6 Video Games That Hide Devious Little Secrets

6 So Many Vegetables Were Harmed To Make Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat's gore propelled it to every 90s parents’ hall of shame. Parents were worried that the series' very anatomically accurate depictions of violence would make kids discover weird things they didn't know they had in them. 

One thing about gore that oftentimes gets slept on, though? The sound design. The imagery is essential, but it needs to be paired with equally gruesome sound effects. Imagine expecting a brain to go SPLOOSH, and then hearing it going DING. Unacceptable. One of Mortal Kombat's greatest and most underrated strengths has always been its sound design, and the parents of today should totally rejoice! Because while we assume the first six games or so in the series relied on grinding actual babies in order to make the game's sound effects (the “toasty!" sound required burning a kitten each time), the latest games in the series have gone completely vegan. 

Turns out the people at NetherRealm Studios are all about destroying all sorts of veggies and recording the results.

Think cracking nuts to emulate some bone breakage and munching on fruit as a child would, but with the very professional goal of creating the most gruesome possible sound effects—again, just like a child would.

5 SNK Games Are Full Of Loving References To Western Music

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” -The guy who stole Oscar Wilde's quote. 

If there's any truth to that saying, then video games are flattering the hell out of popular musicians, because most oldie classic titles have stolen their soundtracks. It is rare to see games paying actual tribute to musicians, so it is quite nice to find out classic SNK games have been doing so for many years.

Twitter user and presumabed SNK historian GhostpilotZ found a bunch of musical references cleverly engraved into SNK games. In Garou: Mark of the Wolves, one of the people watching you fight is David Bowie himself in giant mural form. No pressure, fighters.

One of the stages has multiple references to band names such as Joy Division …

… as well as Fatal Fury 1's sneaky reference to Crosby, Stills and Nash in the background.

Too bad that for King Of Fighters ‘94 they straight-up copied “Surprise! you’re dead!” by Faith No More. 

And for Garou, they ripped off the nineties-est of hits, “Children” by Robert Miles

Oh well, let's just hope it evens out.

4 Half-Life Decay Takes Interactive Storytelling Seriously

There's a lot of awesome stuff hidden inside the mainline Half-Life games, like a rat with magical stretchy powers, but Gearbox's PS2-only Half-Life Decay spinoff (you know, that one where players were originally meant to see protagonist Gordon Freeman get executed Mafia-style) has also been hiding some glorious secrets.

The first one is about the characters switching from treating the main character as a genius scientist to treating her as a complete dumbass. The shift happens when players decide to shoot a specific panel on one level, a very unscientist-y thing to do. This is great and it's a shame that it took 20 years to be discovered because it should have encouraged other developers to turn similar shifts into actual features. It would be a great way to spice things up for players who pick the hardest difficulty in campaigns where they aren't supposed to be acting like buffoons.

But fret not if you like to brainlessly like to shoot stuff up, because there's an Easter egg right at the opposite end of the spectrum. At some point, players will come across a dead body calmly floating in a pool. If you shoot it once, twice, or any number that's below 600 goddamn times, nothing will happen.

If players shoot it 600 times, however, the corpse will explode and offer a new weapon as a reward – one composed of the parasites festering on the poor guy's body.

3 Halo Easter Eggs Come Full Circle

On top of having committed the crime of making First Person Shooters playable on consoles, the Halo series is also guilty of the serious crime of containing a bunch of spooky and hilarious secrets.

Halo 5 upped the ante by having a secret so well hidden its devs had to clue fans in about it.

And it almost feels as if the dev is joking, because a whole-ass racing minigame seems like quite a lot to just hide inside a game, but it's real – and very fun.

Play

And that's not even the Halo Easter egg that remained hidden for the longest time. The honor belongs to a shrine dedicated to the wife of one of the devs. It was a secret for 19 years, so we can only hope nothing heartbreaking has happened since then, like the time Spider-Man featured a fan marriage proposal that went horribly wrong.  

Halo Infinite spent a lot of time in development, which came about in part due to poor fan reception of the first gameplay footage shown. To be fair, the game did look great in motion, but it just didn't look like what you'd expect from the current gen's killer app upon closer inspection.

That's “Craig,” a random enemy who got promoted to the face of Halo Infinite's backlash. The devs took note, and not only improved on most of the game's shortcomings, but they also remembered Craig.

 If you've managed to find all these then congrats, you've earned yourself a sandwich.

2 The Easter Egg That Unintentionally Binds Resident Evil And Silent Hill

It took us 20 years to finally realize that both the Resident Evil and the Silent Hill series can happily coexist in the same (head)canon. Twitter user Old Wesker discovered that Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil Survivor feature a bar with the same name.

Whoa, shared universe confirmed?! Uh, not quite. Masahiro Ito, the creature designer for the original Silent Hill trilogy stated that those are probably just English words that the Japanese believe to be very popular among Westerners

So kind of like the Japanese dev version of the Westerner who picks the coolest-looking Japanese Kanji to get tattooed on their arm.

Still, feel free to go write fanfiction where the inhabitants of the best Silent Hill game gain newfound love for their city after a night of hard drinking has them crossing a portal into the world of the worst Resident Evil title of all time. You know, the one meant to be played with a light gun that US players couldn't even play with a light gun.

1 Hitman Is An Easter Egg ZOO

It's not as if the Hitman series hasn't always been home to some of the wildest easter eggs of all time, but the devs sure did up the ante when it comes to the number of bonkers stuff present in the latest trilogy.

There's so much weird stuff that seeing an off-brand Godzilla on the Japan level …

… or getting straight-up abducted by aliens in the middle of a mission …

… just starts to feel like an everyday ordeal.

And we aren't kidding when we call it an “Easter Egg ZOO.” There's even a talking Hippo who tells your future, but, most importantly, disguising yourself as a pest control dude and playing the classic “La Cucaracha” on a piano will end up summoning something the most beautiful of things.

…ROACHZILLA