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00:00Hey! What are you looking at?
00:05Oh! You pervert!
00:07Welcome to Mojo Plays, and today we're counting down our picks for the Easter eggs that you're not likely to
00:13see pop up next time you log into a brand new video game.
00:16Whether they violated copyright, crossed questionable boundaries, or are just too old school for modern publisher sensibilities.
00:28Before we begin, we publish new content all week long, so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to
00:34get notified about our latest videos.
00:38I, Warren Robinette. Adventure.
00:40Before Easter eggs became an expected part of gaming, Warren Robinette was hiding one for a considerably more practical reason.
00:48He wanted credit.
00:49I was a video game designer at Atari when I was young.
00:53I designed a game called Adventure, which was the first action-adventure game.
00:58Atari famously didn't name its programmers, so Robinette buried a tiny object inside Adventure that could be carried to a
01:05secret room displaying, created by Warren Robinette.
01:08It's commonly regarded as the Easter egg that popularized the entire concept.
01:13Today, developers thankfully get credits without needing to smuggle their names into the code.
01:18And if somebody deliberately inserted an unauthorized credit screen to protest management, there'd probably be a meeting about it before
01:25lunch.
01:26Back then, though, one annoyed programmer helped create an entire gaming tradition.
01:31That was a pretty juicy secret to keep to myself.
01:34I'd quit.
01:35Right after I finished Adventure, I was pissed.
01:37The art of the sequel tease.
01:39Various.
01:40There was something magical about discovering that the game you loved had secretly been advertising its sequel all along.
01:47Batman Arkham Asylum is perhaps the gold standard.
01:51Hidden behind an unmarked wall in Quincy Sharp's office were actual plans for what would become Arkham City.
02:02The room was so obscure that players failed to find it for months, forcing Rocksteady to reveal it themselves.
02:09Nowadays, the sequel would probably have a teaser trailer, logo reveal, countdown, developer livestream, sponsored tweet, and 17 Reddit leaks
02:17before you even finish the first game.
02:19Hidden sequel teases still exist, but the days of quietly burying your next major announcement behind a suspicious wall feel
02:26increasingly endangered.
02:30Clinton and Gore shoot hoops.
02:32NBA Jam.
02:33Remember when putting real politicians into a sports game required no elaborate crossover event whatsoever?
02:39Console versions of NBA Jam let players unlock then-President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore through secret codes,
02:47allowing the leaders of the free world to throw down ridiculous arcade dunks alongside actual NBA stars.
02:56No campaign statements, no careful coordinated promotional events, just Bill Clinton entering orbit before slamming the ball through the hoop.
03:04It had this element of harmless fun to it, despite the crazy premise.
03:09Considering how modern politics is more toxic than a swamp, we doubt we'll ever see a union of console and
03:15state like this ever again.
03:22The Bath. Dishonored.
03:24Dishonored already gives Corvo plenty of opportunities to make questionable moral choices, but apparently those also extend to bathroom etiquette.
03:32After catching inventor Piero spying through a keyhole while Kalista is bathing, Corvo can enter the room himself.
03:41Can't you see I'm about to bathe?
03:43He can apologize, flirt with her, or generally make the entire situation significantly more uncomfortable.
03:48Players even discover that trying to jump directly into the tub results in a game over due to the loyalist
03:54conspiracy immediately dissolving due to irreconcilable hostilities.
03:58Translation, congratulations Corvo, you creeped out everyone so badly that the revolution has been cancelled.
04:05Ugh, I feel dirtier than when I started.
04:08Modern games still feature risque comedy of course, but this particular combination of voyeurism, player agency, and slapstick punishment feels
04:16unmistakably 2012.
04:18The hidden South Park episode.
04:20Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour Golf.
04:23Nothing screams family friendly golf quite like an episode of South Park.
04:27We wish you a Merry Christmas! We wish you a Merry Christmas!
04:32Early PlayStation copies of Tiger Woods 99 contained the animated short, Jesus vs. Satan, hidden inside a dummy data file.
04:40Put the disc into a computer, open the file, and suddenly your respectable golfing simulator becomes considerably less respectable.
04:48Electronic Arts recalled affected copies, with later pressings removing the video entirely.
04:53Apparently, the file had slipped through quality assurance while being used as filler data.
04:58Today, accidentally shipping copyrighted, adult-oriented video content inside an otherwise innocuous sports game would cause a copyright firestorm.
05:07Who would you help in a fight? Jesus or Santa Claus?
05:11Kids, you shouldn't think of things like that.
05:13Speaking of easter eggs, here's our not-so-subtle one.
05:16If you're in the mood for more great gaming content, scan the QR code on screen to head over to
05:21MojoPlay's 24-7 livestream.
05:23Thank you, boys.
05:25Yeah, thank you, boys.
05:26The Nude Code, Tomb Raider 2.
05:3490s gamers were obsessed with rumors, and a secret code that would remove Lara Croft's clothes was the Holy Grail.
05:41Core Design never included one, despite the legend becoming practically inseparable from early Tomb Raider.
05:47So, they decided to give randy gamers an explosive surprise, just not the one they were hoping for.
05:53Attempt to input the supposed nude code, and Lara simply explodes into pieces.
06:00It was essentially gaming's version of bonking horny players with a stick.
06:05All the power to the developers for using the rumor mill for a hilarious cause.
06:09These days, it's only a matter of time before every aspect of a game is out in the open, ripe
06:15for dissection.
06:16Any secrets, salacious or not, are basically confirmed or quashed in real time.
06:21Deleting your saves.
06:23Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem.
06:26Modern horror games mess with the player.
06:28Eternal Darkness declared psychological warfare.
06:36As your sanity meter dropped, the game could fake technical problems, alter the television volume, disconnect your controller, and most
06:44horrifyingly, pretend to erase your save files.
06:47Imagine investing hours into a game only to watch a progress bar announce that everything you've accomplished is being deleted.
06:54It wasn't, thankfully, but players didn't necessarily know that.
06:58Metagaming isn't nearly as rare nowadays, and so the bar keeps getting higher when it comes to trying to pull
07:04the wool over the eyes of gamers.
07:06And let's be honest, thanks to the cloud, losing the game's progress is not much of a scare tactic.
07:19The Star Wars Kid.
07:21Tony Hawk's Underground 2.
07:27Early internet culture could be absolutely ruthless, and Tony Hawk's Underground 2 aided in immortalizing one of its biggest memes.
07:35Hidden Inside Boston is a character parodying the Star Wars Kid, performing enthusiastic lightsaber-style moves just like the viral
07:43video.
07:49The uncomfortable part is that the original wasn't some actor willingly participating in a joke.
07:55Gilslin Raza was a 14-year-old whose private recording was uploaded without his consent,
08:00and subsequently became the subject of enormous ridicule and cyber-bullying.
08:05You wanna see my boobs?
08:1020 years later, turning a real teenager's humiliating viral moment into a video game gag without considering the person behind
08:17the meme would receive considerably more scrutiny.
08:20The Easter egg remains a fascinating snapshot of how differently early internet fame was treated.
08:26Snake Beater. Metal Gear Solid 2. Sons of Liberty.
08:30Metal Gear Solid 2 isn't exactly subtle about its pinup girls.
08:37Throughout the tanker, Snake can find lockers decorated with photographs of scantily clad models,
08:43and staring at them for long enough produces some very Kojima-esque reactions.
08:47Call Otacon while admiring one, and Snake's Kodak portrait makes it abundantly clear that he's enjoying the scenery.
08:54What do you think you're doing, Snake? You don't have enough to keep you busy?
08:59Later releases even rewarded the gag with the wonderfully-named Snake Beater achievement.
09:04Franchises like Yakuza still happily embraced gravure models and overt pinup culture,
09:09but in a modern Western AAA game, plastering real-looking glamour models across locker doors
09:15purely for players to ogle would probably inspire considerably more internal discussion.
09:20Back then, however, it was apparently just part of decorating the ship.
09:24Poor Purna. Dead Island.
09:32This one wasn't even supposed to be discovered.
09:35Player character Purna has a skill called Gender Wars that increases her damage against male enemies.
09:41But when an incorrect development build of Dead Island was accidentally released through Steam,
09:46players discover the skill's original internal name buried inside a diagnostic file.
09:51We can't repeat it, but let's just say it is wildly insulting.
09:55Techland confirmed the name was genuine, apologized, and stated that it violated the company's professional and ethical standards.
10:02And that was in 2011.
10:05You bring me a couple and I can make you a few cocktails, if you catch my drift.
10:09Today, with development builds routinely datamined within hours and internal file names capable of becoming headlines immediately,
10:17studios know that practically nothing inside shipped code is truly hidden.
10:21Apparently, that also included the toxic traits of their developers.
10:25What a loser.
10:26Duke Nukem's dismembered corpse.
10:28Blood.
10:29The build engine era treated rival gaming mascots less like intellectual property and more like free real estate.
10:35In Blood's case, it hides a mutilated approximation of Duke Nukem hanging inside a secret area of the Dark Carnival.
10:43Caleb even mocks the body using lines referencing Duke's own dialogue.
10:47Oh, shake it, baby.
10:50Imagine a modern AAA shooter secretly putting a recognizable butchered version of Master Chief, Kratos, or Nathan Drake into the
10:57scenery without an officially announced collaboration.
11:00The lawyers would materialize before the level finished loading.
11:04Goes to show the 90s FPS scene had the energy of developers doodling insults about rival studios on the back
11:10of their school notebooks.
11:12I got time to play with you.
11:15Jiggle Physics.
11:16Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.
11:18Motion controls gave us bowling, sword fighting, aiming, and this.
11:22When playing as certain female characters in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, shaking the PlayStation 3's 6-axis controller causes their
11:30top halves to jiggle.
11:31That's it. That's the feature.
11:33No combat advantage, no secret item, no elaborate joke requiring context.
11:41Somebody simply looked at motion control technology and decided this was an essential application.
11:47Fan service, especially in games, is eternal.
11:51We all know this.
11:52Modern games certainly haven't abandoned it, but dedicating a hardware-specific physics interaction exclusively to making women's chests bounce would
12:00probably inspire a very different conversation today.
12:03Truly, humanity was so preoccupied with whether it could, it never stopped to ask whether it should.
12:09Looks like I found a great place.
12:12John Romero's head. Doom 2.
12:15Want to defeat hell itself? Shoot John Romero in the face.
12:24Behind the icon of sin in Doom 2 sits the severed, impaled head of id Software co-founder John Romero,
12:31secretly functioning as the boss's actual target.
12:34No clip through the scenery, and there he is in all his digitized, decapitated glory.
12:40It's one of gaming's greatest developer in jokes.
12:43Would a modern studio scan a recognizable director's real face, mutilate it, and make employees repeatedly fire rockets into it?
12:50Maybe.
12:51Provided HR receives several extremely interesting emails first,
12:55the 90s id Software office culture was clearly built differently.
13:01A lot of the retailers are getting demand for Doom already, so they know that when Doom 2 comes out,
13:06they're going to be able to sell a lot of product.
13:09Captured Croft. Shadow Warrior.
13:11Another example of 90s developers casually borrowing somebody else's mascot for a joke,
13:16though this one feels far sleazier.
13:19Inside a hidden room, players can discover an unmistakable Laura Croft chained to a wall of the prison cell.
13:25Lol Wang responds with a cheerful observation that she has raided her last tomb.
13:32She's raided her last tomb.
13:34Even ignoring the licensing nightmare of depicting another company's superstar without permission,
13:39the joke itself lands considerably different today.
13:42Laura isn't merely a skeleton or a throwaway corpse.
13:45She's imprisoned, restrained, and the implications make it the furthest thing from funny.
13:52Reading your memory card. Metal Gear Solid.
13:55I'm Psycho Mantis!
13:58That's right. This is no trick. It's true power.
14:02This one wouldn't disappear today because it was offensive.
14:05It would disappear because modern hardware made the original trick almost impossible to reproduce naturally.
14:11Psycho Mantis proves his psychic abilities by reading your PlayStation memory card
14:16and recognizing saves from other Konami games like Castlevania and Suikoden.
14:21Sure! You like Suikoden!
14:24He even makes your controller move through vibration and it remains one of gaming's greatest fourth wall breaks.
14:30Today, accessing unrelated game information raises permission, platform, and privacy considerations that simply didn't exist when one little plastic memory
14:40card held everything.
14:41Somehow, 28 years later, Psycho Mantis is still showing everybody up.
14:47Ashley calls you out.
14:48Resident Evil 4.
14:49What did you do to her?
14:51The original Resident Evil 4 contains a tiny interaction that tells you considerably more about the player than they probably
14:57wanted Capcom to know.
14:59Stand below Ashley and deliberately angle the camera up her skirt and she'll cover herself before shouting,
15:05You pervert!
15:07Ow! You pervert!
15:08For clarity, Ashley is a university student and approximately 20 during the events of the game.
15:15But that doesn't make Leon's potential camera work classy.
15:18Capcom noticeably removed this gag for the 2023 remake, which probably tells you everything necessary about how attitudes towards this
15:26kind of behavior have changed.
15:28The original essentially anticipated creepy player behavior, programmed a response to it, and then waited patiently for you to incriminate
15:34yourself.
15:35Hey! What are you looking at?
15:37Bin Laden in the Backyard. Postal 2.
15:41Would you please sign my petition?
15:43Subtlety and Postal 2 have never been on speaking terms.
15:47Released less than two years after 9-11, the game includes a hidden terrorist facility accessible near the Postal Dude's
15:55trailer.
15:55And inside, you can encounter an Osama Bin Laden look-alike.
15:59In the name of Allah! Prepare to die, infidels!
16:02This wasn't historical satire created decades later.
16:06Bin Laden was still alive, actively wanted internationally, and connected to an event excruciatingly recent.
16:14Postal built its entire identity around deliberately crossing lines, so controversy was practically a marketing strategy.
16:21A modern game could obviously satirize real terrorists, but dropping a contemporary mass casualty figure into a secret room near
16:29the protagonist's house purely as a shock gag?
16:31You'd be crucified.
16:35The Secret Message. Gex.
16:37Being angry with management is understandable.
16:40I work for Mocha Plays. Please send help. I miss my children.
16:43I give a little back.
16:45Giving thousands of customers your boss's phone number is somewhat harder to defend.
16:50During development of Gex, lead designer Justin Nohr reportedly became frustrated with content cuts and hid messages criticizing Crystal Dynamics
16:59inside secret material.
17:00He then went further, including the real phone number of the company's head of project development and encouraging players to
17:07call and complain.
17:08Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
17:10Testers discovered the messages before release, and Nohr was fired.
17:14Today, this would merely be considered a naughty easter egg.
17:18It would be a privacy, employment, and potentially security catastrophe.
17:22Developers still hide complaints inside games occasionally, but publishing a colleague's personal contact information is part of the protest?
17:30Dude, no.
17:31Sex minigames. Various.
17:38There was a period when major action games occasionally treated making love like a bonus level.
17:44Early God of War games let Kratos initiate optional encounters represented through button prompts, suggestive sound effects, and increasingly unfortunate
17:52pieces of pottery.
17:54Then there's Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and its infamous unused hot coffee sequence, which modders restored and which contributed
18:01to the ESRB temporarily changing the game from mature to adults only.
18:06Give me back to my plate.
18:08I can't be scared, but I gave the way.
18:11Keep talking.
18:12Games containing sexual material obviously haven't disappeared.
18:16In fact, entire genres embrace it openly.
18:18What feels increasingly archaic is hiding a cheeky little sex minigame inside an otherwise mainstream blockbuster as though it were
18:26another collectible.
18:27After hot coffee cost take two millions in recalls and relabeling, publishers learned that nobody will find this is not
18:34a content strategy.
18:36We gonna meet again, huh, player?
18:37Bye, girl. Don't forget about Carl now.
18:41If you love games, be sure to check out WatchMojo's new game, Terrible Influence, just launched for purchase at TerribleInfluence
18:48.com.
18:48Terrible Influence is a satirical board game about the dark side of fame from the writer of the most popular
18:53girls in school and us, WatchMojo.
18:56Boom.
18:57I can make an apology video.
18:58Oh, you so would.
18:59Click on the link in the description to check out the game and be the first to play Terrible Influence.
19:05The ultimate crash out.
19:07Erika to Satoru no Yume Bowken.
19:17Forget leaving a passive-aggressive message in the credits.
19:21One developer apparently decided to bury an entire workplace meltdown inside a Famicom game.
19:26Complete Erika to Satoru no Yume Bowken, perform an absurdly specific series of actions on the ending screen, and you
19:33can uncover a hidden message attributed to programmer Hitamushi.
19:37What follows is a profanity-filled rant insulting and complaining about various members of the development team before eventually thanking
19:44coworkers he actually liked.
19:46It's the sort of message normally written at 2am, deleted the following morning, and never discussed again.
19:53Instead, this one was permanently preserved inside a commercial Nintendo game.
19:58It is the final boss of developer rants and will likely never be dethroned.
20:08Be sure to subscribe to MojoPlays for more great gaming videos every day.
20:13Have a great day!
20:18See you in the next one!