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Messages in a bottle (Developer messages you were never meant to see)

M

meltingparappa

Member
Oh man, I wish I could remember the lurid message a programmer left in an old NES kuso game.

It was featured on Retronauts, and was a couple sentences about liking boobs and vagina, and then complaining about his producer.


Edit: Wait, it WAS the Pachi Com one!
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
@MUWANdo said:
I just remembered another one! Pachi Com! There were two versions of the game--one for Famicom, one for MSX--and they both feature developer messages from the same dude. Here they are:

Famicom:



(for what it's worth, his fixes really do make the game way more playable)

The MSX version isn't fully translated and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but here it is.
Click to expand...

I had that one listed in my notes and thought about posting it, but it felt a little hard to understand even translated ;) glad someone posted it though.
 
B

bernardobri

Steve, the dog with no powers that we let hang out with us all for some reason
@MUWANdo said:
I just remembered another one! Pachi Com! There were two versions of the game--one for Famicom, one for MSX--and they both feature developer messages from the same dude. Here they are:

Famicom:



(for what it's worth, his fixes really do make the game way more playable)

The MSX version isn't fully translated and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but here it is.
Click to expand...

I was about to post this one.I read it a few years ago on Kevin Gifford's blog and boy, sure it gets really weird.

http://magweasel.com/2009/08/29/hidden-messagin/
 
D

Diablohead

Member
In the demo version of test drive 5 on PSX if you looked at the textures using an xplorer cheat cart there was something written in green mouse handwriting, forgot what it said but it was not there in the final release version. Because it was over what looked like a building texture I tried to find it in the game demo while playing but to no luck.


Ugh I hate forgetting stuff like that, going to annoy me now that I don't know what it said.
 
C

Currygan

at last, for christ's sake
some of them are rather disturbing, but still, interesting thread


anyone remember the hidden Iwata and Miyamoto messages in MP3? Those were funny
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
Like the hat? said:
Wasn't there like some text hidden on the diablo or diablo II title screen? Think I saw it in the shocking game secrets thread.
Click to expand...

aLSHl.jpg


I believe you mean these ones.

(edit) MrT-Tar: Not exactly what I meant, but it goes with the thread well. Hidden texts, small doodles on textures, etc all fit well enough. Though I did focus mainly on rants in the OP, they are all interesting little tidbits... Got another good one around here somewhere...
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
Here's another good one from an SNES game I'd never personally heard of before called Equinox...
RNiVa.gif
The newly revealed graphic posted there said "Ste & John were ere OK". It was recognisably my rubbish mouse-controlled pixel writing, but I had no recollection of drawing the graphic. It turns out it was hidden in the SNES game ROM, but never appeared on screen anywhere. This jogged my memory - hiding little graphics that would never be seen by anyone was definitely the sort of thing I used to do, usually when I was bored on a Friday afternoon.

I had a root around in my backups, and sure enough this little bit of digital graffiti was right there in my source files, and I think I've figured out why I drew it.

Unusually for the time, we were making the game for the US market and the Japanese market at the same time. In fact, the Japanese version was the lead (our client was Sony Imageworks in Japan - the was before Playstation), so adding Japanese characters and text wasn't an afterthought or a retro-fit as it often was in other western games developed at that time.

The image shows two of my work screens containing the front-end character sets for both the Japanese and EU / US versions of the game. As you can see characters 00 to FF are packed with data in the Japanese version. It was probably a bit of a tight squeeze to get all the essential characters for fonts and screen furniture into this allocated space, mainly because of the number of Japanese font characters required. The same space is mostly blank in the EU / US version of the same work screen. (The area from 100 to 1FF in those images was just my workspace, not included in the ROM)

Our data management system at the time would grab a specified area from a Deluxe Paint screen (an LBM file), and convert it into SNES character data to be dumped into the game ROM. I obviously had one version of the front-end character screen for the Japanese version of the game, and one for the EU / US version, and the same area of data was grabbed from both screens then dumped into the equivalent space in the ROM of the matching version. This meant that the space required for Japanese font characters would be stored as a blank area of ROM in the EU / US version.

I must have been offended by the thought of all those uninterrupted, useless zeros being burned onto hundreds of thousands of Equinox cartridges, and decided to 'tag' the space, never imagining anybody but John and I would ever know or care.
Click to expand...

http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros/blog/view.php?post=504
 
O

OgTheClever

Member
c2ut1.jpg


I couldn't find a better image online, but I've always liked this one in Playstation Home. To view it you need to glitch a piece of furniture through your apartment wall, whilst placing it. I was quite surprised be the level of detail in the areas you aren't supposed to see.
 
R

RionaaM

Unconfirmed Member
I love these from Duke Nukem 3D:

3fdb2638b30d1d85aff5d667f541b24ef9968dd6.jpg


d22f53f3b7dffab09f8b51d42179b390d59850c1.jpg


8aae9586c7b264b5ad3e6317bdbf9d1906a6ee2b.jpg


71606dc13ef6714dc0b86b4fa4a8aba9321ba58a.jpg
Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken, I found all of these myself, except for the Dopefish message that I read about on some website. I always cheated when playing this game as a kid, and I couldn't believe it when I saw the first message, hidden in a remote cave of E1M5 near a shrinker ray. For the last two you need to use noclip and go through a wall or a window, respectively, so there's no way of seeing them without cheating.
 
E

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Dicer said:
The TG-16 CD's started this trend they all had an audio warning, some like the WD ones were a bit more comical though...
Click to expand...

Best example is Symphony of the Night, Alucard tells you some shit and then there's silence. Until this amazing remix of the first area music comes on.
 
Z

Zaraki_Kenpachi

Member
KojiKnight said:
Never had Albert Odyssey, the warning is almost identical to the one in Dragon Force (the DF one seems to be a different take, but definitely the same lines). If I can find my DF disc I'll try and dump it.
Click to expand...

Cool, I couldn't find dragon force at all for a clip so I thought maybe it was a mistake. It's pretty much identical to the turbografx one too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMsNtj6S7Q

Apparently they had slightly different sounding variations but all of that same message on turbografx.
 
A

AmFreak

Member
V

Vilam

Maxis Redwood
The New Tetris (N64) said:
19] Idiots who think they can pedal a bike as fast as a car, so they ride in the
middle of a traffic lane. You should be allowed to run them over, it looks like
natural selection to me.

52] Nintendo and everything about them.
Click to expand...

Still relevant nearly 20 years later. This man was a nostradamus.
 
O

Oersted

Member
KojiKnight said:
Actually, I bet we were. The fact that it was disabled with what was essentially a digital on/off switch means they thought they could sneak the content in and keep the M rating. We may never know for sure of course, because Rockstar would never be able to admit to it.

Some more programmer stuff, this is from Bungie pre-Halo (specifically, found amongst Marathon 1/2's files)






Oh delicious irony Bungie...
Click to expand...

xD
 
C

Chev

Member
There's the one in FF9 I found a few years ago and eventually posted in the cloudbush thread:

Chev said:
The game is FF9, the opponent Ragtime Mouth. It asks quiz questions which the player has to answer to win the fight. Note the quiz card he's holding:



Now, the other face of the quiz card, which is probably near-impossible to get a close look of in-game:



Texture:

It reads: "Pop Quiz! FF10's theme is GUTS! True or false?"

Several monster textures also have little doodles hidden in the alpha channel of unmapped regions but no specific message.

(crossposted from Selectbutton)
Click to expand...
 
C

confuziz

Banned
Not exactly messages, but I remember that in these 'exploration' videos of WoW done by some sort of hackers, Blizzard had put a lot of symbols (like a smiley) in not yet released areas of the game
 
N

neopokekun

Member
Speaking of Iwata messages, there is one in Star Battle / Galaxian for the Commodore VIC 20:
The title screen says "(C) 1981 COMMODORE JAPAN" but the full string in memory is actually "(C) 1981 COMMODORE JAPAN THIS PROGRAM WAS WRITTEN BY - SATORU IWATA - APR.19.1981 HAL LABORATORY AKIHABARA TOKYO JAPAN".
 
C

codswallop

Member
About halfway through Borderlands in an area you'd normally drive through, there was a small pedestal with a QR code on it. Can't remember what it said, think it was one guy's calling card.
 
Fess

Fess

Member
Some of these texts makes me sad, piracy back then was pretty much like pirating indie games today
 
C

Chunky

Member
In return you will get sod all as usual. In the meantime I'll be thinking of you when I'm in Florida, spending some of my dosh.
Click to expand...
Mmmm, all dat Blood Money dosh

9] The cheeseheads from asia who take a Honda Civic, slap some stickers on it,
put a muffler on it that makes it sound like a riding lawnmower, a ridiculous
sized fin on the back and think they have a formula 1 racer. 'Devastating
Power!' my a$$!

11] The huge complex hairdos on african american women, 5 layers, 6000 curls, 4
sprouting areas, 200 dangling bits, 6000 beads, air conditioning and enough
hairspray in it that it wouldn't move if Hurricane George hit it.

35] Racisist people and the crap they spew out.
Click to expand...
lol
 
C

CrudeDiatribe

Member
KojiKnight said:
Jason Jones said:
Hopefully
this is the version that I'll be playing in fifty years
under emulation on some fuckfast portable the thickness
of a sheet of paper that walks my dog, dresses me every
morning and grinds up my food because I don't have any
teeth left. And hopefully it won't be running Windows.
Click to expand...
Oh delicious irony Bungie...
Click to expand...

Well, to be fair, you can now play Marathon on your iOS device.

Thanks for posting those, I hadn't seen them in a while.

reverof nohtaram!
 
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