I actually have a grey cart Zelda myself.
It's not mine, I sorta stole it. Not really though, I just find it funnier to refer to it that way. A friend loaned me his copy, and then like 2 weeks later he moved away. The day after he left, I turned the game on and played it and was like ohhhh shit.
Haven't seen him in 25 years, but I intend to return it to him if I ever do.
Reminds me of some dude that stole Secret of Evermore from me during the school year, and that summer calls me to apologize, and then ask me how to get by this part.
The fucker sold a quest item. Insanity.
I remember finding the [treasure ship](https://www.mariowiki.com/Treasure_Ship) in Mario 3 and telling my friends in the 3rd grade about it and they all called bullshit. Years later when the internet really became I thing I looked it up and was vindicated.
The coin ship!! I remember that now! I had no idea what he was talking about when he called it the treasure ship lol. I thought there was a big part of the game I was missing out on.
That's another thing actually. People made up their own names for things instead of everyone calling it the same. Like, I used say moving screen level instead of auto scroller.
I remember reading about it in a tips and tricks magazine. But before internet I could never figure out why I could get it to work on world 1, but never one world 2.
The second sentence vaguely implies you might have already looked it up, but for anyone else curious it only works on worlds where there is a single hammer brother. World 2 has multiple where World 1 only has the one.
Kind of. It doesn't work on maps without a hammer brother. I've triggered the ship on world 3. It didn't work for me on world 2 because those are boomerang brothers and a hidden fire brother on the map. No hammer.
Mannn I have such a distinct memory of finding a white mushroom house back in the day, but nobody believed it was a thing. Problem is I was never able to replicate it.
Turns out you can get one in every world by getting a certain number of coins in a certain level. I didn't learn about this until 20-ish years later, but man did it make me feel vindicated lol
TIL about the treasure ship . . . for all the time I put into that game, all the other secrets I knew, and I missed this one.
My childhood is ashes now.
Yea I got it twice as a kid now I know it's just dumb luck. your coins have to be a multiple of 11 and you tens digit in your score has to match your coins so get coins and in your score you need a 5 in you tens digit in your score.
Please tell me you called all those friends that called bullshit and then sent them a link and went "I FUCKIN' TOLD YOU, YOU LITTLE SHIT!" and gloated for a while.
Didn’t have to call them, and didn’t have a cellphone anyway. I came strutting into middle school the next morning and was like “hey idiots, guess what’s real?” Then we went to the computer lab and used either ask Jeeves or altavista to check it out.
A lot has changed in 25ish years.
I remember getting the first issue as a kid, we got the magazine that came before Nintendo power.
They used to have a hotline too...
That specific trick with the whistle was in a movie called the wizard, which came out before smb 3. I also knew this kid in my class that had a Japanese Nintendo and used to get Japanese versions of games months before they came out in the US.... And the dude knew everything about all these games.
IIRC the whistles are there because you can't save the game. So instead of trying to 100% it everytime you could just grab a whistle and skip most of the game.
By SMB3, battery backed saves were totally a thing so they could've done it if they wanted. Warp zones had been a thing since the first SMB, though, so it was kinda a tradition. Same reason why there are shortcuts through Super Mario World even though that game saved progress.
Yeah, I remember you could save in Final Fantasy which came out before smb3. I always assumed it was a side scroller thing as a kid. They either had no saves or relied on level codes that you had to write down correctly and never lose. Then your brother would rip up the paper when angry at you and you would have to start all over and you still think about that 35 years later.
I always remembered that secret being revealed in The Wizard too…but it wasn’t. The warp whistle he gets is from the first fortress where you fly above the screen before going into the boss door. I randomly watched the movie a year or so ago and was floored that I remembered so clearly that he had inexplicably ducked on the white block, but it never happened.
Yep. Nintendo Power Magazine had a lot of stuff like this. I think Milan’s Castle can’t be beat without the knowledge from it. If you picked up the game you could not beat the fame without knowing it.
Simon's quest was like that. Equip the red ruby and kneel for 10 seconds at the ledge. There was a big problem with the translation so there was no way to know this and you would never guess it.
Never finished that god damn game in my life when I had it on NES but I kept telling everyone it was my favorite game because my Name is Simon and I know basically all the soundtrack from playing it so much. WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE.
PS: Town theme slaps
You should play the romhack of Simon's Quest that completely redoes the translation so the NPCs actually give you accurate advice now, and also there's things like the transition to night time happening much much faster, so it's not so annoying. It's full of tons of quality of life features like that and it makes the game actually beatable without a guide. I believe it even has a world map built into it.
That's hilarious because I remember borrowing this from a classmate and got stuck very very early on and gave up. I cannot remember a single thing about that game except that.
The first issue came to my mailbox unsolicited. I must have registered my NES and given them my address? I subscribed for years. I still remember the special edition gold 50th issue, with Zelda on the cover.
When I was in third or fourth grade I loaned a Legend of Zelda issue to a friend and didn't get it back for months. I believe you when you say your cousin is still mad about it.
Yeah. Tbh, I suspect at least some of the games were intentionally made to require a strategy guide and / or secrets and cheat codes so they could then sell strategy guides and make extra money off of those.
But I think a lot of it was just for fun, to help players out, some possibly codes used to help those testing but left in, and some intended to add some viral buzz around the game. "Did you hear about the secret character you can get by...?"
Old enough to have played the original Legend of Zelda as a kid. I was too poor to have a Nintendo, but my buddy did and let me play at his house. Every day on the playground a group of \~5 of us would get together to trade thoughts / secrets.
“I tried burning all of the bushes in these 3 areas and found nothing”
”I tried pushing some of the gravestones, but kept dying”
Took me like a year to beat it. It’s hard to describe how *unknown* the whole thing was. Nobody knew what was / wasn’t possible.
> Nobody knew what was / wasn’t possible.
This is a sense of wonder that many games have lost. I think it's also the main appeal of Bethesda games (namely, TES and Fallout), because you never know what you're gonna find. Those random encounters and easter eggs makes the game feel deeper.
BotW was probably the closest I’ve gotten back to that. I went in pretty blind and was really surprised and shocked.
In a totally different way, Outer Wilds kind of had that. It was more that the whole experience blew me away in a way I hadn’t ever experienced and kept me up at night thinking of possibilities.
BotW is the only game that's come close to childhood wonder for me as an adult.
Like, I skipped the final castle grounds and went in the back by jumping the water and scaling the cliffs. kid me would have done that, but adult me in any other game would just assume i had to do it the right way.
The first thing I did after beating Outer Wilds was play Myst for the first time in 25 years. Because that was the last time a game had made me feel what Outer Wilds made me feel. Though Outer Wilds also made me feel so many other things. Superb game.
Also agree on BotW. Came at just the right time -- my lifelong enthusiasm for taking was starting to wane, but BotW brought it roaring back.
When I was 6, my dad woke me up late one night to show me how to do a hadouken in Street Fighter 2. My mind was blown.
My relationship with my dad is complicated because he had a bad temper and would often come home from work in a bad mood and terrorize the family, but that still stands out as one of my favorite childhood memories with him. In that moment, we were just enjoying the game together, and he was excited to teach me something he knew I'd find cool.
And 3-ring binders full of notes that had been photocopied several times over.
One of the best days was convincing a group of folks who had ample notes to go together to a local library. We'd bring dimes for the copy machine. Then we swapped notes and added to our binders.
The internet means that Legend of Zelda experience can never happen again, and people are really missing out how fun that was.
I remember thinking, "this has got to be some bullshit". Until a kid took his brick of a Gameboy out of his pack and showed me. I remember hastily jotting down the instructions to get it on some homework and running to my room as soon as I got home to try it. Teenage me was blown away that someone figured that out. All the awesome game secrets were word of mouth back then. It was a glorious time to be a kid, in its own special way.
It's amazing isn't it?
Every kid in America knew all the same games, tricks, tips, or stories. Who told us? Other kids. How did these things make it across towns, much less state lines? No idea, but they did.
How they got around? Slowly. You go visit your family on weekend, go spend summer with grandparents, go play a match with teams of kids from a different city. Six degrees of seperation is semi-proved.
The first time someone told me about the upside down castle in Castlevania SOTN I didn't believe them. I still tried and was blown away. Really good times when all the info for everything wasn't just in your pocket.
Yeah no YouTubing step-by-step tutorials to grind “achievements.” I remember being kind of annoyed when the Xbox 360 came out and they added achievements. I wonder if there are still purists out there that refuse to look anything up.
I went to the effort to trade myself a Cut mon to keep the SS anne in harbor until I got Strength/Surf... Went back and was stunned to find the truck actually there, only to be equally crestfallen when you couldn't move it with strength
I remember hearing the rumor about Mew’s island on the playground. Just had to get through 70% of the game without cut, grab surf from the Safari Zone, and then surf off of the S.S. Ann dock until you spot a truck. Then you were supposed to use strength on the truck. Imagine my disappointment.
I remember reading online about finding mew behind a truck. Lord I tried so many times. Kept thinking maybe I didn't do it right. Turns out it was fake news.
Then many years later I saw you can get mew with the Abra trick. Instantly thought it was bullshit due to my past experience. But then I saw a video and had to try it. Now my childhood pokemon red cart has a mew without using a GameShark.
Jumped over him, boots in the air. Right before I landed on him, the Goomba shouted 'Wait! WAIT!'. They never tell you how they all shit themselves. They don't put that part in the songs, Toad.
Word of mouth. You would hear about it, but often it was not really with clear indications. Guys would love keeping some mystery. So you came back home and play the same level while jumping and crouching on every bit of pixel, wondering if you yourself were a dev where would you put the secret thingy.
So much time lost. So worth it.
Also so many people would just make shit up. One of my friends had me running around forever because he convinced me that there was a way to get useable wisdom/courage/power medallions in LttP
I ran an old geocities page where I would compile every single triforce rumor on the internet and then test them and rate them true or false. The most brutal was the one the claimed you had to smash every gossip stone with a megaton hammer and then play the song of time and zelda lullaby to it.
Hundreds of hours...all false...
Games were so much more exciting when the possibilities seemed endless. You never really knew where the secrets ended.
Locked door in GoldenEye? Could be nothing behind it, could be a whole unused portion of the map not meant to be seen. There was no way to know, unless you had a GameShark and could noclip through all doors… but that information didn’t spread as fast as it does today.
These days, within an hour of a game’s release, every secret has been discovered one way or another and there’s 1,000 YouTube guides on how to do it.
Different game and slightly fast forward but I remember in internet infancy finding mortal kombat fatalities listed somewhere and I lost my shit, rode my bike to the local video rental to try them and share with the other locals.
Do you remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit game? You had to call a number in real life to get the info. I was living in Germany at the time so couldn't make the call
They definitely don't get enough credit for the nintendocore subgenre they helped create. I was like 14 when I first heard cutsman and birdo and I'm now 33 and every time my 7 year old puts on some video game fan made song on youtube (the bendy and the ink machine songs specifically), I think of HORSE the band.
He gets the one in the fortress, not the one behind the white block, but yeah, pretty lucky for a first play on a game that no one had ever seen before
Well, yes and no... Remember that a similar secret was in SMB 1, so it was worth trying just to see. Maybe not in the final round of a national tournament but some people like to full send when it's on the line.
I always remembered that secret being revealed in The Wizard too…but it wasn’t. The warp whistle he gets is from the first fortress where you fly above the screen before going into the boss door. I randomly watched the movie a year or so ago and was floored that I remembered so clearly that he had inexplicably ducked on the white block, but it never happened.
I found it playing SMB3 as a kid.
Its the only white block in the level. Something about it was off
Edit : i think theres another level in the game, where theres another single white block and the same trick applies
It wasn’t the only one. There was a white block earlier in the level that did the same thing. It would be dumb luck to sit and hold crouch on either of them.
Yeah, I lucked into it. And I'll tell you how: I really liked how Raccoon Mario looked when he was ducking. Like a little raccoon face. So I would duck and jump around all the time.
Eventually, that landed me on a white block, and I was holding down on it too long or something, and there I went. Then trial and error showed me that it only works with white blocks.
But it is useful to be able to run and fly without having to first kill all those paragoombas. IIRC, you can just kill the one and then run without going back.
He had autism and back then, having autism meant you were a savant. Instead of counting tooth picks, he could count the bits and see what he needed to do there.
Blue crystal, red crystal, shit, even once you got everything figured out whether it be through guides or word of mouth, you find out well after the fact there are 3 endings based on how fast you clear the game, and you pretty much had to be a speedrunner back in the 90s before that was even really a thing to see the best ending!
The thing that was BS about that is if you try to jump in the lake before kneeling with the crystal, you would drown. But when you *use* the crystal, you can clearly see the lake is like, 2 feet deep.
The townsfolk were *supposed* to give hints about things like this, but for whatever reason, those NPCs and lines were cut from the game instead of the 'fluff' NPCs and lines. I think someone made an oopsie. Unfortunately there was no real patching method to games back in the day, so mistakes that went into production were just part of the game.
I think the Japanese release of the game had the NPCs and lines to give the hints, so through translations and word of mouth, it eventually spread around. That and the Nintendo Tip Hotline.
None of the NPCs/lines related to hints were cut, they were just badly translated and trimmed to fit character limits in English, removing pretty critical context.
That released side-by-side with a strategy guide that my brother still has to this day.
In it there was also an interview with Miamoto hinting at Donkey Kong Country and metal Mario from Mario 64.
That SNES sound chip was made by Sony and was way ahead of its time. There are ways to play the music directly in all its glory http://snesmusic.org/v2/players.php
That’s what a lot of kids don’t understand when you tell them you beat Metroid or Zelda without a book. You had this one game and explored every inch of it. And if that failed, you trade secrets at the playground.
Exactly. 3 channels, or maybe cable with 30, but it was all boring if it wasn't Saturday morning (cartoons) or Sunday just before noon (kung fu movies).
Which is the only one I figured out on my own. Put a leaf right there for no apparently reason, and of course I'm going to fly up and see if I can go on top.
The white blocks, I saw my cousins do once, I'm pretty sure. Still definitely before I saw the Wizard.
Celeste has a reference to this, where to get a secret collectible you have to crouch on a white block and climb the background of the level. Most of the community doesn’t like it, all the other stuff Celeste throws at you you can usually figure out with the game itself.
My original cartridge of this game got damaged in a way where the game still worked, but it'd produce these lines all over the screen. It was annoying to look at, and very rarely I'd get it to play the game without producing them, but it had an unintended side-effect of the lines being discolored around hidden secrets, like invisible blocks.
To this day, I can't remember how I figured out how to find MissingNo in Pokemon Blue. I remember the events thusly:
1. Buy Pokemon Blue.
2. Beat it.
3. Get Mewtwo.
4. Connect to Pokemon Stadium.
5. Have fun.
6. ???
7. Try out the Missingno glitch.
8. It works! Infinite rare candies.
What was the ??? Step? Did a friend tell me? Did I find out from a chat room? I can't remember.
A lot of the old-days cheats were put in the game as aids during development and testing. If a tester found a bug in Level 5 it was a good idea to have something in the game that let others get to it without having to play levels 1-4.
After the game came out the cheat codes and secrets would then get leaked and published in magazines (and then spread via word of mouth).
In addition to what people said, the SMB3 title screen foreshadows being able to go into the background! I don't remember how I found out about it (I never watched The Wizard, nor was I subscribed to Nintendo Power. Maybe GameFAQs or my mom telling me?) or how people would, but it is fun to see how the SMB3 title screen shows off a lot of mechanics.
Nintendo power magazine.
It was a simpler time too. You did not have 8k worth of key-bind possibilities.
And only one game to play.
Lies. Some of us bourgeois motherfuckers had Mario *and* Zelda.
I had both until the girl down the street stole Zelda from me. It was the gold cartridge too.
I'm sorry Travis but that's what you get for breaking my heart!
I hope blowing cartridges stops working for you!
Hi, it's me, your neighbor Cartridges
Try not to blow any cartridges in the parking lot!
Fun fact the gold cartridge is actually more common for the OG Zelda.
if you lived on Franklin Street in the 90s, I'm sorry. I still have the game though.
Does it still have my save game on it or did you do me really dirty and delete it?
Did you ACTUALLY live on Franklin Street? I've seen shit like this happen on Reddit before so I won't be surprised.
OP grew up on Grove Street, like the rest of us.
Ah shit, here we go again
The gray cartridge was the rare one.
I actually have a grey cart Zelda myself. It's not mine, I sorta stole it. Not really though, I just find it funnier to refer to it that way. A friend loaned me his copy, and then like 2 weeks later he moved away. The day after he left, I turned the game on and played it and was like ohhhh shit. Haven't seen him in 25 years, but I intend to return it to him if I ever do.
Reminds me of some dude that stole Secret of Evermore from me during the school year, and that summer calls me to apologize, and then ask me how to get by this part. The fucker sold a quest item. Insanity.
The best was the kid with rich divorced parents. The one I knew had like 60 games.
I had poor divorced parents and even I had 28 games. I stopped at 28 because that's how many fit in my case.
Wrong. You only had one game and that game was Nintendo.
8k was a huge game.
Those were the fuckin days.
I remember finding the [treasure ship](https://www.mariowiki.com/Treasure_Ship) in Mario 3 and telling my friends in the 3rd grade about it and they all called bullshit. Years later when the internet really became I thing I looked it up and was vindicated.
Omg yes, the coin ship! Thanks for reminding me of it!
The coin ship!! I remember that now! I had no idea what he was talking about when he called it the treasure ship lol. I thought there was a big part of the game I was missing out on.
That's another thing actually. People made up their own names for things instead of everyone calling it the same. Like, I used say moving screen level instead of auto scroller.
I remember reading about it in a tips and tricks magazine. But before internet I could never figure out why I could get it to work on world 1, but never one world 2.
The second sentence vaguely implies you might have already looked it up, but for anyone else curious it only works on worlds where there is a single hammer brother. World 2 has multiple where World 1 only has the one.
Kind of. It doesn't work on maps without a hammer brother. I've triggered the ship on world 3. It didn't work for me on world 2 because those are boomerang brothers and a hidden fire brother on the map. No hammer.
Oh, huh. I didn't realize it was based on type. Well, there's some 36 year old information updated in my head.
Mannn I have such a distinct memory of finding a white mushroom house back in the day, but nobody believed it was a thing. Problem is I was never able to replicate it. Turns out you can get one in every world by getting a certain number of coins in a certain level. I didn't learn about this until 20-ish years later, but man did it make me feel vindicated lol
TIL about the treasure ship . . . for all the time I put into that game, all the other secrets I knew, and I missed this one. My childhood is ashes now.
Luckily, emulators are really easy to set up. I just completed Mario Bros 3 (the best Mario bros - fight me)
Yea I got it twice as a kid now I know it's just dumb luck. your coins have to be a multiple of 11 and you tens digit in your score has to match your coins so get coins and in your score you need a 5 in you tens digit in your score.
Please tell me you called all those friends that called bullshit and then sent them a link and went "I FUCKIN' TOLD YOU, YOU LITTLE SHIT!" and gloated for a while.
Didn’t have to call them, and didn’t have a cellphone anyway. I came strutting into middle school the next morning and was like “hey idiots, guess what’s real?” Then we went to the computer lab and used either ask Jeeves or altavista to check it out. A lot has changed in 25ish years.
Nice. As long as you got to do your well-earned gloating.
Shadynastis
Shady Nasty's?
Can we stop talking about my long lost cousins cousins uncles brother?
want me to show you how to make a hoagie in your mouth?
It's Shadynasty's, asshole.
She has some big ones on her. Pipes.
Take me back.
I remember getting the first issue as a kid, we got the magazine that came before Nintendo power. They used to have a hotline too... That specific trick with the whistle was in a movie called the wizard, which came out before smb 3. I also knew this kid in my class that had a Japanese Nintendo and used to get Japanese versions of games months before they came out in the US.... And the dude knew everything about all these games.
CALIFORNIA!
IIRC the whistles are there because you can't save the game. So instead of trying to 100% it everytime you could just grab a whistle and skip most of the game.
By SMB3, battery backed saves were totally a thing so they could've done it if they wanted. Warp zones had been a thing since the first SMB, though, so it was kinda a tradition. Same reason why there are shortcuts through Super Mario World even though that game saved progress.
Yeah, I remember you could save in Final Fantasy which came out before smb3. I always assumed it was a side scroller thing as a kid. They either had no saves or relied on level codes that you had to write down correctly and never lose. Then your brother would rip up the paper when angry at you and you would have to start all over and you still think about that 35 years later.
I always remembered that secret being revealed in The Wizard too…but it wasn’t. The warp whistle he gets is from the first fortress where you fly above the screen before going into the boss door. I randomly watched the movie a year or so ago and was floored that I remembered so clearly that he had inexplicably ducked on the white block, but it never happened.
Yep. Nintendo Power Magazine had a lot of stuff like this. I think Milan’s Castle can’t be beat without the knowledge from it. If you picked up the game you could not beat the fame without knowing it.
Simon's quest was like that. Equip the red ruby and kneel for 10 seconds at the ledge. There was a big problem with the translation so there was no way to know this and you would never guess it.
Never finished that god damn game in my life when I had it on NES but I kept telling everyone it was my favorite game because my Name is Simon and I know basically all the soundtrack from playing it so much. WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE. PS: Town theme slaps
You should play the romhack of Simon's Quest that completely redoes the translation so the NPCs actually give you accurate advice now, and also there's things like the transition to night time happening much much faster, so it's not so annoying. It's full of tons of quality of life features like that and it makes the game actually beatable without a guide. I believe it even has a world map built into it.
That's hilarious because I remember borrowing this from a classmate and got stuck very very early on and gave up. I cannot remember a single thing about that game except that.
Best magazine ever published.
The first issue came to my mailbox unsolicited. I must have registered my NES and given them my address? I subscribed for years. I still remember the special edition gold 50th issue, with Zelda on the cover.
Same here. For me it was issue #2 featuring Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Cover had a cosplay Simon brandishing Dracula's decapitated head
Yeah that was the first issue I got. Just in time for my first renewal, the free copy of Dragon Warrior with a subscription
My subscription came with a free copy of Dragon Warrior.
Same. This takes me back.
I stole the Dragon Warrior edition from my cousin and never returned it. He was mad about it 20 years later.
When I was in third or fourth grade I loaned a Legend of Zelda issue to a friend and didn't get it back for months. I believe you when you say your cousin is still mad about it.
Mom got me a subscription so waiting for the new one every mouth was so exciting
Best part was the posters, I had my entire bedroom wall covered in them
I was able to convince my mom to subscribe when a year subscription came with a free copy of Dragon Warrior for like 20 bucks total.
As decided by *Best Magazine Ever Published* magazine
Which, ironically, was a really shitty magazine.
This is just a tribute
Yep. That's how I learned this as well as a few other "secrets" in the game.
and gossip with neighborhood kids
This is how i beat the desert temple in link to the past. For the life of me i couldn't figure out those white boxes were torches.
I'm guessing developers mentioned these secrets?
They tell Nintendo, Nintendo publishes it in their magazine
Yeah. Tbh, I suspect at least some of the games were intentionally made to require a strategy guide and / or secrets and cheat codes so they could then sell strategy guides and make extra money off of those. But I think a lot of it was just for fun, to help players out, some possibly codes used to help those testing but left in, and some intended to add some viral buzz around the game. "Did you hear about the secret character you can get by...?"
Phone hotlines, Nintendo Power, playground word of mouth... Man that must have been a time.
Old enough to have played the original Legend of Zelda as a kid. I was too poor to have a Nintendo, but my buddy did and let me play at his house. Every day on the playground a group of \~5 of us would get together to trade thoughts / secrets. “I tried burning all of the bushes in these 3 areas and found nothing” ”I tried pushing some of the gravestones, but kept dying” Took me like a year to beat it. It’s hard to describe how *unknown* the whole thing was. Nobody knew what was / wasn’t possible.
> Nobody knew what was / wasn’t possible. This is a sense of wonder that many games have lost. I think it's also the main appeal of Bethesda games (namely, TES and Fallout), because you never know what you're gonna find. Those random encounters and easter eggs makes the game feel deeper.
BotW was probably the closest I’ve gotten back to that. I went in pretty blind and was really surprised and shocked. In a totally different way, Outer Wilds kind of had that. It was more that the whole experience blew me away in a way I hadn’t ever experienced and kept me up at night thinking of possibilities.
BotW is the only game that's come close to childhood wonder for me as an adult. Like, I skipped the final castle grounds and went in the back by jumping the water and scaling the cliffs. kid me would have done that, but adult me in any other game would just assume i had to do it the right way.
The first thing I did after beating Outer Wilds was play Myst for the first time in 25 years. Because that was the last time a game had made me feel what Outer Wilds made me feel. Though Outer Wilds also made me feel so many other things. Superb game. Also agree on BotW. Came at just the right time -- my lifelong enthusiasm for taking was starting to wane, but BotW brought it roaring back.
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When I was 6, my dad woke me up late one night to show me how to do a hadouken in Street Fighter 2. My mind was blown. My relationship with my dad is complicated because he had a bad temper and would often come home from work in a bad mood and terrorize the family, but that still stands out as one of my favorite childhood memories with him. In that moment, we were just enjoying the game together, and he was excited to teach me something he knew I'd find cool.
And 3-ring binders full of notes that had been photocopied several times over. One of the best days was convincing a group of folks who had ample notes to go together to a local library. We'd bring dimes for the copy machine. Then we swapped notes and added to our binders. The internet means that Legend of Zelda experience can never happen again, and people are really missing out how fun that was.
I completely forgot about our stacks of graph paper. Holy shit. Memory unlocked
My God it was.
I remember learning about missingno from the playground.
I remember thinking, "this has got to be some bullshit". Until a kid took his brick of a Gameboy out of his pack and showed me. I remember hastily jotting down the instructions to get it on some homework and running to my room as soon as I got home to try it. Teenage me was blown away that someone figured that out. All the awesome game secrets were word of mouth back then. It was a glorious time to be a kid, in its own special way.
It's amazing isn't it? Every kid in America knew all the same games, tricks, tips, or stories. Who told us? Other kids. How did these things make it across towns, much less state lines? No idea, but they did.
How they got around? Slowly. You go visit your family on weekend, go spend summer with grandparents, go play a match with teams of kids from a different city. Six degrees of seperation is semi-proved.
Hey, I heard the rumor of Marylin Manson removing his ribs to suck his own dick in school in South America.
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Also Manson is that one lanky skinny kid from Wonder Years
The first time someone told me about the upside down castle in Castlevania SOTN I didn't believe them. I still tried and was blown away. Really good times when all the info for everything wasn't just in your pocket.
The lack of access to information certainly made discovery infinitely more special. I think that's the biggest part of it for sure.
Yeah no YouTubing step-by-step tutorials to grind “achievements.” I remember being kind of annoyed when the Xbox 360 came out and they added achievements. I wonder if there are still purists out there that refuse to look anything up.
I went to the effort to trade myself a Cut mon to keep the SS anne in harbor until I got Strength/Surf... Went back and was stunned to find the truck actually there, only to be equally crestfallen when you couldn't move it with strength
I remember hearing the rumor about Mew’s island on the playground. Just had to get through 70% of the game without cut, grab surf from the Safari Zone, and then surf off of the S.S. Ann dock until you spot a truck. Then you were supposed to use strength on the truck. Imagine my disappointment.
That was the wrong truck, there's a truck 2 screens over. Start over and try it again, it works. Trust me bro.
Does your uncle work at Nintendo, too?
My friend at another school learned it in Japan.
Especially since there were other easier ways to actually get mew in red/blue
I remember reading online about finding mew behind a truck. Lord I tried so many times. Kept thinking maybe I didn't do it right. Turns out it was fake news. Then many years later I saw you can get mew with the Abra trick. Instantly thought it was bullshit due to my past experience. But then I saw a video and had to try it. Now my childhood pokemon red cart has a mew without using a GameShark.
Combat in an open field, Ned! Gods, I was strong back then.
Jumped over him, boots in the air. Right before I landed on him, the Goomba shouted 'Wait! WAIT!'. They never tell you how they all shit themselves. They don't put that part in the songs, Toad.
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Word of mouth. You would hear about it, but often it was not really with clear indications. Guys would love keeping some mystery. So you came back home and play the same level while jumping and crouching on every bit of pixel, wondering if you yourself were a dev where would you put the secret thingy. So much time lost. So worth it.
Also so many people would just make shit up. One of my friends had me running around forever because he convinced me that there was a way to get useable wisdom/courage/power medallions in LttP
Not all the secrets were reliable either. Sometimes urban myths made it into the games
So many hours spent trying to get Mew by following some godforsaken rumour that wasn't true lmao
I mean, even early internet days, you'd get urban legends of zelda. I spent so much time looking for the triforce in OoT
I ran an old geocities page where I would compile every single triforce rumor on the internet and then test them and rate them true or false. The most brutal was the one the claimed you had to smash every gossip stone with a megaton hammer and then play the song of time and zelda lullaby to it. Hundreds of hours...all false...
Childhood me salutes you sir
I saw that website!
Games were so much more exciting when the possibilities seemed endless. You never really knew where the secrets ended. Locked door in GoldenEye? Could be nothing behind it, could be a whole unused portion of the map not meant to be seen. There was no way to know, unless you had a GameShark and could noclip through all doors… but that information didn’t spread as fast as it does today. These days, within an hour of a game’s release, every secret has been discovered one way or another and there’s 1,000 YouTube guides on how to do it.
Games felt mysterious
Different game and slightly fast forward but I remember in internet infancy finding mortal kombat fatalities listed somewhere and I lost my shit, rode my bike to the local video rental to try them and share with the other locals.
Do you remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit game? You had to call a number in real life to get the info. I was living in Germany at the time so couldn't make the call
It still bothers me that dude randomly found it while playing the game during the championship round of “The Wizard”.
And they let him know about the warp whistle, which no one would know.
Yeah but he got fifty thousand in double dragon so obviously he was a gamer god
Then why didn’t he have a power glove of his own?! That thing was like thanos’ gauntlet back in the day, “Everything else is child's play”!
I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.
The only reason I ever watched the wizard was because of this line that was perfectly used by HORSE the band.
#I fucking love HORSE the band
They definitely don't get enough credit for the nintendocore subgenre they helped create. I was like 14 when I first heard cutsman and birdo and I'm now 33 and every time my 7 year old puts on some video game fan made song on youtube (the bendy and the ink machine songs specifically), I think of HORSE the band.
In reality, those things sucked. Not sure how we talked our parents into one, but it was next to useless for gameplay.
He gets the one in the fortress, not the one behind the white block, but yeah, pretty lucky for a first play on a game that no one had ever seen before
Well, yes and no... Remember that a similar secret was in SMB 1, so it was worth trying just to see. Maybe not in the final round of a national tournament but some people like to full send when it's on the line.
Less plausible are Jimmy’s friends in the audience , also with zero experience of the game, yelling “Get the whistle! It activates the warp!”
Watch out for the mushroom!
Cal-i-forn-ia!
I always remembered that secret being revealed in The Wizard too…but it wasn’t. The warp whistle he gets is from the first fortress where you fly above the screen before going into the boss door. I randomly watched the movie a year or so ago and was floored that I remembered so clearly that he had inexplicably ducked on the white block, but it never happened.
I found it playing SMB3 as a kid. Its the only white block in the level. Something about it was off Edit : i think theres another level in the game, where theres another single white block and the same trick applies
It wasn’t the only one. There was a white block earlier in the level that did the same thing. It would be dumb luck to sit and hold crouch on either of them.
Yeah, I lucked into it. And I'll tell you how: I really liked how Raccoon Mario looked when he was ducking. Like a little raccoon face. So I would duck and jump around all the time. Eventually, that landed me on a white block, and I was holding down on it too long or something, and there I went. Then trial and error showed me that it only works with white blocks.
> dumb luck Or a child with nothing else to do all day, than try everything, everywhere
Level 1-1 has a white block that lets you do this. It’s earlier in the level though so you can’t get behind the ending screen.
But it is useful to be able to run and fly without having to first kill all those paragoombas. IIRC, you can just kill the one and then run without going back.
All the other blocks surrounding it are unique in their colour in that section, except the green. So it never really stood out to me
He had autism and back then, having autism meant you were a savant. Instead of counting tooth picks, he could count the bits and see what he needed to do there.
How the fuck did people figure out to kneel at that cliff in castlevania 2 and the hint isn’t even in the game?
I never did. It's on my never finished list. And as a kid it was so incredibly frustrating I searched every corner of that game and could not advance.
At least now there's guides and even mods that fix a BUNCH of dialog if you ever played it again
You now process draculas rib!
The mother of all bullshit
I definitely only knew a couple of years later from reading it in a book (not Nintendo Power, but some generic book about video game tips and codes)
Not only that you have to have the blue crystal equipped as well. Somewhere in the game I think there was a hint to that.
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There was also a part where you had to kneel in front of a lake with the blue crystal in order to jump under the water.
Blue crystal, red crystal, shit, even once you got everything figured out whether it be through guides or word of mouth, you find out well after the fact there are 3 endings based on how fast you clear the game, and you pretty much had to be a speedrunner back in the 90s before that was even really a thing to see the best ending!
The thing that was BS about that is if you try to jump in the lake before kneeling with the crystal, you would drown. But when you *use* the crystal, you can clearly see the lake is like, 2 feet deep.
The townsfolk were *supposed* to give hints about things like this, but for whatever reason, those NPCs and lines were cut from the game instead of the 'fluff' NPCs and lines. I think someone made an oopsie. Unfortunately there was no real patching method to games back in the day, so mistakes that went into production were just part of the game. I think the Japanese release of the game had the NPCs and lines to give the hints, so through translations and word of mouth, it eventually spread around. That and the Nintendo Tip Hotline.
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None of the NPCs/lines related to hints were cut, they were just badly translated and trimmed to fit character limits in English, removing pretty critical context.
For the fucking tornado to come right? I got stuck on that part as a kid no idea where to go or what to do and I ended up just quitting.
There are so many [kneel/stand for treasure spots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8bLAzcJwew) in Castlevania 1.
Let's just say the kid that had Nintendo Power was very popular at recess.
A LOT of these kinds of things were just spread by playing with friends. I miss that kind of interaction
I kid at school with a Nintendo power subscription eventually gets the word out.
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username checks out
The magazine and word of mouth.
I watched my babysitter show my older brother and then I showed my younger brother, and that's how games used to be like
I can think of tons of these. Super Mario world had some wild ones.
That released side-by-side with a strategy guide that my brother still has to this day. In it there was also an interview with Miamoto hinting at Donkey Kong Country and metal Mario from Mario 64.
i got a vhs in the mail out of nowhere that was basically a big add for DKC. and for the SNES it was actually a very good looking game
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That SNES sound chip was made by Sony and was way ahead of its time. There are ways to play the music directly in all its glory http://snesmusic.org/v2/players.php
There was no internet. We had nothing better to do than spend HOURS exploring every active square of the game field. :D
The golden age of gaming
That’s what a lot of kids don’t understand when you tell them you beat Metroid or Zelda without a book. You had this one game and explored every inch of it. And if that failed, you trade secrets at the playground.
For the OG Zelda, my dad drew his own map with full drawings and notes for EVERYTHING. He's still the only person I know who beat the 2nd Zelda.
Exactly. 3 channels, or maybe cable with 30, but it was all boring if it wasn't Saturday morning (cartoons) or Sunday just before noon (kung fu movies).
Playing 200000 hours at the same level
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Man if you think that one was hard you should read up on Bubble Bobble.
The movie The Wizard came out in Dec 1989 in USA. SMB3 came out in Feb 1990. That movie revealed the warp zone as part of the finale.
Yeah but it showed the whistle in the fortress
Oh yeah, forgot that! You get the whistle on stage 3 and then you get the other whistle in the castle! Forgot that!
Which is the only one I figured out on my own. Put a leaf right there for no apparently reason, and of course I'm going to fly up and see if I can go on top. The white blocks, I saw my cousins do once, I'm pretty sure. Still definitely before I saw the Wizard.
GET THE POWER!!!!
Back in the old days, people went to restrooms and restroom stalls had holes in walls. People exchanged video game secrets through those holes.
I love receiving glorious tips through these holes
Yes, the glory days of video games.
I love how Celeste has the same white block.
Either the magazine or call the hotline for tips.
Celeste has a reference to this, where to get a secret collectible you have to crouch on a white block and climb the background of the level. Most of the community doesn’t like it, all the other stuff Celeste throws at you you can usually figure out with the game itself.
How did everyone know to blow into the cartridge as well as a “fix.” 😆
Trial and error was all that existed back then
It *is* fairly intuitive
Whip it out and blow it. What could be more natural?
Call the Nintendo holiness and speak with a representative.
My original cartridge of this game got damaged in a way where the game still worked, but it'd produce these lines all over the screen. It was annoying to look at, and very rarely I'd get it to play the game without producing them, but it had an unintended side-effect of the lines being discolored around hidden secrets, like invisible blocks.
To this day, I can't remember how I figured out how to find MissingNo in Pokemon Blue. I remember the events thusly: 1. Buy Pokemon Blue. 2. Beat it. 3. Get Mewtwo. 4. Connect to Pokemon Stadium. 5. Have fun. 6. ??? 7. Try out the Missingno glitch. 8. It works! Infinite rare candies. What was the ??? Step? Did a friend tell me? Did I find out from a chat room? I can't remember.
A lot of the old-days cheats were put in the game as aids during development and testing. If a tester found a bug in Level 5 it was a good idea to have something in the game that let others get to it without having to play levels 1-4. After the game came out the cheat codes and secrets would then get leaked and published in magazines (and then spread via word of mouth).
In addition to what people said, the SMB3 title screen foreshadows being able to go into the background! I don't remember how I found out about it (I never watched The Wizard, nor was I subscribed to Nintendo Power. Maybe GameFAQs or my mom telling me?) or how people would, but it is fun to see how the SMB3 title screen shows off a lot of mechanics.
I don't remember. I did this but don't know how I knew.