So when a secret lays hidden for years, if not decades, the impact of the discovery feels so much stronger than simply Googling for cheat codes. Sometimes these Easter eggs are found by hackers obsessing over lines of video game code, others are discovered purely by accident, and still others were spilled by developers who simply couldn’t keep a secret any longer. Whatever the case, these secrets, codes, or glitches are a reminder that nothing stays hidden forever – sometimes it just takes fifteen years to find everything a game has to offer.

Final Fantasy 9’s Nero Family sidequest

In Japan, there are a series of strategy guides called Ultimania. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re some of the most exhaustive video game guides in the world, with rundowns of every quest and item, interviews with developers, and more. Naturally, Final Fantasy 9 got the Ultimania treatment in Japan. In America, we got… well, probably one of the worst strategy guides ever designed. Written by BradyGames, the “guide” was essentially a paid advertisement for Square’s PlayOnline service, forcing you to enter keywords on a website for tips on how to do basically anything in the game.

Because the BradyGames guide is one of the most worthless things ever printed on paper, the Nero Family sidequest (opens in new tab) effectively went undiscovered in the West for over a decade. It wasn’t until some GameFAQs posters (opens in new tab) noticed an incredibly convoluted quest in Ultimania that was never mentioned in the North American guide, and tested it out for themselves. Solving the quest is a lengthy, laborious process, requiring players to go to the Tantalus hideout on disc 4 to meet with members of the Nero family, complete an event or boss fight, head back to meet another member, then repeating the process several more times. Completing the quest will net you a Protect Ring – not a huge reward, but hey, sometimes going on a previously undiscovered journey is more valuable than the destination.

Play as Master Hand in Super Smash Bros. Melee

Super Smash Bros. Melee released in 2001 as a launch window title for the Nintendo GameCube, and it wasn’t until 2008 that someone discovered a mind-blowing secret – there was a way to actually play as Smash Bros.’ imposing final boss, Master Hand (opens in new tab). Of course, the reason why it took so long to figure out and replicate is because activating the trick requires a very specific and totally unnatural set of controller commands to be input very precisely. If you’ve done it right, you’ll have pulled off what’s known as the Name Entry glitch.

First, you need to plug a controller into port three of your GameCube. Then, you point your cursor over the name field on the character select screen and hold A and B. Release A while holding B, scroll down to the Name Entry field, and press A again while still holding B down. It’ll probably take more than a few tries, but if done properly, you’ll be able to play as Master Hand, complete with all of his powerful laser and grappling moves. Unfortunately, other players won’t actually be able to defeat you because Master Hand was never meant to be a playable character, and you run the risk of causing your game to freeze, but none of that matters when you’re flying around the screen as a giant glove.

Halo 3’s hidden birthday message

Bungie loves packing its games to the rafters with secrets and Easter eggs, and the studio isn’t afraid to get real weird with how it hides them. Case in point: one of Halo 3’s longest buried secrets was hidden right in front of players’ noses, and wasn’t found until 2014 – seven years after Halo 3’s release. The secret? A birthday message from a developer to his wife (opens in new tab).

The only way to find this secret is to boot up a copy of Halo 3 on December 25, head to the title screen, and hold down both thumbsticks. The main menu should dissolve and a large, translucent Halo ring will start to form in its place. If you look closely on the edge of the ring, you’ll see the words “Happy Birthday, Lauren!” appear in dark, blocky letters. While this appears to be the last secret hiding in Halo 3’s depths, there’s no real way of knowing – Bungie is intentionally keeping mum, preferring to leave any other potential mysteries lingering as a question mark on one of the most beloved first-person shooters ever made.

Mortal Kombat’s hidden diagnostic menus

The Mortal Kombat games were full of hidden characters, special fatalities, and so many other secrets that describing how to pull some of them off makes all those other weird video game urban legend cheats seem plausible. Like the one in MK2 that requires you to press down and start the moment a digitized image of the game’s sound designer appears and shouts “Toasty!” so you can fight a hidden character named Smoke – these games were filled with stuff like that.

One particular cheat remained so hidden that it took over twenty years to uncover, only being found after some adept hackers pored over the arcade cabinet code. They found that if you press the player one and two block buttons in a specific order on Mortal Kombat 1-3’s arcade cabinets (the order is different for each game), you’ll unlock a special diagnostic menu. Dubbed the EJB Menu (opens in new tab) after series creator Ed J. Boon, these screens allow players to instantly access every fighter’s ending, turn on free play, display the word ‘Hello’ on the screen, and more. 

Metroid’s “Everything” password (NARPASSWORD)

Veterans of the original Metroid on NES remember the struggle to collect everything in the game and finish it in enough time to see the best ending. Countless hours were logged by thousands of players, but all of that could have been avoided knowing what we know now: all this time there’s been a password that unlocks everything in the game right from the start.

Because of the fail-safe built into Metroids password system, it was near-impossible to know that NARPAS SWORD0 000000 000000 would be the savior to many Metroid fans desperate to see the final credits. Thanks to this wonderful thing we call the Internet, the beauty of NARPAS SWORD or NAR PASSWORD or however you interpret it can be shared among the masses, making one of the most difficult NES games ever made a little more manageable.

LMD in Donkey Kong for Atari

Perhaps the most well hidden Easter Egg appearing on this list, I’m not sure anyone would have even noticed the three letters that could appear on Donkey Kong’s title screen even if they met the parameters accidentally. Of course those parameters are ridiculous anyhow: set a specific high score, die by falling, set the difficulty to 4 back at the title screen, and let the intro loop play.

What was so secret that such a complex method of discovery was needed? What could possibly need to be hidden for 26 years before someone finally found it, and only then after the developer tipped us off to its existence in a blog post? The developer’s initials, LMD, which will appear at the bottom of the title screen. That’s it. I don’t mind the initials; if I had the chance to hide my initials in a game I’d totally do it, but the work it takes to see them is just crazy. No wonder it took 26 years.

Goldeneye 64’s Line Mode

For years Nintendo swore that the only cheats available in Goldeneye were those we had to unlock through playing the game. There were no button sequences to be found, Nintendo maintained, and any attempts to figure some out would be futile; that is, until players actually did find button sequences that unlocked a ton of cheats, including some not available via the normal unlocking method.

One of those cheats, line mode, is the only non-unlockable mode in the entire game and turns the entire game into the music video for Take On Me by A-Ha. It’s a nifty little mode that doesnt really add anything to the experience (except 80s flashbacks), but the fact that it exists at all after Nintendo’s insistence is amazing in itself.

Wesker’s Desk in Resident Evil 2

Who’s going to check the same location 50 times after the first time tells you there’s nothing useful there? Apparently someone somewhere did while playing Resident Evil 2, and thats how the discovery of Film D was made. What’s on the film that took 50 searches to dig out of Wesker’s desk? A photo of Rebecca Chambers after a pick-up game of basketball. What a treat.

We know that this hidden gem was officially revealed in a book called Research on BioHazard 2 Final Edition in Japan the same year RE2 launched, but we’d bet that North American players had no idea this existed until years had passed. If it weren’t for that book, I STILL don’t think we’d have found it today, almost 20 years after the game released.

Chris Houlihan room in Link to the Past

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Chris Houlihan room is a hidden area in Zelda: A Link to the Past named after a 1990 Nintendo Power contest winner. It’s basically a fail-safe that the game sends you to if the game is going to crash, but what seems like an inconsequential addition was once one of the Zelda franchise’s biggest mysteries.

Because the game launched back in the days before the Internet, no one even knew the room existed. The World Wide Web is what brought this place to light, only becoming widely known twelve years after the game initially launched in 1992. Anyone who stumbled upon it before that probably thought the game was haunted by someone named Chris and tried to perform an exorcism on the cartridge; or was that just me?

Wave Race Blue Storm’s jerkface announcer

Wave Race: Blue Storm for the GameCube hides a comical Easter egg where the announcer turns into a half-interested, overly-sarcastic jerk. Things you’ll hear him say include “you have chosen poorly” at the character select, “if you were any good, you’d get a turbo by hitting the gas when the light turns green at the start of a race”, and “you don’t have an inferiority complex; you’re just inferior” when he REALLY wants to be a jerk.

The game initially launched in 2001, but it took nine years and an intrepid NeoGAF forum member to discover this antagonistic announcer because of how well hidden he is. First, you have to change a display on the Audio Options menu to vertical fog, then put in a long code of button presses, THEN go back and start a race. Surprising as it may be, I totally understand how this guy could have stayed in the shadows: who would think that rising fog would lead to this jerk?

Deus Ex: Invisible War’s Flag-Flushing Disco

Deus Ex: Invisible War admittedly does not live up to the quality of the original game, but this Easter Egg is too good to pass up. In the final level, pick up a flag and take it to a toilet in the bathroom, then flush said toilet. You’ll suddenly be warped to a rip-roarin’ party at Club Vox with all of the major characters in the game getting down with their bad selves. For a game as serious as Deus Ex, this is quite the surprise.

This is another Easter Egg I’m surprised we ever found, because getting to the disco dance party takes some really weird steps. I’d bet that most people didn’t look at those flags in that bunker and think to themselves “You know what? I’m going to move that to the bathroom. That’ll show that dastardly UNATCO!” Whoever first discovered this, we’re glad you did: everyone should be invited to this party.

Marathon Infinity’s Hangar 96

The Marathon games on the PC and Macintosh are a great example of how Bungie got its start in making great shooters. While the games certainly laid the groundwork for the smash hit Halo series, they also showcased just how well Bungie could keep secrets within its games: they hid an entire multiplayer level within the game, where only the most tech-savvy players could find it.

With a lot of digging, someone finally figured out the key to unlocking the level: finding it centers around combining hexadecimal terms seen on terminals in-game, then turning the combined hex term into readable code and reintroducing it into the game’s files. I have no idea who would even think to try that, as some players (like me) just know how to hit the start button, but the idea of hiding a full map in a game’s code is astounding. 

Splinter Cell: Double Agent’s Seal Rescue

Throughout the original Xbox version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent’s co-op stages, there are a series of hidden side missions where you and a friend must rescue five seals from imprisonment. That doesn’t sound like anything too out of the ordinary, except I’m not talking about Navy SEALS; I’m talking about the ocean-dwelling, balance-balls-on-their-noses animals that clap their fins and make honking noises.

Four years after Double Agent’s release, two of the game’s developers posted a video revealing the hidden co-op side mission, where a team must find and rescue five baby seals using a variety of seemingly inconsequential items. (Here’s a video showing it off.) Without the reveal, these seals might have stayed hidden forever, but I’m glad that we could bring peace to the seal people of Splinter Cell.

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The cancellation of Silent Hills was just cruel. So much terrifying potential lurked in the single corridor of P.T that a full game might have been too much fear to actually handle. So, in mourning of what could have been, lets take a look back at some, er, magical moments from the Silent Hill series. Nothing from the films obviously. Or Homecoming, because bloody hell, it was plops.

Oh, just a warning, there will be spoilers aplenty.

1. A blind alley – Silent Hill

What better way to celebrate the horror of Silent Hill than by starting from the very beginning. Harry Mason runs through a foggy town, looking for his recalcitrant daughter, only to be led down an alley. Of course, wandering down an alley in a mysterious place with no one around in any horror media is a SPLENDID idea. What follows is a series of very Hitchcock-esque, dutched camera angles, a siren wailing, a descent into pitch black darkness, a lot of rust, blood, hanging corpses and tiny skinless decapitated bear things clawing you to death. Lovely. It made Resident Evil look like Gex, and proved that video game horror could easily be as unsettling as anything seen in films.

2. Your first nurse – Silent Hill

Horror games have become a lot nastier in the 15 years since Silent Hill was released, but as the old saying goes, you never forget your first: and this moment in the original Silent Hill is a keeper as far as nightmarish imagery is concerned. Especially if you were in your formative years when playing it. Poor old nurse Lisa, (who is only ever encountered in Silent Hills Hellworld, which should set alarm bells ringing) begins to realise somethings not quite right, before she starts leaking blood from her eyes and mouth. The truly horrifying thing? Shes still asking Harry for help, but all Harry can do is make a beeline for the door. What a git.

3. The woodland walk – Silent Hill 2

This entry isnt horrifying in the traditional sense, but it shows just how confident Team Silent truly was in the fruit of its doubtless mangled loins. Protagonist James Sunderland starts off towards the titular town, his journey taking him through a wooded area with a long, winding road and it seems to go on forever, with only a quick detour at a cemetery to break up the descent. Nothing happens, but youre constantly expecting it to thanks to unsettling noises and your own febrile imagination. After a good long while, he finally makes it to town. Its an inauspicious start, but it absolutely fills you with dread.

4. Pyramid Head’s silent menace – Silent Hill 2

Pyramid Head is easily Silent Hills most iconic enemy. The best thing about him though? Theres no big entrance, no grand cut scene announcing his arrival. James is frittering about the Woodside Apartments building minding his own business and trying to open doors when suddenly a scream! Oh crumbs. He runs up to where the scream was, only to be confronted by this thing looking at him from beyond a set of bars. Its not moving. Its just silently watching James, while his radio is emitting static like crazy. Of course, its not there again when he looks back. But you know its prowling around. Somewhere.

5. You are the monster – Silent Hill 2

Now comes the horrifying realisation that Silent Hill 2s real monster is you! It was you all along! James, though not evil in the pantomime sense, did a very bad thing, and without giving too much away, that revelation helps unravel certain other elements of the game. This game isnt just abstract for the sake of it: everything has meaning. For example (berets at the ready), the first enemy James encounters is that armless vomiting thing. Its not hard to deal with, and cant really fight back (due to no arms), except to puke things up at you, but given the revelation near the end of the game? Vomiting and sickness? Cant fight back? Sound like someone? Eh, eh?

6. The terrible reflection – Silent Hill 3

Silent Hill 3 is a return to the cult shenanigans of the first game, as opposed to the more conceptual stuff seen in 2. So its a bit more daft, and not really as interesting, but no matter. It still has plenty of nasty tricks up its sleeve. Heather Mason ends up in a room with a large mirror and–this being Silent Hill–things happen. Blood starts pouring out of the sink on the mirror side and spilling out into the real world. Meanwhile, Heathers reflection just sort of stops, and starts looking a bit ill. Its already been established by the way, that Heather has a fear of mirrors, so Silent Hill is probably the most sadistic sentient place in games. Apart from the Mushroom Kingdom.

7. No safe place – Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4: The Room is genuinely probably the scariest of the series, and its all thanks to the hauntings in the titular room. These range from fairly innocuous, like a pair of shoes moving (maybe protagonist Henrys mum moved them because hes a messy swine), to the downright hideous, like a load of screaming faces appearing in the wall. Plus, you lose all important health the closer you get to these hauntings. The Room starts out as some kind of safe haven, but thats gradually turned around the further you get into the game, so no place is safe. Easily the worst one is when staring out the peephole in the door, you see a ghastly bloodied version of yourself staring back. Aaaargh.

8. The horrifying head – Silent Hill 4: The Room

Theres always been a bit of David Lynch to the Silent Hill series, especially when hes at his most discombobulating and terrifying (like Eraserhead or Inland Empire). Everything will seem normal, if a bit strange, and then suddenly theres a deformed woman singing a song inside a radiator. This bit in Silent Hill 4 is reminiscent of that. Henrys minding his own business, wandering around an unassuming hospital in a nightmare hellscape, when he walks into a room featuring the massive head of deuteragonist, Eileen Galvin. Of course, the eyes follow you round the room too, because its Silent Hill, and Silent Hill is bloody horrible. Youd never see that ornament in Bargain Hunt.

9. Raw shocks – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Shattered Memories is easily one of the best in the series, and let no plonker tell you otherwise. It takes a completely different approach from the other games, going all in for atmosphere and tension, rather than the grotesque. Anyway, there are no enemies, and the game largely involves Harry Mason wandering around a snowy Silent Hill looking for his daughter (its a reimagining of the first game). Occasionally, though, its iteration of the Hellworld will break through, and youre be forced to run away from Raw Shocks. These bits are exercises in blind panic, as youve no clue where to go, with these things on your tail.

10. Child death – Silent Hill: Downpour

Finally we come to Downpour, which is savagely undervalued too, perhaps because the dreadful Homecoming really hurt the franchise. Anyway, Downpour–in many ways–could be the darkest of the Silent Hill games, dealing with molestation and child murder. In one scene, Murphy Pendleton is forced to watch while the bogeyman picks up a hapless child, slowly and agonisingly snapping the little tykes neck. Considering most games shy away from showing kids getting killed, youre always expecting something to interrupt the process. But no! It goes ahead and does it, and the tot slumps to the ground, neck flopping about. Crikey.

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The humble save point is an endangered species in this day and age. Modern games, not wanting to interrupt or burden players with a need to remember to slide a digital bookmark into their progress, either save your game automatically or let you save whenever you please. The little glowing ports in a storm, where no enemy will attack you, where you can catch a breath before a boss, or you can make some badly needed progress are eternally memorable if done right. These ten are the best and strangest in PlayStation history.

Dead Rising 2

Even in zombie infest Las Vegas, the bathroom is a safe space to collect your thoughts, to mark a moment in time to return to again and again, to consider: how many times have I duct-taped a baseball bat and a weed-whacker together now? Dead Rising 2’s lavatory save points are not only more convenient than the lonely security office couch Frank West had to use in original, they’re also apparently magical, hiding secret shortcuts within. 

Alien: Isolation

Beeping sounds are not comforting in the world of Alien. If you hear an insistent electronic tone, it’s usually coming from a motion tracker indicating precisely close you are to having your face eaten by a hulking two-mouthed bug monster. In Alien: Isolation, though, beeping can also indicate the presence of a blessed save point, a taupe colored electrical panel that represents a few more minutes of survival. Only problem: it seems to take a billion years for for Isolation’s save stations to register Ripley’s key card. Not that there’s any hurry because of face eating bug monsters.

Metal Gear Solid

Snake’s Codec is not a comforting piece of technology. Is it convenient to have a communication device that interacts directly with your ear’s delicate bones? Sure but what if it malfunctions! That’s stressful. It’s also not particularly convenient to have to use it to call a separate person just to save your game. Sure, Mei Ling is a personable and intelligent individual always willing to cough up some philosophical bonmot to ease the pain of extreme espionage, but isn’t there a better way to mark your time at Shadow Moses? Apparently not, because that’s how you have to save there.

Resident Evil

The Umbrella corporation’s boundless capacity for horrifying technological advancement is matched only by its adoration of technological anachronism. If you can build massive, secret underground base’s for developing futuristic, biological military ordinance, why do you need typewriters to save everyone’s progress? They’re not even electric typewriters! You need old fashioned, messy ass ink ribbons to use them. There will be hell to pay if that ink gets all over the jewels and bizarre keys in this inventory full of stuff needed to get through Umbrellas various mansions. At least the music playing in every save room near the typewriters is beautiful.

God of War 3

Kratos is not the kind of guy you’d expect to regularly genuflect. Indeed Kratos’ whole thing is hating gods, killing gods, and yelling about how he’s going to kill all those gods he hates so much. And yet every time he wants to save his progress during some gluttonous revenge rampage, he steps into an altar, gifts from Zeus’ daughter Athena  in God Of War III. Zeus himself is the one who granted the Spartan his progress-stashing ability in the first game. I’m not calling you a sellout or anything Kratos, but if you were for real you wouldn’t need to save your game at all! Just kidding. Your new Viking beard frightens me.

GTA: Vice City

Over the past decade, saving your game in Grand Theft Auto has always been a homey experience. Returning to your base of operations is part of it, but it’s all about where you rest your head permanently. Niko Bellic’s apartments, Michael de Santa’s house of Hollywood strife, etc. Back in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, though,  Tommy Vercetti saved his progress in a seedier, more transient locale. The Ocean View Hotel, with its gaudily decorated bed and a floating cassette icon, is where he needed to save his game. It is simultaneously the least comfortable and the most in GTA history. No one likes to live in a hotel, but at least you can trash the place and someone else will clean it up.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

Old Chuck Greene saves his game in the bathroom, but we don’t know that he’s actively relieving himself in there. Guy could just be washing his hands. Tucking his shirt back in. Wiping off a bloodstain or something. Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes? There are no illusions about what this assassin nerd is doing when he saves his game. He walks right into his WC, drops trou, and goes to town to mark down precisely where he is on his journey to becoming the number one hired killer with a lightsaber. It’s ridiculous but I have to admit that I admire his comfort level. You do you, Travis.

Dead Space

When you’ve been trundling through the darkened halls of a crumbling space station infested by monsters made up of the ripped up limbs of the terrible warped crew that used to live there, a little light goes a long way. The welcoming glow of a USG Ishimura save terminal goes the longest in Dead Space. Warm, reassuring and a temporary salvation from all that getting your brains sucked out through your eye socket by some gasping monstrosity. That said it doesn’t quite make sense that there are terminals everywhere for the crew to just randomly record their thoughts on. Is the Ishimura like a giant sci-fi episode of the Real World with confessionals everywhere? Weird, Dead Space. Weird.

Ico

So this creepy, vaguely medieval society is terrified of boys born with horns, right? So they lock them up in a rotting castle ruled over by some inky witch with blue electric magic powers and a legion of living shadows at her command. If everyone doesn’t want the boy to escape with the ghostly magical young girl he just met in the castle, why are there inexplicably comfortable couches all over the place for the two of them to take naps on, thus saving their game? One second, you’re in a crumbling hallway of death. The next, you’re on a windswept terrace with a couch ready for popcorn and binge watching John Hughes movies. This castle and its save points make no sense, Ico.

Tomb Raider (1996)

We’re not saying Lara Croft doesn’t run a high probability of finding precious jewels during her grave robbing adventures in the original Tomb Raider. In fact, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point after she’s shot a T-rex in the face and solved the instant death puzzles of an evil statue with the midas touch, Lara’s going to find some shiny, valuable rocks. But why do all the jewels in Tomb Raider let her save her game? And why are there only a few of them inexplicably scattered around the tombs all over the world? MAGIC JEWELS DON’T SAVE GAMES IN REAL LIFE, TOMB RAIDER!

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Screencheat, out this week on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is designed precisely around this principle. You can’t see your enemies. You have to watch their screens.

Come meet the developer as we face off against director and artist Nicholas McDonnell of Samurai Punk live at 4:30PM ET/1:30PM PT/9:30PM GMT.

Dig the show? We air twice a week, so make sure to follow our Twitch channel! When are we live? Here’s our schedule:

Tuesday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT GamesRadar+ joins fascinating folks from every walk of life, playing their favorite games and other treasures from the history of gaming. This is you chance to chat with creators from the world of music, film, comics, and everything else under the sun.

Thursday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe that’s why video games seem so remarkable. We meet with the creators of the best games to demystify the process.

The post GR+ Live: Meet the maker of Screencheat as we try to destroy each other appeared first on Game News.

Today Bluth and Goldman joined us to discuss their years of collaboration and why now is the right time to transform Dragon’s Lair into a hand drawn movie for 2016.

Dig the show? We’re here four days a week, Monday through Thursday so make sure to follow our Twitch channel! When are we live? Here’s our schedule:

Tuesday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT GamesRadar+ joins fascinating folks from every walk of life, playing their favorite games and other treasures from the history of gaming. This is you chance to chat with creators from the world of music, film, comics, and everything else under the sun.

Thursday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe that’s why video games seem so remarkable. We meet with the creators of the best games to demystify the process.

The post GR+ Live: The making of Dragons Lair, An American Tail and more with Don Bluth appeared first on Game News.

But something changed around Metal Gear Solid 3. After writing himself into a corner in MGS2, Hideo Kojima shifted the series’ focus to the 1960s, finally telling the origin story of the series’ most diabolical villain: Big Boss. But in doing so, something fantastic happened. The series was no longer about Solid Snake and his attempts to right the wrongs caused by a laundry list of absurdly over-the-top megalomaniacs. Now, Metal Gear Solid was about a tragic hero’s fall from grace; how his plan to unite the world caused untold conflict and strife; how Solid Snake has been a pawn, used by the real villain from the start; and how Big Boss ultimately breaks the 50-year-long cycle of violence he helped create.

In many ways, Big Boss is the Anakin Skywalker of the Metal Gear Solid franchise – a one-dimensional villainous figure who slowly gained humanity and depth as the series grew and developed. You could easily make an argument that Darth Vader is the real hero of the Star Wars saga; that Anakin was meant to be the chosen one, but was twisted by darkness until his son, Luke, pulled him out of it. In the end, Luke Skywalker was a supporting character in Anakin’s own hero’s journey, much like Solid Snake is with Big Boss. By the time Return of the Jedi rolled credits, we had a much different perspective on what it meant for Anakin to become Darth Vader, and what sacrifices it took to finally achieve redemption.

But unlike Star Wars (and, well, virtually every major series ever), Metal Gear’s story is told out of sequence, and to explore why Big Boss is the Anakin Skywalker of the Metal Gear franchise, we have to remember that Kojima has crafted the series over the course of nearly three decades without any real master plan. Instead, he opts to tell each story individually and fit the pieces in however he can, which often includes liberal doses of retroactive continuity. While this certainly makes following Metal Gear’s timeline (opens in new tab) far more convoluted than it really should be, it also means that characters and events can be given a whole new context – and how a series’ greatest demon can actually be its most misunderstood savior.

When the series first started out on the Japanese MSX2 computer, Big Boss was a cartoon villain, double-crossing Solid Snake at the game’s 11th hour. But in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, we start to see a deeper, more nuanced side of Big Boss. He still has nefarious plans, but we learn that he truly cares for the children and resistance fighters he takes in. These soldiers revere him as a father figure and idolize him, and they willingly work with Big Boss to take on the government that betrayed them. Solid Snake defeats Big Boss with a makeshift flamethrower at the end of the game and emerges a hero, but we still get the feeling that maybe Big Boss isn’t the real villain here; that the true enemy is more of a concept than a single entity.

The pieces are falling into place, but it wasn’t until the 1960’s-era MGS3 that we really got a sense of why Big Boss became the feared despot of the MSX2 era. Manipulated by the government to kill the one woman he truly loved, Big Boss becomes disillusioned with the current state of global affairs and strikes out on his own, partnering with his former CO, Major Zero, to create The Patriots. The cloning project that gave birth to Solid and Liquid caused a schism between Zero and Big Boss, generating a perpetual rivalry that would span decades and continents. In its final, 70-minute-long cutscene, MGS4 reveals that Big Boss had been trying to fight Major Zero since the beginning, that every ounce of pain and strife that Solid Snake has gone through has been a result of the struggle between these two stubborn individuals.

Knowing that now, it’s interesting to go back and play those old MSX2 games and see them in a whole new light. Big Boss wasn’t just building up nuclear armaments to take over the world – he was doing it to defeat Major Zero and his clandestine organization. In fact, it’s The Patriots who invariably use Solid Snake out of self-preservation to foil Big Boss’ plans. The final moments of MGS4 sees Big Boss finally ending the cycle by killing Major Zero and sharing a final, tearful goodbye with his ‘son’, Solid Snake, before paying for his own sins with his life.

That’s what makes following Big Boss into Metal Gear Solid 5 so interesting. We already know how all this ends, how many of the series’ narrative threads get tied up in MGS4. While The Phantom Pain aims to show us how Big Boss became the demon we knew from the MSX2 games, we already know the man he was up to that point, and the man he becomes afterward. The path he takes is tragic, and thanks to the series’ narrative structure, fated.

So while Solid Snake may have been the ‘good guy’ of the Metal Gear universe and the main character for many years, ever since Snake Eater, the story is no longer about him – he’s merely a supporting actor in someone else’s narrative. A single game has reframed the entire structure of the Metal Gear saga to tell the story of a soldier who fell from grace and the fallout of his actions. Over the course of three decades, Metal Gear has transformed from an action series into a tragedy, and Big Boss has replaced Solid Snake as is its tragic hero.

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For the old school console fan, 2015 is a paradise of fresh delights. Axiom Verge oozes that classic console feeling when it starts up on PlayStation 4. The grinding wub-wub-wub of the distortion field weapon and its glitchy effects warping the blocky environment seem like they were lifted right out of 1989. The same is true of The Adventures of Pip. Played on a Wii U, the hero’s transformation from single block into increasingly detailed pixel dudes is practically a greatest hits tour through the transitions in tech from Atari 2600 to NES to SNES. Odallus even has those fetching scan lines right on the screen to mimic sitting in front of a CRT television. “Wait a second,” mutters the console purist, gently setting down her Jaguar controller. “Odallus is a PC game!”

JoyMasher’s game only looks like a console game. Axiom Verve and Pip, despite being readily available on those slick little boxes with controllers that never need a keyboard and mouse to operate, also happen to be playable on PC. These games may have been made to ape the ticks and charms that made console games so distinct from their PC cousins in the past, but in 2015 there are almost no tactile differences between games built on any platform. If the specific pleasure of firing up and playing a console game is ubiquitous across all platforms, what defines console gaming now?

Understanding just how incredibly different console games were to one another in their heyday is difficult in an era when XCOM: Enemy Unknown runs as comfortably on a PC and iPad as it does on an Xbox 360. It wasn’t just that each machine had its own style of controller, either; even the noises they made were particular. Consider Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit beasts. Genesis does indeed do what Nintendon’t but the reverse is equally true. Super Nintendo games used a custom built processor called the S-SMP to generate sound effects and music, resulting in tones with a characteristic warmth. Think about the smooth horn blats of the Super Mario World soundtrack (and the admittedly farty noise made when Mario enters a Koopa castle) for perfect examples of that machine’s audio identity. Sega’s Genesis used a stock sound processor, the Yamaha YM2612. While just as capable of making some bitchin’ tunes, the YM2612 produced a drier, almost acidic tone encapsulated by bruisers like the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack. Compare the main theme of Chrono Trigger remixed using Genesis sounds compared to the SNES original.

The specificity of the hardware, like the SNES’ custom sound chip and the fact that consoles couldn’t be gradually augmented with more memory made game development on those consoles isolated, but also focused. PlayStation developers had an easier time making 3D games because that console’s processing power wasn’t awkwardly spread out across multiple processors like the Sega Saturn. For 2D games, though, Saturn trounced the PlayStation because of the lack of video RAM in Sony’s box. The differences between those two platforms made the same game feel different depending on where it showed up. Resident Evil’s Jill Valentine is jagged on PS1 but more detailed compared to the smooth, simple character model on Saturn.

Every console had its own quirks, its own identity as well as flow in its games that culminated not just in a house style but also a genuine hominess. Recognizing the instrumentation and sound libraries cohere across multiple Super Nintendo games like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana let the console itself grow deep roots in a regular player. For any ravenous fans of Capcom’s arcade work in the mid-’90s, the Sega Saturn’s 2D capabilities made it the only place to translate those brief experiences into something lasting at home. Even machines like the Nintendo 64 whose technical abilities seemed like drawbacks on paper could become benefits as you became attached to its specific style. Did the muddy textures and hazy resolution of N64 games make them immortal works of graphical achievement? Hell no, but for the people that love that machine in its games, that smudgy look is representative of everything great about the console. Consoles could have a style that was also a soul.

Games the cross between console and PC today are actually very capable of mimicking the particulars of classic machines like Super Nintendo, but those artful flourishes aren’t a result of using locked-in hardware specifications. Axiom Verge, whether played on a PS4 or a PC, feels like a modern successor to Nintendo’s own Super Metroid, from the chunky biological art design to Tom Happ’s eerie sci-fi music. Rather than milking a specific sound out of a custom chip, though, the soundtrack was made using an old version of SoundForge and Sonar X2. The game itself was built using software called MonoGame. The result is classic console style but what’s ultimately a device-agnostic feel; Axiom Verge was built with those tools precisely so it wouldn’t be confined to a single platform like old console games.

What marks a console game today actually has nothing to do with what’s in the games, but the ecosystem that surrounds them. Each console environment gets its shape in multiple ways. One aspect is the online community. While cross-platform play between PC and console games like the kind Capcom’s building for Street Fighter V is becoming more common, the player pools on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live do remain largely closed and specific. Multiplayer communities, achievements, trophies, and just the simple notifications that someone you know has been playing the same things you have creates a sense of shared experience that gives that specific console a new feel and form.

While the technical proficiencies of the consoles don’t necessarily define their games anymore, what the makers of those consoles choose to fund and create also internally further shapes the culture of that machine. Nintendo and its fleet of mascots are the most obvious example. Modestly powered PCs could run games like Super Mario 3D World without much difficulty – Wii U uses a PowerPC processor not dissimilar to the PC-like Xbox 360 – but that game and others published by Nintendo share. Wii U games tend to be colorful and emphasize action over story; even games made by studios outside Nintendo’s offices like Bayonetta 2 share that spirit.

Less specific than Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft nonetheless have their own content cultures. Sony, for example, has been cultivating the same persona since it got in the game back in the ‘90s. Its publishing slate tends to mix blockbuster savvy with a flair for quiet, weird experimentation. That’s how you have Uncharted coming out of the same pool as Tokyo Jungle and The Puppeteer with a heavy emphasis on individual characters and largely single-player experiences. Microsoft on the other hand has always banked first on big, blockbuster style games that emphasize multiplayer. Halo, Gears of War, and the Driveatar-ridden roadways of modern Forza all have ample space to play by yourself, but they’re sold first as things to play with other people. (It’s hard to find an Xbox One tentpole that doesn’t have four-player co-op.)

For the old school fan, longing for those aesthetic quirks that made console gaming so distinct in the 20th and early 21st century, your options are limited. There’s always the hardcore homebrew scene, where people are even still cranking ZX Spectrum games alongside new NES and even SNES games. They can satisfy, but it’s no easy task to find homemade games that feel as polished as the classics. Games like Axiom and Odallus that pay homage to an era of more specific technology scratch part of the itch, but even games as precise as those aren’t wholly the real deal. Which is fine. It simply means that old console feeling is itself an antiquity, the soul of games as they were, not as they are.

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When I finished Metal Gear Solid, those weren’t the things that I was thinking about. I was thinking about the perilous tightrope of nuclear disarmament; of stockpiles of poorly maintained nuclear waste; of the Chernobyl disaster. I was thinking about how previous generations had nearly destroyed the world, and how, in turn, new generations could still destroy the world. Yes, I was a precocious teenager, but Metal Gear Solid is detailed and explicit in its distaste for nuclear weapons and their proliferation. It wants its players to think about this stuff.

The Metal Gear Solid series has been criticised for trying to shoehorn serious issues into an ostensibly campy, sci-fi series. You shouldn’t, the theory goes, try to highlight the treatment of prisoners of detention camps in a game with a character called Skull Face. The place for a discussion on surveillance and the control of information, it is said, is not in a game that features a techno-vampire.

I disagree. Metal Gear Solid has every right to explore serious issues, just as any form of entertainment should be free to have an underlying theme. If it takes popular culture to bring big ideas to the broader population, then so be it. Plus, isn’t the plurality of tone essentially mimicking reality? The Metal Gear Solid games, much like life, are simultaneously absurd, dramatic, funny and serious.

This tonal patchwork is undeniably effective. As a teenager, I wouldn’t have watched a dry documentary about the ramifications of the fall of the Soviet Union. But I did spend hours talking to Nastasha on the Codec; the game’s ultimate stealth trick being to teach me about the state of the world under the cover of entertainment. Or, to put it another way, a spoonful of REX helped the frightening realisation about the precariousness of existence go down.

It would be one thing if the series was ever exploitative – pulling ripped-from-the-tabloids story ideas in service of a banal attempt at relevance. That’s not the case. In each instance, the game’s theme comes from a place that feels genuine. Individual stories are sometimes handled clumsily – most notably the way the tragedy of MGS 4’s Beauty and the Beast unit is highlighted through their sexualisation. But the occasional misstep shouldn’t invalidate Kojima Productions’ desire to make a point.

Looking back, Metal Gear Solid was a formative game for me. It was released at the right time in my life, and prompted me to look outside the insular world and at something bigger and more important. Metal Gear Solid’s exploration of nuclear weapons, and the tensions that led to their proliferation, eventually led to me studying politics, and specifically the history of the Cold War. More than that, it changed the way I thought about games. The series had a profound effect on my life and my career. For that reason, I’ll always be indebted to the series – specifically its desire to tackle serious subjects.

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There are times when Konami and Kojima Productions seem to acknowledge that Codec scenes and their radio ancestors are a bore. MGS2 lets players subvert the seriousness of these dialogues by pressing buttons to zoom in on faces, or wiggle analogue sticks to move them. It’s a typical bit of silliness, but it did turn MGS into what its detractors glibly described as the series that encourages players to listen to endless conversations while twiddling their thumbs.

Still, as tempting as it is to dismiss the Codec, MGS’s radio conversations are – alongside cardboard boxes, exclamation points and giant robots – a crucial part of the series’ identity. More importantly, they’re the means by which the series comes closest to reconciling its love of scripted dialogue with its interactive nature. At least that’s true for the optional ones. Players keen to get on with the action may rarely bother with its extra functions, but the Codec can make calls as well as receive them. Snake was running about Shadow Moses with access to a set of contacts long before Rockstar handed Niko Bellic a mobile.

There are scores of games in which the protagonist embarks on a mission aided by a support team delivering context and instruction into his or her earpiece, but MGS lets you actively choose to call on that support, and even provides a basic logic to what you’ll hear and when you’ll hear it. Equip a gun and ring weapons specialist Sigint in MGS3 to hear an exhaustive rundown of its technical specifications as well as some more practical information. Enter a new location for the first time and you’ll be given a briefing on what to expect if you call your CO. Call up anyone during a boss fight and you’ll get relevant tactical tips or well wishes. There’s a kind of contextual dialogue system at play in MGS; it may have a mountain of script to scale, but it also weaves player-influenced and -instigated conversations into an action game without resorting to dialogue trees.

The Codec allows players to tailor their experience, choosing how much background information they want to embellish the story with, and how much help they receive. One character in the first Metal Gear Solid, Ukrainian weapons analyst Nastasha Romanenko, is entirely optional: Snake need never hear an accented word from her unless you decide to seek out more background info on nuclear armaments or want operational tips for your FAMAS assault rifle. Mass Effect’s extensive Codex arguably performs much the same expository role as the Codec, but the latter ensures that Snake, Big Boss or Raiden functions as the vehicle for your curiosity, and keeps information seeking hemmed inside the game’s present tense.

Kojima knew players would visit the Codec regularly, though, because it also functions as a save screen. Calling Mei Ling, Rosemary or Para-Medic to save your progress applies vast quantities of C4 to the fourth wall, but just stops short of detonating it. There’s something so reassuringly straight-faced about the way all three characters discuss the ‘mission data’ you’re storing that the act of saving progress becomes, thanks to the Codec, a simple bit of military protocol.

Unless, of course, you keep calling Mei Ling and refusing to save until she gets fed up and sticks her tongue out at you. That probably breaks protocol. But it wouldn’t be MGS unless the Codec was used for occasional levity, whether that’s Easter Eggs like Mei Ling’s anger, or overt digressions such as Para-Medic’s long-winded chats about movies. Yet the latter serve a thematic function, firmly establishing Snake Eater’s ‘60s setting despite the game’s jungle environment leaving Snake cut off from the prevailing culture.

Of course, the funniest Codec dialogues are the ones you have to work hardest to uncover: the throwaway conversations that occur when you push behavioural limits within the game, such as when you murder too many Huskies in Shadow Moses and get told off by your comrades. For a linear action series, MGS has always offered densely simulated environments, packing them with optional interactions and opportunities for mischief, and the Codec is an easy way for the game to acknowledge that, yes, it has taken notice of your attempts to break it.

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It’s these silly, extraneous conversations that frequently feature the series’ best writing. Freed from explaining torturous double-crosses and convoluted plans, the Codec lets moments of human warmth and character seep into what are supposed to be lone-wolf sneaking missions. The Codec and the radio aren’t just MGS at its most indulgent, they’re its lifeblood-pumping heart.

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Generally speaking, cheesing is seen as completing a challenge in an underhanded way that isn’t in the spirit of the game, like leading an ultra-powerful boss off a cliff or shooting from a convenient hidey-hole where no one can reach you. In many circles these techniques are poorly regarded – cheesing is often said in the same breath as glitching or exploits, which are really just technical synonyms for cheating. But I don’t see those things falling into the same category, because cheesing doesn’t alter the basic framework of the game by prodding at frayed code. Cheesing a game comes from studying its many details and eccentricities, and using what you find to confront challenges in unexpected ways.

Take, for example, horror-romance-puzzle game Catherine. In between navigating the throes of romantic entanglement, your job is to rearrange the building blocks of a tower so you can create a path to the top. One boss in the game has the ability to change the blocks ahead of you into traps like spikes and black holes. It’s an aggravating segment that you can fail with an errant twitch, unless you realize that you have the ability to undo your last block-pulling move, which also undoes the boss’s spell. You can then hop to the next level and pull out another block before he makes a move, bypassing his cheap tactic with a cheap tactic of your own.

That gets you to the top on your own terms, and it wasn’t by abusively duplicating items or manipulating some other mix-up in the code. By paying attention to how the ‘undo’ function affects the game in less obvious ways and making creative use of what you learn, you’re able to utilize a mechanic in a way you may never have thought of otherwise. It’s not the same as trying to beat a game out of contempt or superiority (opens in new tab). It’s a battle of the minds against a game you respect and love enough to learn it inside-out.

Of course, you have to be open to the idea of the game cheesing back – I had to bite my tongue when a massive, stampeding pig killed me through the floor in Bloodborne. But in the end that means you’re interacting with the game on an even deeper level, which just makes playing it more personal and fun. So next time you snipe Sekrion from above in Destiny (opens in new tab) or goad Ceaseless Discharge into a bottomless pit in Dark Souls, banish the word ‘cheating’ from your mind. It’s just you and the game, having a Gotcha moment.

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