Has anyone done this?

When I first started playing Doom, I used to try to use noclip mode to get to the mountains on E1M1. I didn't really know how they worked. I also tried blasting through walls. Has anyone done something else weird like that?

In the arcade game Battlezone I always wanted to explore the mountains in the distance, and the volcano in particular. I could never get to them though, and the more you moved away from the area where you were meant to be fighting, the more missiles it chucked at you.

When I played pokemon red when I was a lot younger I used to think there was secret areas beyond the borders with the grass behind them around the routes next to first town and at one stage I tried to move through each of the border barrier things hoping one of them was a secret camouflaged gap/entrance.

Avoozl said:

When I played pokemon red when I was a lot younger I used to think there was secret areas beyond the borders with the grass behind them around the routes next to first town and at one stage I tried to moving through each of the border barrier things hoping one of them was a secret camouflaged gap/entrance.

It didn't help with all the rumors about Bill's Secret Garden, and that truck beyond that ship if you were able to use Surf before you were supposed to.

Krispy said:

When I first started playing Doom, I used to try to use noclip mode to get to the mountains on E1M1. I didn't really know how they worked. I also tried blasting through walls. Has anyone done something else weird like that?

No, because the mountains looked just like a bit map tiled in the background. The maps where you can see the bottom of the sky texture didn't help the illusion.

Yeah, every time I play a text or graphic adventure I end up trying to interact with background stuff. :D

With Doom, I used to think some outside areas (like at end of E1M2) had secret passages or teleporters leading to them, but it turned out they were just for decoration.

What would be cool is if someone actually modified the maps to account for what they imagined might be there.

I definitely tried to get to the horizon in Stunts (4D Sports Driving) by building a ramp to launch myself over the map boundary fence. I think you can guess what happened.

I remember wondering if it was possible to go outside in Wolf3D.

Twisted Metal 2 - Amazonia: I tried to take my vehicle up the river to the volcano and couldn't figure out why I kept stopping...

GTA 3 - Shoreside Vale Closed Tunnel: I've heard rumors of going to Carter City from that tunnel, I tried my best to glitch myself through (I did through the subway gate on the first island plenty of times), I've tried running a Patriot over the hills, I've tried flying over with a Dodo (no one can fly that thing). Well, I can assume there's nothing beyond that point...

Unreal - Skies and Mountains: Similar to what has been done in Doom, ghosting up there only to be disappointed.

Driver - Beyond the Invis-a-wall: Though there were ways of going to other cities if I got passed their invisible walls. Needless to say, there aren't any as I have found various ways to go through walls (buildings, invisible walls, the ground). I glitched the hell out of that game.

Yep.

And in any 2D racing game I used to think that if I kept on driving I would eventually get to the mountains and forests in the distance.

Funny how you think game worlds are infinite when you're younger.

DoomUK said:

Yep.

And in any 2D racing game I used to think that if I kept on driving I would eventually get to the mountains and forests in the distance.

You could actually do that in Test Drive 3 -not a 2D game,but still the amount of freedom it gave you was vastly larger than anything at the time, you could even drive inside a stable and take a look at the mess of polygons representing a cow :-p

However, in Doom I'm always fascinated by areas that you normally are not supposed to walk or even teleport to e.g. cages, ridicolously high pillars, monster platforms "in the void", fenced yards, the outdoors in MAP01 etc. and I often idclip to visit them as a "break" for the level. I don't consider this to be cheating, unless I pick up something I was not supposed to e.g. ammo from dead zombies.

I dunno, I guess this is because I always felt that there's something such as a great secret or hidden meaning lying "beyond" , even in Doom...

When I first started playing Doom, I used to try to use noclip mode to get to the mountains on E1M1. I didn't really know how they worked. I also tried blasting through walls. Has anyone done something else weird like that?

Right there with you. :)

Funny how you think game worlds are infinite when you're younger.

Isn't that the best feeling? :)

When I was in my early twenties, I had the whole "games are merely games and I'm such a smart and intelligent manly man guy because I'm a cynic" thing going on, but since then I've managed to recapture (or approximate) that original childlike enjoyment and immersion, and it makes gaming so much better.

When I first played I wondered if I could move the barrels to make a trap, so I punched one and ended up dead.

Doom Dude said:

When I first played I wondered if I could move the barrels to make a trap, so I punched one and ended up dead.

You actually kind of can -there's even a map that relies on you pushing barrels just enough so you can squeeze through without blowing everything up-, but it's a crapshoot: they might blow up in 4 hits, or in 1, depending on the whims of the RNG God (and that's without even a berserk pack). In any case we're talking about moving them a few units.

I have the best one:

I had a friend a long time ago who spread the rumor that when you beat "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" final battle with Ganon in exactly 3:00 minutes the game would restart and Link would have undergone a Jason-esque change and be toting a giant chainsaw instead of the Master Sword. The new point of the game was to go around and massacre all characters of the land of Hyrule.

I tried it several times, but gave up, and of course was never really true. But I know it would have been fun :)

Doom Dude said:

When I first played I wondered if I could move the barrels to make a trap, so I punched one and ended up dead.

LOL, priceless.

I always wondered what was on the other side of the castle next to the flagpole in SMB1 when I was little (doesn't everybody?). I found out the hard way when I got stuck and had to reset the game.

I think performance will be an ultimate limiter on how many mountains you can draw in Doom, especially if there are lots of them. You may be on the "Phobos" mountains, but there'll still be bitmap paintings of mountains in the background.

Cybie3 has an interesting rendering of how "mountains" may look in Doom. Oh and of course Mt. Pain. The trick to maintain the illusion in both cases is to have them out of reach so you don't realize how small they really are and how crappily they are shaped :-p

Same goes with maps that have canyons, rivers, "seas", "lakes", gorges, or even individual buildings and "skyscrapers": at some point mapping limitations will make them look silly.

When I was young, a friend told me that if you beat Duck Hunt, it would allow you to play any NES game. Obviously it's not true, but I was young and didn't realize the limitations of a game cartridge.

Well, in the arcades there always was a lot of speculation, urban legends and make-believe about what would happen if you beat game X or did something unusual in game Y -usually some of the most obscure or unclear ones, e.g. Bubble Bobble had a lot of speculation about how to get a "true" ending, or super-bonuses...with the difference that in its case those rumours were partially true.

Most of the time it was just juvenile bragging along the old adage saying "It's easy to pretend that you're the holder of a great secret...", or simply a "broken telephone" effect, greatly altering the truth and throwing some bullshit into the mix.

This is why I loved to play San Franscisco RUSH so much. You could go practically anywhere in the world. probably the first "open world" racer.

When I was about 4 years old, I have this vague memory of watching my cousin playing Super Mario Bros. and coming across a level that was an underground castle with multiple Bowsers. My adult self accepts that the memory is so fuzzy it may have been a dream, but I spent many, many years looking for this level and was utterly convinced that it was hidden somewhere in the game. After all, there were so many secrets I knew were in the game, like warp zones, that surely there could easily be more. Now that rom editors exist, I could actually probably recreate that level, though I don't really remember it now, aside from having multiple Bowsers.

When I was like 10 or 11, I knew enough about computers to understand that programs were a series of instructions, but I didn't know exactly what programming was at the time. Therefore, I was convinced that by altering random bits of data in a .EXE file, I could rewrite a computer program to do different things. I always made backups, so I never ruined any games I had, but damn was that a waste of time. Then, I discovered programming from a book I got at the local library, but the book was written in the 80s, and so assumed that you could just type BASIC into the command prompt. Took me forever to figure out why typing in BASIC commands to the DOS prompt didn't work.

Finally, when I was 12, I discovered Doom, and more importantly, I discovered that it could be modified. My first mod ideas were incredibly laughable - I had no idea how the game worked or how data was stored, and so I was convinced that I could do simple changes to turn stairs into ramps and turn zombie guns into flowers. Once I learned how editing worked, however, there was one other flaw - I was convinced that I could somehow trick the shareware version of Doom into running add-on levels. Ultimately, that never went anywhere, as I quickly found that I couldn't bypass the shareware level lock, but it did lead me to designing a number of levels which I intended to play once I got the registered version but which turned out to be utterly unplayable because I had no way of testing them.

Csonicgo said:

This is why I loved to play San Franscisco RUSH so much. You could go practically anywhere in the world. probably the first "open world" racer.

Yes, I loved the Rush series on the N64. Shortcuts and driving off the main path was very awesome when I was used to 'linear' racing games. The idea of going off a branching path and driving through an office building was awesome. I also loved hunting for the keys/coins/mountain dews.

The extra stars rumor attached to Mario 64 ate up quite a bit of my time. Road Rash 3d is pretty accommodating to it's players that are more interested in the game content outside of the actual game.

DoomUK said:

Yep.

And in any 2D racing game I used to think that if I kept on driving I would eventually get to the mountains and forests in the distance.

somewhat related, I used to try to get into an opening in a building on track 7 of Ivan Stewart's Ironman's Offroad. It was always so risky to do, tho, because the track is so hard and there is no time for such shenanigans, but I was so curious where it might lead. :D foolishness.



But, yes, I used to long to explore the mountains of Phobos, but I think I always knew it would never be possible.

Numerous occasions in numerous games... Mostly when I played as a kid. Mario 64 was especially bad for this. I remember playing Mario Kart 64 and going back to see if I could get over the hills outdoor and find Royal Raceway (well, I didn't try too hard).

Sometimes at the end of Star Fox 64 levels I'd try to boost into the background (Sector X). There's also X-Wing, which I once flew to a ship that was listed as 99.99 distance away from me (or whatever the maximum distance was)... Don't recall if I ever made it to the damn thing or not, but I took waaaaaaay too much time of my life doing stuff like that in that game.

Snakes said:

There's also X-Wing, which I once flew to a ship that was listed as 99.99 distance away from me (or whatever the maximum distance was)... Don't recall if I ever made it to the damn thing or not, but I took waaaaaaay too much time of my life doing stuff like that in that game.

Heh, reminds me of the time I tried to see if I could get to the blackhole in the first part of the The Maw level of Rogue Squadron 2 the first time I played it.

E1M3: Toxin Refinery



What the fuck is in there???

Mr. T said:

I remember wondering if it was possible to go outside in Wolf3D.

There actually is an "outside" level in Spear of Destiny.