Every day I find a big black spider somewhere new in my apartment. Sometimes I'll get my driver and find PS4 with a start that it is mixed with black touchpad. Sometimes I will open the first of my coffee production and it will fall out on the counter. I even found in the bathroom drawer on top of toothpaste; it's always a nice surprise, I was nervous. I should clarify, the big black spiders is plastic, and it is something that my wife and I take turns to find another plant at some point in the day. Since I work from home and she went downtown all day, which is one of the few ways we can interact while outside. earn to die
Of course, it was fun when it was a real surprise. If I hide the spider and she could not find it, I'm perfectly content to wait a few days for her to open a bag wrapped in her. If she hid it and did not find it, you just have to tell me where it is because we can laugh about it. She is not the best secret keeper. Now, Genyo Takeda, Makoto Wada, Shigeru Miyamoto and - these are some well kept secret. They are the men behind the Punch-Out !!, a nearly 30-year-old game still contains secrets never discovered by anyone. earn to die 6
You may have heard about the recently discovered Punch-Out!! Easter egg: a Reddit user who goes by the name "midwesternhousewives" discovered a previously unknown visual cue which is the key to putting an early end to some later fights. You can see in the video here that there's a lone, inconspicuous member of the crowd behind your opponent (either Piston Honda or Bald Bull) that gives a very subtle nod when it's time to strike. I can say, with absolute confidence, that I would have never noticed this. It's such a small touch, but it's something that was very intentionally placed by the designers at the time for the sole purpose of aiding the player. It's incredible that, after all of this time, they were all able to keep their mouths shut, and that's why finds like this make headlines.
It's such a thrilling thing when games that we think we've known inside and out for decades become new again. Sure, every now and then someone will break out a retro console or pull up an emulator and we think we're hot stuff because we know the Konami code or the password to unlock all the stages in Mega Man X, but there's more out there! There are still Easter eggs and button input codes waiting to be discovered. Just look at Mortal Kombat, another game that recently made headlines as we discovered hidden diagnostic menus for the very first time. How have these things been kept secret for decades, and what's still out there, waiting to be discovered, in your favorite NES or SNES games?
We know for a fact that there are still undiscovered secrets in Punch-Out!!, and we may never find them. That's an incredible thought. Sometimes we forget that the video game industry as a whole is still quite young, and in its earlier stages - before licensed engines, automated asset generators, and advanced AI - designers and artists had to come together and pool their creativity in astounding ways to make a product that stood out from the competition. While today we may notice subtleties in the way a character's hair or some fabric moves and we praise a game engine, in the NES era the subtleties we notice are more deliberately placed; hand-crafted, in a way, by cunning and playful designers; things like a lone, bearded spectator in the background with an oddly-timed nod. Are there any games out there that you think are probably still holding secrets? I for one think there are probably still some corners of the world of Pokemon Red and Blue that haven't been explored, but that's another theory for another time
