GHOST IN THE MACHINE

For the young Billy Basso, it was Super Mario Bros 3. "It was such a profound memory to me that I can still picture it to this day," the developer says, his eyes going a little softfocus. "I was at my neighbour's house - they used to babysit me when I was three or four years old - and they had a 13-inch CRT television sitting on their dining-room table, set up to play NES." On that TV, the neighbour demonstrated a trick. "It's maybe the third stage, and you have to get on the white block and hold down for a while," Basso says, "and it drops you down into the background, behind the set dressing of the level." Waiting there, in this place that breaks the established rules of 2D space, is a treasure chest. And inside, the Warp Whistle, allowing the player to disrupt the natural flow of Mario levels. "It was like this weird breakthrough in my little brain," Basso says.
The influence of this formative moment can be traced throughout the developer's entire career. Even during his time making medical training games at Chicago's Level Ex, Basso couldn't resist hiding little Easter eggs inside of endoscopy simulators. "There was this one case where you'd remove a nail from someone's lungs," he explains.
Your equipment included forceps to tug it free, and "an APC gun" for cauterising the wound; he programmed a shader so that, if the APC was aimed at the nail, an electrical charge would arc to it "like the Force lightning from Star Wars". Since it wasn't medically accurate, he was told to remove it, but Basso was pleased with the effect he'd made.
"So instead of taking it out, I just disobeyed my producer · and made it so it only happens one out of 100 times." Those of us who have never trained to perform lung procedures, however, might be more familiar with the project Basso began making out of hours during those Level Ex days. A game over which he had total control, even programming its engine from scratch in C++, it was the perfect chance for him to scratch this decades-long itch.
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Animal Well begins as a relatively conventional game in the Metroid vein, albeit one with a brilliantly thick, eerie atmosphere. But as you play, it gradually introduces things that don't quite seem to fit: items that have no obvious uses, or else have extra utilities you discover by accident and can't quite fathom a need for; hidden passageways that link the map in unexpected, looping ways; and a giant groundhog that ducks back into its hole whenever you get too close, responding the same way no matter what new tools or abilities you bring to bear.
"I always wanted another layer beside what you are doing, in the background, to tease you and give the sense that, 'Oh, there's more here," Basso explains. "There's always a loose end, trailing off into the distance." He talks about the game's structure in terms of layers, the first of which is the relatively short journey to reach the 'ending'.
After the fireworks have gone off and the credits rolled, you're ushered into a new area that opens up fresh mysteries, then dropped back into the world. It makes clear that everything to this point was just the tip of the iceberg.
What hides underwater, in the remaining layers, is some of the game's most inventive, virtuosic design - a string of secrets that require reconfiguring your brain, much as their maker's was once reconfigured by the Warp Whistle.
"I still think of it as a puzzle that I'm designing," Basso says. "It's just either a harder one or one that has a layer of obfuscation." But these secrets were harder to design than your average puzzle, he adds. "Each one is a kind of anomaly that's breaking the rules of the game in some unique way. It doesn't follow a framework. It was dependent on me having these little sparks of inspiration. So I could only come up with one every three months or something." Basso's solution to this problem? Simply to keep making the game for seven years.
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Along the way, ideas emerged in various ways. Some grew out of unintentional bugs, including one that allowed players to die and respawn in an area they shouldn't be able to reach - rather than fix it, Basso decided to build a puzzle around it. Others came from studying the component parts he had to work with, finding novel applications for them. "I was thinking of Metal Gear Solid and how that breaks the fourth wall by making you check the game packaging or reading your Memory Card data," he says.
"I wanted to do something like that: 'How can I use the hardware in surprising ways?' I think it helped that I had full control over the game engine, so I was able to tap into some of the weirder APIs using the printer functionality and stuff like that." Ah, yes. That. Playing Animal Well on PC, at some point you'll be asked whether you have a working printer connected. Say yes and you might hear, elsewhere in the house, a motor whirring to life and something dropping to the carpet: a piece of paper, complete with origami folding instructions. "People get kind of sketched out by it, because no game has ever done it," Basso says. "They're like, 'Is this hacking my computer or my network?' Because a lot of time they'll have their printer on the network. They feel violated, I think. But it's a standard Windows API that you can call." It's just that no one else has thought to use it. "I didn't do anything sketchy. I just used the functionality that was available to me." Were there ideas, though, that he did deem too much? "I wanted to add a feature where it displayed your Steam name on screen at all times", Basso replies. The difference in brightness would be so low that the text wouldn't be visible to the naked eye. "So every single screenshot or video of the game, you could then take into Photoshop and reveal who posted it. But I thought maybe that was a little bit of a violation of privacy."
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There were other ideas, meanwhile, that he just didn't get around to implementing. "So, the Switch has the JoyCon sensor," he says. "It's just this NFC reader. And actually, in Nintendo's documentation, they tell you that it's capable of reading subway cards - so you can take your JR Line ticket or whatever, scan it on the Amiibo sensor and get data from it." He planned to put a turnstile into the Switch version of the game, passable only by scanning an NFCchipped card on the Joy-Con. "Time limitations didn't allow for it, but I'm disappointed I didn't do that one." Still, it's not like the game is short of secrets. Indeed, according to haseverythinginanimalwellbeenfoundyet. com a website made by Basso's business partner, Dan Adelman, as "a funny joke for the community", and which consists entirely of the word 'no' - there's at least one loose end still trailing. Not that Basso will tell us much about that. "There is a lot of debate if there's a fifth layer, sixth layer, whatever," he says. "And I'm not gonna answer that!" Basso adds that he's entirely not sure himself what's left to be found. "I honestly kind of lost track of everything in the game, so I can't quite say if everything's been solved or not." This suggests that whatever might remain is rather smaller than another 'layer', or else that the developer has a very good poker face. Either way, he clearly understands that some of the magic of secrets goes away once they can be quantified. "I don't ever want you to feel like you checked all the boxes and you completed it and could just wrap it up," Basso says. "I wanted it to linger." Among Animal Well's more consequential secrets, there are also playful little Easter eggs. Hold down the jump button for a few seconds, for example, and your little blob of a player character will transform into a dumpy fox dressed in green, with a sword and shield. You might recognise them as the hero of Andrew Shouldice's Tunic, a Zelda-influenced adventure game that shares Basso's love of secrecy. It's no wonder, given the similarities between these two developer's origin stories.
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"I remember being quite young when I put two and two together to find the Warp Zone at the end of 1-2 in Super Mario Bros," Shouldice tells us. "And that was a profound and somewhat terrifying experience." He reckons he was five years old. "I could read, but I probably didn't know the words 'warp' or 'zone' yet. So when it said, 'Welcome to Warp Zone', I didn't know what to do. I froze. I think I just let the timer run down." He smiles. "Which feels like a poignant formative thing for not just my love of secrets, but also my inability to commit." There is a crucial difference between the two developers' stories. "I was alone," Shouldice says. "I was in the recroom basement playing this game and coming across this thing." Without anyone to ease him into this world of secrets, he'd had to piece things together himself: "Hey, sometimes I can get above the level - that's neat. I can go where the score is. That seems like a sort of transgression somehow. And then, hey, I noticed that it continues past the end of the level. Put all that together, and maybe you get yourself a Warp Zone.
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We're reminded of Basso's puzzle-design approach to secrets, but Shouldice reckons there's another kind. "The out-of-the-blue, absolutely mysterious, inscrutable kind," he says. "There's no rhyme or reason, it just sort of appears and is delightful." A few examples: missing your intended target with a bomb in The Legend Of Zelda, so it instead blows a hole in the wall. Loading Tunic and noticing a save file that wasn't there before, with 999 hours on the clock.
Discovering The Other hiding inside Immortality's footage.
The defining factors of this kind of secret, according to Shouldice, are that its discovery doesn't have to be earned' by the player and that it can potentially happen at any point, before they might be prepared for it. The very best cases recontextualise everything you've seen up to that point, sending you back to search for other places this might be hidden. "And maybe you're going to puzzle out in retrospect why it was there." But maybe not.
Shouldice describes this as "stumbling into something that's above your pay grade" - and that idea of forbidden knowledge is key to his lasting interest in videogame secrets.
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"This idea of mystery, of evoking a feeling of the world being larger than your little five-year-old brain can comprehend. Of feeling like a world is ready for you to explore, and it's full of things that are incomprehensible. Full of words like 'warp' and 'zone' that you've never heard." We can't help noting that, for all their shared interest in the unknowable, Shouldice and Basso are leaning on something very familiar indeed. Like Spelunky, Fez and Celeste before them three platformers with plenty of hidden layers of their own - Tunic and Animal Well are both rooted in the language of a very specific, pre-3D era of Nintendo games, the time of Metroid and The Legend Of Zelda. And, of course, the series that gave these developers that first awakening.
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"I mean, I have a lot of fondness for those games, having played them growing up, and they informed my taste," Basso says when we point this out. "But I do think they offer a good template to design a game within. And I think making puzzles and secrets is easier when you have a familiar context to contrast them against." Having a baseline of expectations, he argues, means there's less need to tutorialise - contributing to the overall sense of mystery but it also gives these games something to subvert.
Shouldice agrees: "If you don't have those things, and it's all baits and switches and unexpected things and novel transgressions against the norm, then there's very little context for the player. You can't transgress unless there's an expectation there to push against." You need the bait in order to have the switch, essentially. A secret passage doesn't have any real meaning, Shouldice points out, if you haven't already come up against a lot of perfectly solid, passage-free walls.
There's also the simple practicality of working in 2D (or rather fixed-perspective 3D, in Tunic's case). "Being a little cynical about it, I want to say that the sort of game that can afford to put in content that is not meant for everybody is probably a smaller, indie experience," Shouldice says. A game made at triple-A scale, after all, can't afford to dedicate time and resources to something that a chunk of its audience is likely to miss. Being cynical is clearly not the developer's natural mode, though, and he backpedals apologetically: "Maybe that's making presumptions about aesthetic and budget." Nostalgia is a factor here too, of course. When those formative memories still burn so bright, it's only natural that these creators would reach for them as a reference point during the design process.
For Basso, secrets were an early peek into the human side of game development: "Especially with older stuff, it was really kind of obfuscated from you. They came from overseas, or no one was credited, so it just felt like this product that came out of a black box." Discovering an Easter-egg message a developer has left for a loved one breaks that illusion, and even when the secret isn't so directly personal, there's also a sense of connection in matching wits across space and time.
On the other hand, many of these secrets-dense games aspire to exactly that 'black box' quality Basso describes.
Tunic explicitly introduces itself as a videogame you are playing, with its in-game manual that straddles the world you're exploring and the one you're playing in. (Behind its pages you might catch a glimpse of the paused screen, run through a filter that suggests a curved CRT display in the dark, perhaps of a rec room somewhere.) This puts additional distance between the player and their avatar, perhaps, but in doing so it potentially casts you as the protagonist of this game. A kind of digital archaeologist, examining this alien object, trying to decode its language and riddles. "I wanted it to feel like something that was there all along," Basso says of Animal Well. "This ancient artefact that's what your copy of the game is like. Or this old book in another language that has all this meaning and knowledge within it - it's just up to you to find it." This is a mindset that is easier to access when you're young, Shouldice reckons, "and a little more receptive to infinite mystery". The benefit of not understanding how games are made is that you have no real idea of their limits, of what could happen when you start poking the world on the far side of the screen. Perhaps a future generation of developers will grow up with folk tales of Fortnite and Minecraft, but for the current crop, that means a particular era. "The mystique of weird old computers, this physical object full of mysteries," Shouldice says. "The Nintendo, LX-III computer, the Commodore 64, Amiga, whatever."
You might have noticed, among Shouldice's examples there, one name that doesn't quite fit: the LX-III, the crowning achievement of UFO Soft - a videogame company that never existed. UFO 50 is presented as a collection of this company's games from the period 19821989 (an NES contemporary, you might note). In truth, though, the games were all made over the course of the past decade by Mossmouth, a team that includes Spelunky devs Derek Yu and Eirik Suhrke.
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The pair's previous collaborations had more than their fair share of secrets - Spelunky's Eggplant, in particular, has become an ...