Call me old fashioned but I miss the old days when shit like this would take decades to discover and even then it would be shrouded in doubt and mystery.
Kids today just hop on youtube and know all the secrets in a short 40 minute video full of ads sponsorships and fillers.
Call me old fashioned but I miss the old days when shit like this would take decades to discover and even then it would be shrouded in doubt and mystery.
You are old fashioned, but also wrong. In the old days there were gaming guides sold alongside games that provided the same information that players can get on youtube. Only a few games have had secrets revealed years after they came out.
The youtube full of ads and sponsors is crappier though, if you don’t just block them.
gaming guides
I would like to remind the assorted that the official final fantasy 9 guidebook left out massive chunks of useful information to encourage you to go online to their website.
It was a dark time.
There was absolutely a sweet period around when indy games were taking off and after game guides had fallen out of favour, where secrets like this in medium sized games (or huge indy hits) could remain for years.
Datamining is the worst except in the cases where it just becomes more of a mystery. Like “we know there’s this scene in the game and it doesn’t appear to be cut, but we can’t figure out how to get to it without hacking yet.” Like the Nuclear Disarmament cutscene in MGS5. It was found pretty early on, but nobody was sure how it worked until enough people worked together to dismantle every single nuke on the platform for the game (IIRC PlayStation did it first).
Wasn’t Mew in the original Pokémon games found through data mining and only obtainable by hacking?
Mew was also given out free at Ninendo events.
Obtainable via memory exploits, if you want to call that hacking.
Memory manipulation is very much hacking. Pretty much the form of computer hacking.
When hacking is used in context of Gameboy games then I’d normally first think of using external tools such as a gameshark to directly edit memory, rather than game glitches. I’m not sure most people would say missingno glitch is hacking but it is a memory exploit.
When I was your age, I’d go down to the corner store where I’d drop down $2.50 for a freshly printed copy of Nintendo Power and a package of bubble-gum cigarettes when I wanted to get my ads and filler squeezed between spoilers.
If I really wanted to beat a game quick, I’d buy myself a Game Genie.