really enjoy these analyses Anon
>>12145613Yeah the gimmick was cool but I don't know why Rare didn't just think to use the Memory Pak to store the data on instead
>>12148536The gimmick was more cool and secret, probably certification meant needing to have the memory pack icon on the box, implement the save management interface, etcMeanwhile just swapping the game cart after turning off the console felt more mystical
>>12145663Yeah iirc it was meant to be a level objective that got cut late
I'm glad I'm not the only one that spent hours on Quest 64 thinking about how I was going ito go nside houses and places there and thinking there was so much more game there.>>12145624>>12145319>>12145642I didn't know these were found before Nintendo officially published how to get them.But yeah BK was the first game I ever 100% and that ice key and the ??? eggs from the ending drove me insane. When the codes were published I was so happy. And so disappointed when BT didn't use any of that. I guess that's why it became such a huge legend that lives on to this day about what it could've been despite that it was likely something very small in the end had they actually done it.
>>12147742This is like that New Vegas horror ARG but real wtf
>>12148567I still remember the stop n swop discussions on gamefaqs, it was crazy. They had permanent threads with research and speculation but nothing ever got done because nobody had the skills to do reverse engineering then and dev NDAs meant they had to shut up for at least 10 years
>>12148570man, the memories. gamefaqs used to be so far. there was a bunch of fake dataminers photoshopping their "findings", with endless flame wars over their veracity. I remember a guy who posted faked screenshots of an unused Perfect Dark map (Ark Hives, supposedly a remake of the Archives map from Goldeneye) and the arguments went on for years until he finally admitted he just wanted to take people for a ride.
>>12148592*so fun, even
>>12148592It was also very whimsical, video games were relatively new and we didn't have over 30 years of corporate evidence so even in the L is real 2141 threads many people actually believed the numbers meant dates and such
>>12148597there's no place like that on the net anymore. the rules enforcement being so literal made everything a cat & mouse game and if you fell for trolling or bullshit it was 100% on you. so much of it would get killed on sight on any platform today. just try to imagine the Modhaters being allowed to run operations here. lol>video games were relatively newgamefaqs already had a Classic Gaming board in 2000 :D
>>12148627You're talking about rules but it's more that datamining makes it impossible, unless you lean into it like with Toby Fox games.
>>12144247Areas like this frustrate me tbqh. I'd much rather have pointless rooms I can explore than ones I can't.
Etemon treehouse has a 3D door but you can't open it.
>>121504373D assets on pre-rendered backgrounds are the most objectively undeniable flagHas anyone extracted the background to see what's behind the 3D door?
>>12150456There's nothing behind the door.
>>12150287you're right, but I was just reminiscing about old forum culture.
>>12150437this reminds me of the Programmer's Door from chrono cross, the debug room had that mysterious locked door that could not be opened.I remember quite a lot of discussion about that and even a whole faq, in the end it lead to nothing, probably something scrapped at the last minute, it was in a debug room so it's likely they wanted to put something behind it but didn't have the time
>>12151624Correction: it was the developer room from one of the endings rather than a debug room, if I recall correctly
