The Explorers: The gaming archaeologists digging through the code you were never mean

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont.../Caption-1.jpgGuerrilla War developer KNT’s initials are spelled out as hidden power-ups that would kill all enemies onscreen, give the player 1,000 points and grant a weapon.

Spare a thought for those who shut down 1988 Famicom game Erika To Satoru No Yume Bouken (Erika And Satoru’s Dream Adventure) when it ended. They never knew how close they were.All they needed to do was sit on the screen that read ‘End’ for 18 minutes until its image of the game’s characters turned black-and-white. From there, just another 18 minutes would see the picture turn sepia. The game’s music would still be playing at this point, but would stop after a further 55 minutes, signalling to absolutely no one that the music from The Karate Kid, by famed composer Hirohiko Takayama, could now be played. How? Press A+B+Start+Select+Left on controller 1, and A+B+Right on controller 2.
The player who got this far would have intuited that nowhere in The Karate Kid’s music was a prompt to press B+Select+Right on controller 1, and B+Right+Down on controller 2. If they did that anyway, now an hour and a half into this insane process, it would play a message from programmer ‘Hidemushi’, from which we’ve had to remove names for legal reasons.“Mmm, that’s a nostalgic song playing. Those were good times,” it begins. “Meanwhile, who the hell are these people with this project? I’m so glad it’s over. You think it’s nothing but good memories? Hell no! Let’s use this space to give out some thanks.“First off, [person A], who ran off with some guy in the middle of the project. Yes, you, you bastard. Don’t show up at the office without showering after having sex six times the previous night. Next, [person B]. Yes, you, you bastard. Don’t give me your flippant shit – coming in late on the day we ship the ROM like nothing’s amiss. You can give me all the porn you want, I’m not forgetting that one. All that ****ing weight you put on. No wonder you paid out 18,000 yen and still got nothing but a kiss out of it.”On it goes, naming further ‘bastards’ and threatening to send one back to the Edo period. More button presses reveal a heartfelt apology to Hidemushi’s family, and 18 minutes later the game ends again, this time for real.Erika To Satoru No Yume Bouken is a game about an everyday brother and sister searching for a magical crown on behalf of something that looks like a cat. It’s probably the last place you’d expect to see a developer go completely postal on his colleagues. Spend enough time on The Cutting Room Floor website, however, and you soon learn to expect anything.With 3,712 articles at the time of writing, The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF) is “a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from videogames”. It’s not the only one, but it’s the biggest and most organised, and at the heart of a very real phenomenon you could call videogame archaeology.

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