Introduction
The goal of a game developer is to fabricate an entirely false reality and immerse you in it, so of course, they’re not telling you some things. However, some of it ends up looking a little sinister. Hi folks, it’s Zaid Ikram, and today on Aura Riot, 10 dark secrets were revealed by game makers. Now, before we get going, the games industry can be a dark place, and there’s a lot of bad stuff going on. That’s not what we’re talking about today. The dark secrets I want to discuss are more like funny, weird glitches left in the game that come off a little bit ominous, I think is a good word, maybe a little malevolent even.
Dynamic Resolution Tricks
Starting at number 10, it’s a 1080p trick for Wipeout HD. Back when the PS3 was still new, getting games to run at 1080p wasn’t always easy. The expectation was for games to have cutting-edge visuals and a solid frame rate, which is still a challenge for many game developers even now. The PS3 was especially difficult to develop because of its code, which is notoriously impenetrable. It has exotic hardware that uses seven floating co-processors. It was all meant to be very cutting-edge, but it was more of a challenge than anything else for developers.
Wipeout 3 HD was a game that seemed to beat the PS3 curse. It was an HD game that ran at a consistent 60 frames per second with no drops. At least, that’s how it appears. In reality, the game would switch between resolutions using the console’s hardware scaler. It was a form of dynamic resolution scaling that we see in games today, but without any of the frame skips or visual messiness you’d see with that kind of technology.
Even then, what makes Wipeout HD unique, at least according to this Eurogamer article from Digital Foundry, is that the game has a dynamic frame buffer, which keeps the frame rate high and masks the dynamic resolution changes. Keep in mind, the devs did all this stuff before technology like DLSS and frame generation were common. This was all very cutting-edge. It’s easy to look at this and shrug your shoulders because it’s really common now, but on the PS3, this is conjuring dark magic.
In all seriousness, it was incredibly impressive, and I remember Wipeout 3 HD going, “How in the hell does this look so much better than everything else?”
Opening Logos Deception
And number nine, the real reason they have all those opening logos and titles. Do you know that endless parade of boring logos, warnings, and disclaimers? Do you ever wonder why you get that when you boot up a new game? Well, there’s the boring answer that a lot of that stuff is mandated by the publisher and any partners involved in making the game. But if you want something a little darker, look no further than a comment made by a developer posting anonymously in one of those game dev Q&A-type forum threads.
This, along with Reddit, is where I’m getting all this from, and a lot of this information can’t be verified, so understand it’s not confirmed. So, take it with a grain of salt. That goes for the entire list. I’m working with what I have, people. But there’s a username, “Sho’Nuff.” He responds to a question about long-opening movies by talking about their experience working on an unnamed Xbox original game. This game would install to the internal hard drive at startup, which was unheard of at the time and a violation of Xbox’s TRC, or technical requirements checklist.
They were not supposed to do that. This caused such a stink that Ed Fries, Microsoft’s VP of game publishing at the time, came down to yell at them about it. And how did they fix it? Well, by removing the install screen and saying that the licenser is making a hold on this frame for about 20 seconds. That’s all they did, and somehow they got away with it. I doubt games mostly have long intros because they’re secretly installed without telling you, but hey, if one game did it, who’s to say?
Legacy Code Haunts Halo Infinite
And number eight, Halo Infinite still has the Marathon code in it. This one’s pretty wild. I’ve heard of games retaining code from old games, like how modern Call of Duty games still have some Quake code in there, but this goes even further back. In a Reddit thread on our GameDev, a user who claims to have worked on Halo 5, named Randy N., asserts that 343 Studios were so deathly afraid of losing the Halo feel that they refused to revamp the aging Halo engine. According to him, the code is a mess of multiple different scripting languages stitched together.
It was so bad that they went so far as to say, “I can’t believe any Halo game ever shipped.” The thing that shocked me is just how far back the remnants of the Halo code go. As the user puts it, there is code in the engine that goes back to one of Bungie’s first games, Marathon, from 1992. It gets worse. Another user named Chip Snapper chimed in, mentioning the code for C Series appears in a few headers in Halo Infinite, which comes from Convergent Series, which was a name the founders of Bungie came up with before calling it Bungie. There is a code in Halo Infinite that is older than Bungie’s entire existence. Now, that’s tech debt.
Silent Sound Fixes
At number seven, silence is golden. Some of the most eerie glitches are the ones hiding in plain sight. As described by Keith K., a programmer from Digital Eclipse, for a Gamedeveloper.com article, there was a persistent bug in the Mega Man Legacy Collection where the first sound that got played would get horribly garbled or just not play properly. As usual with stories about game development, they were aware of the issue but never found the actual cause of it because they just ran out of time. But they couldn’t ship the game with a bug like that.
It messes up the first sound of the game. So, they came up with a clever solution. They just inserted 1 second of sound before the opening title, which was completely silent. Problem solved. It’s a clever solution, but it’s kind of weird. And like, yeah, game devs can just insert inaudible sound files in the games whenever they want. Any of these games could easily be sending us subliminal messages at any time, and we just don’t know it. I mean, yeah, people would know about it. Guys go through the game files all the time, and everyone knows at this point that subliminal messages are kind of bunk. They’re bunk, right? Right? It’s a funny scenario to imagine, though.
Deceptive Texture Quality
At number six, sometimes games lie to you about settings. Another interesting little revelation from gamedeveloper.com, this time from a Remy Queenin, who doesn’t say what this game is from. Honestly, it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I looked it up, and it’s not anything noteworthy. But the actual secrets are a little sinister. Not going to lie. So, here’s what happened. They were working on an RTS game from around 2007. Everything was going smoothly until the last day before the deadline to send in the gold master CD for printing. At that point, they realized that the German language translation was making the game too big. They had planned for all the languages to be about the same size, but German took longer, and it made the total file size of the translation just a little too big.
They had less than a day to figure out how to squeeze out the space to make everything fit, and their solution was, well, pretty deceptive. This game had texture quality settings, pretty standard stuff back then. And if you know anything about game development, you know how much space high-res textures take up. So, they were looking at their levels and just deleted the high-resolution textures and replaced them with medium-resolution textures. It’s only in Germany, but if you’re playing the game on maxed-out settings, there will be one level that looks conspicuously worse. Even if you got all your settings switched to high, it’s an ingenious solution, but it calls the entire graphics selection menu into question. Can any of these sliders and settings be trusted?
Invisible Framerate Counters
At number five is the just off-screen framerate counter. So, just one more from gamedeveloper.com. This one comes from Martin Turton, talking about a port of a PS2 and PSP version of a racing game. The handling of their versions of the games didn’t feel right, according to QA, but the developers just didn’t notice a difference. They spent weeks trying to hunt down the reason why the game felt different to play before they noticed the developer build of the game had a framerate counter while the QA version didn’t.
After some testing, they realized that was the problem. When the framerate counter was there, the game performed how it was supposed to, and when it wasn’t, the handling was wrong. Without proper time to fix the root problem, they just threw up their hands and left the framerate counter on the screen. But moved it just out of the visible play area. Even if it’s something as benign as that, there’s something a little weird and unsettling about UI elements just being outside of your viewable range. It’s always there, like the ghost in PT. You just never know it. I mean, that’s overdramatic, but it’s kind of weird.
Also, what the hell is that? There are a few bugs I have heard of that make that little amount of sense.
NPCs as Information Boards
At number four, characters with tiny information boards in them that allow them to speak. In an r/GameDev thread about the dumbest shortcut, you’ve ever taken as a game dev, a user by the name of “I am not a British spy” had an especially interesting answer to that question. They never revealed what game they worked on, but it was a “semi-popular” platformer. All was going smoothly in development, as these things tend to go, but less than 2 weeks before their final deadline, a shareholder came up with a brilliant idea that the characters should be able to speak.
They had less than 2 weeks left to develop the game, and there was no time to come up with a whole new dialogue system. So, instead of working harder, they worked smarter. The game already had a system where you could read information boards for hints, so they just took those boards, shrunk them down, and put them inside NPCs. So, whenever you talk to somebody in the game, you’re just reading a tiny information board masquerading as a character. The implications for the lore are staggering for whatever game this is. I wish I knew, but after some searching, I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Maybe you guys have the answer. I’m genuinely curious.
Mysterious Wii Reboots
At number three, the Wii resets constantly. You probably heard about Mario Wii on the Xbox and how it silently reboots the console while loading as a way to get around memory constraints, right? Well, you’re hearing about it now. But it was one of those stories that was all over the place a few years back. What you might not know is that it was not the only piece of game software doing this. At least according to comments on this Hackaday article, this isn’t coming from the developers themselves because Nintendo is notoriously tight-lipped about pretty much everything they do behind the scenes.
But the people who post on this site tend to be modders or hackers who understand the inner workings of consoles like this, and I’m inclined to trust them. According to user DL Carrier, the Wii has a crazy number of reboots, and it’s not just when loading a game. Simply switching between menus can necessitate multiple reboots, which does explain why the Wii can feel a little slow switching between menus sometimes. A guy named Potato further explains that each program on the Wii is its operating system. Dam Tech follows up by explaining that the Wii has several little operating systems they call IOSes because they’re each separate operating systems rather than programs.
That Wii is forced to reset every time you load into a different one. It’s so weird that a system is just doing something this drastic without us knowing it. In reality, it’s a pretty common practice for a lot of things that are lacking in system memory. Arcade cabinets reset all the time, and it wasn’t anything to worry about. Still, knowing this kind of puts me on edge about turning on the Wii. What else is it doing and not telling me about?
People in Treasure Chests
At number two, when treasure chests are people. It’s bad enough that you have to deal with mimics. Now you’re telling me the treasure chests are also people? Ah, come on. In this r/GameDev thread for the dumbest shortcuts you’ve ever taken as a game dev, a user named Trum said something interesting about the treasure chest. Only one level of the game had chests in them. So instead of making an entirely new script for opening a chest, they made chests that are just enemies that can’t move, and their only attack was a close-range melee that would always miss you but hit themselves with splash damage, enough to make the chest disappear and leave a reward.
That’s kind of disturbing, right? But on top of that, another user named Zish added something even stranger. Three treasures appear post-game in EarthBound, the quirky SNES cult favorite RPG. But because the game can’t make new chests appear in places, these new chests are just people who say, “Nest open the treasure box” when you talk to them and give you an item. Just imagine being one of those NPCs, forever trapped in a single location, aware of your existence, but unable to speak or do anything but give the main character an item when they talk to you. It’d be the worst episode of Black Mirror ever made.
Unsolved Code Mysteries
And finally, at number one, the code is probably a disaster. It cannot be understated how big of a mess the code of most games is. I’m not talking about complicated or confusing. I mean, like, next-level incantations to get anything to work type stuff. Many of the developers on r/GameDev talk about their prior experience working with messy games in this thread about a secret people should know about. But the part that interested me starts with user Glutitis Maximus, who gets the ball rolling by talking about messed-up code in games. There are some amazing replies here, like from Mr. Grady Sir, who talks about the code that has the comment, “This function doesn’t do anything at all, but if you remove it, nothing will work.
Do not remove it.” Like the 20 developers before you tried to do. They took the time to try to figure out what the function was, and it did nothing. Even though it was code that didn’t do anything, if you removed it, the entire game would fall apart. A perfect example of this kind of nonsense comes from Chris Windguard, a guy who worked at EA. A NASCAR game, they didn’t specify which one, required that a field goal post be placed under the world because if they took it out, it would break the game. The NASCAR game, by the way, was built using old Madden code, and somehow it came to be that if the game didn’t have a field goal, the game would not function.
So when people say making games is hard and that trying to fix bugs can be sometimes almost impossible, I am inclined to believe them. You might as well be trying to predict the future with chicken blood or something. It makes about as much sense as some of these game engines do. Don’t even get me started about the fact that Bethesda is still running Gamebryo, a 1990s engine. Yeah, they call it the Creation Engine, but Starfield is still running on this engine.
Bonus: NBA Jam’s Save Game Ruse
I’ve got a couple of bonuses for you as well. NBA Jam had this ridiculous save game lie. It was revealed by Chris Kirby, a developer on NBA Jam Tournament Edition on Sega Genesis. They had already ordered 250,000 game carts from the manufacturer before realizing the game’s save system was completely broken. Midway, the game’s current publisher, understandably freaked out because they had just ordered thousands of game carts that were essentially broken.
They tried multiple methods to get the game to work, including manually adding hardware to every cart to fix them, but nothing worked. The devs did manage to find a solution. You had to play the games in a very odd and specific order, and the save system would sort of work. What did they do? They added some extra instructions in the box explaining how to get the save system to work and called it a feature, which is real marketing, folks.
Bonus: Wing Commander Error Message Trick
And finally, Wing Commander. Thanks for playing. We’ve talked about this one before, but it’s funny as hell. It was explained by Ken Demarest from Origin Software. Every time they’d exit the game out of DOS, an error code would pop up. You don’t want your game crashing every time you exit it, so they tried to fix it but couldn’t come up with a solution. So, what did they do? They just changed the error message. Instead of reading EMM 386 memory manager error, which if you remember the DOS era, whoa, you remember EMM 386 errors. They just changed it to say, “Thank you for playing Wing Commander,” which is freaking brilliant because, at this point, you’re done with the game. It doesn’t matter that there was an EMM 386 memory manager error. Honestly, the slickest and funniest possible solution.
