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https://mashable.com/article/doom-2-secret-24-years-found/
Video games are often filled with secrets. They just don't usually stay hidden for this long.
Doom series co-creator John Romero took to Twitter on Friday with an exuberant congratulations for Zero Master, the YouTuber who discovered a secret unlock that's confounded Doom II fans for more than two decades. The secret is out now, and Romero is thrilled.
To be clear, the location itself isn't the secret here. Doom and its sequel have been a source of public fascination for decades, and dedicated programming-savvy fans discovered all of its hidden areas long ago.
What's unique about this one, however, is no one's ever managed to unlock it without cheating. As such, no one has ever been able to claim a 100 percent completion — a milestone that requires players to find every secret in the game — in the 24 years since Doom II launched. Until now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @03:30PM (7 children)
... I bet it takes a lot longer than that before someone finishes Daikatana.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @05:13PM (5 children)
Plenty of people played through Daikatana and talked about it being ok in IRC in my late teens. And Doom... Hell, I known two guys who finished it back in the day. It's a single player game with no internet connection.
Honestly it's shocking people actually run with this story. The engine was reversed and ported by half a dozen guys over the years and people built level editors and shit... This being the first completion is not only a most dubious statement, it's moronic.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Tuesday September 04 2018, @06:34PM (3 children)
The level design bug that made 100% completion unachievable was the moronic bit. The method of using spawning monsters to help trigger the impossible secret, without requiring a no-clip cheat code, is new and innovative.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday September 04 2018, @06:55PM (2 children)
Have any of the devs confirmed it to be a bug? The comments by the map designer, John Romero, make it sound intentional. Seems more like overly clever design intended just to screw with completionists to me.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday September 04 2018, @08:08PM (1 child)
That's just the thing. Look at it under a map editor and it looks like a fairly cut and dried map bug.
Doom 1 had some nasty bugs, such as a zombie shotgun guy stuck in a wall that you could still kill with a rocket if you did things exactly right. That one was fixed in an update.
So it could have just been a bug and now they are saying "uh, oh, yea, that was intentional".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @11:06PM
I'm inclined to think that the fact they didn't patch it actually lends credence to the fact that it is legitimate considering that they didn't patch after it was pointed out on multiple occasions, other bugs in level layout and secret triggers were patched (some as early as a few months of release), multiple re-releases for different platforms keeping it, and the creator himself insisting multiple times in the past that there was no mistake in the secret count.
There are many other well-hidden secrets that have gone years before being discovered. Just because people assumed they were errors or left in from the cutting room floor, doesn't mean they weren't put there on purpose.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 04 2018, @06:45PM
Look at the internet tough guy here: aggressive, arrogant, insulting, anonymous, and most importantly, wrong. The linked article isn't very helpful, but you should have at least bothered to follow through to the video to read its description before being a smug douchebag over something you didn't even casually research before making bold statements on. The existence of the secret has been known for years, but that doesn't help if you can't figure out how to trigger it. Based on the description, discussion, and info from the linked wiki page [doomwiki.org] (which provides screenshots illustrating why it could not normally be triggered), the game's mechanics made the secret impossible to trigger under normal means, so it was believed by everyone to be a game bug and treated as such, including not being a requirement for 100% clears in things like speed runs.
That is, until someone finally figured it out and made it known, 24 years later. Maybe someone else did it and never announced it between then and now, but until someone can prove that somehow, it's not news, and this is. And yes, it is news, if for no other reason, just because that's one hell of a secret; it's such an obscure and clever abuse of a game engine's mechanics that it took nearly two and a half decades to figure out how to trigger it legitimately, despite everyone having full access to source code, maps, and level editors for most of that time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @10:04PM
Did Ion Storm ever finish Daikatana?