10 Strangest Unsolved Video Game Discoveries - Part V

Head to keeps.com/oddheader to get 50% off your first order of hair loss treatment.

That crate baby thing seems a lot more like an injoke at Valve then an actual speedrunning strategy honestly.

Crate baby explained: “However, while they were coming up with ideas for Achievements, they became aware of a Half-Life 2 challenge that players had devised of grabbing the baby doll found in the playground near the City 17 Trainstation, putting it in a plastic milk crate, and carrying it as far as it can possibly be taken through the game. This evolved into an in-joke for the team that they dubbed the "crate baby". They eventually decided to develop this concept into the full-fledged Achievement of transporting the Gnome from the beginning of the game all the way to the end” - Combine OverWiki

The water trick in wind waker only works with water from the forest haven, which in-universe is stated to have magical properties thanks to the great deku tree. This is actually incorporated into part of a sidequest where you have to travel to different islands watering Deku plants with the water before it loses its magical properties after 30 minutes.
My guess is that the water trick works as a sort of tactic for speedrunning the dungeon if you manage to reach the boss within the time constraint. As for what it means in the universe, it's likely that magic water from the forest haven is harmful to a plant of evil.

Hi Oddheader, the Broken Sword easter egg is actually a bit added to the gba and directors cut versions of the game, it's a reference to one of the games sequels (BS 3 I think) which you come back here and open that door :)

The forest water instakill is a known thing. Kalle Demos is a parasite that was feeding on part of the forest but couldn’t touch the Deku tree because of its magic. Speedrun routes have used it before, but it ended up being slower because the current route with super swimming wouldn’t let you get a bottle early enough

I love stuff like this even the creepy ones like this. It’s amazing that how much gamers spend so much time to see Easter eggs like this and start figuring out what these developers were doing while making these bizarre and creepy Easter eggs to begin with. Want more to these please.

I love how you called the Fortress of Doom, Doomguy's House.
Thats such a casual name for a floating castle station in space

There's simply no one who can present such content the way oddheader does. He could talk about anything with this background music (that he produced himself) and I'd watch it, or listen to it. He really needs a podcast.

Its good seeing that HP Lovecraft is still doing well playing games and looking for secrets

From what I've researched online, although I haven't played it to confirm it myself, the Broken Sword door is an Easter Egg related to the third game. It's also in the PC Director's cut, leading me to believe it's probably something from the third game that you can interact with properly which is in the DC version for continuity.

Im almost 100% sure that the "crate baby thing" was just them putting the baby in the crate and then seeing how far they could carry the crate.
Which explains why it inspired the achievement where you have to carry an item through the game.

This channel always gives me chill, nostalgic, relaxing vibes. I love it here.

I think the egg thing is literally *the* easter egg. and the fridge egg is the second easter egg, hence 2 eggs.

I find odds videos really entertaining and I always re watch old ones not only for the little comedic bits but how good his videos are

Once we find out what the deal with "crate baby" is, we can move on to tackling the baseball minigame in Tetris Plus.

I always wondered more about that Giant Squid in Assassins Creed. Thank you Oddheader. You really went into detail on that one.

The "crate baby" is actually "legit" if someone has the time to do it: Just bring the baby to kleiner's lab (you don't need to bring the blue crate) and then drop somehwere in there. Once you're back in the lab several chapters later the baby will be there. Nothing happens but hey it's a cool easter egg

i feel like the half life devs were for sure just trolling. listen to their voices lmao

"Crate baby" was just a reference to a funny little challenge they used to do during playtesting. Put the toy baby in a milk crate and try to bring it to the end of the map without it falling out. It's what inspired the rocket gnome achievement in episode 2, which is why they bring that up too. Pretty sure that was explained at least partially during the original video.

Putting the Baby in the Crate is actually something explained in the very same video - it was an in-house challenge, to see how far you could get the baby in the crate through the game.

I barely played AC2 but I still came across that squid interaction and it was quite the jumpscare. I was just sure it came back later in the game as I never finished it. Interesting!

I worked at Nintendo in 2009-2010. The Windwaker water trick was common knowledge, back then. It was even used as an example of the kinds of hints and tips that we gave callers through the community support line.

For the fembot mystery what i could see is a 4 digit code required and four fem-bots that left their post then fall to the floor.
Curious, as though they might be trying to say something to help the player with that problem.

The Kalle Demos Mystery is most likely solved, as the water by the koroks is extremely pure, and the boss lives in extremely murky, and poisonous water

I remember reading about the Wind Waker trick in a news article a little while back. Since it was discovered way after the HD re-release, it makes me wonder what the devs were thinking about back in 2013. Like when doing their once over with Kalle Demos, they wondered, "How on earth has nobody found this yet?"

The water mystery in wind waker might have been an easier way of playtesting the game without having to beat the boss. Honestly, it would be pretty tedious if you had to beat a boss every time your wanted to test something after the boss fight. It’s the same reason why the secret pipes exist in super Mario bros for the NES.

The alligator is probably a small "alligator in the sewer" joke, as that area looks like a sewer.

"What are you?"
"I'm one of Oddheader's favorite games"
"Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?"

Crate baby trick is probably related to prop flying. The game lets you pick up objects, which in early versions could allow you to fly. They later made it so that standing on an item you're holding won't let you do that. Placing a baby in a crate probably lets you bypass that.

I thought the mystery with the Zelda thing was the theory that every boss has an instant kill built into them, and we've only found one of them.

The Broken Sword one... I think I saw in it that "new" steam version, too! And yes, there is no interaction whatsoever possible. Even with further Items collected throughout the part you can even reach that place.
*Possible spoiler alert*
The canal area is connected to the hotel. As you have seen throughout the game, that one dude with the news paper in the hotel lobby ends up being down there in that canal meeting chamber - so logic dictates that there was to be meant like a cutscene or follow sequence, but the devs had a hard time implementing something like that at the time... with the limited hardware resource to back up longer animations... more comic character animations... etc. And yes they made it sound like 18+ still I adore this game and the second game of it. xD

Ah anotha great video. I never tire of seeing what oddities you have to show, oddheader :) Your vids have definitely helped me get through these past 2 years. Thank you for making great stuff and I look forward to the next one!!

Crate Baby is a challenge of sorts, started by the developers. You don't have to believe me, but I talked to one of the beta testers for the game not long after it came out and he told me about Crate Baby. They would put the baby in the crate. Then the goal was to finish the first level by carrying the crate with the baby inside. It was absurdly hard because the physics made the baby go flying when you took a step. I could not complete it, about the time you start taking gunfire it becomes nearly impossible. This comment was an inside joke about that challenge, not a reference to a glitch.

I remember watching an interview with Miyamoto or a designer on Wind Waker.
He said something like the type of flower/plant that Demos was would be realistically killed by the water. I thought it was something like it was a plant who easily absorbed too much water.
I could be wrong and it could be something like, it was holy water (from what I read of other comments) or he told a story about over-watering plants or something.
But I remember hearing him in the interview and thinking, 'Wow, people are idiots for not trying it earlier.".

The Squid Easter Eggs throughout the Assassin's Creed series always intrigued me. I really hope more information will be found on that

The crate baby thing seems more like the devs taking the piss and referencing (what I assume to be) testers taking the baby in a crate with them, which led to the gnome achievement being a thing. To be clear I've never heard any source talking about the crate baby thing, just that it seems to be what they're implying.

dude you don’t understand how happy i am every once a month when i see he has posted, hope this man dosent retire soon

I could have sworn that killing that one boss in wind waker with the water was a well known trick at this point

I think the WW one has a reason behind it. the water found near the great deku tree is basically sacred in nature, but once bottled can only keep it's pure nature for a time before going stale and turning back to normal water. It's basically holy water, the flower boss and the deku tree saplings are the only things I can remember that are affected by this sacred water. the saplings end up getting revived (turns out all of the ones that got planted weren't able to thrive all too well without some during its growth.), and the boss ends up instantly wilting upon contact with the sacred water... your basically pouring holy water onto a demonic flower parasite that was harming a very important tree.

This channel is just so good.
Not a single bad video. Keep up the amazing work!

Actually, I had a Wind Waker strategy guide from the original release when I was a kid. It had the Kalle Demos forest water trick in it.

To clarify on the WW part, I had water in my possession because I was doing incentives in the stream (like fill a bottle with forest water to 'disable' the bottle) so Stimpy suggested to water to plant because I had the water and, plants need water :P As for everyone here who may've known about it further ago than I, if you can't find any documentation on something you know, document it, and thoroughly at that. If you can't document it yourself due to lack of hardware, find a friend/acquaintance who can. Documenting it for both HD and SD is how I ended up with credit for the discovery.

For the broken sword shadow of the templar Advanced one, The GBA version came out around the time that Broken Sword The Sleeping Dragon came out, in that game you revisit the catacombs and go around that corner to find this new skull door. They added it to the GBA version to show that it was there and to keep consistency. Im not sure if they also added it to the directors cut of shadow of the templar ,that was remade from the ground up.

Lets be honest, we all love it when odd header uploads

That one for Wind waker is something I figured out back when I first played it. I think it's just a quick way to defeat the boss

The AC2 one happened to me on my first play through. I remember thinking it was scripted and must be the dev's way of saying falling in the water would be an instant de-synch. Interesting to see it called a rare Easter egg lol

Honestly, the Observer easter egg has some genuinely horrific implications and I really don't like to think about horrible the scenario could be.

The "crate baby" thing makes me think of a common exploit in game physics systems where if you stack two items on each other and pick up the bottom item while standing on the top one, you'd start flying.
Maybe by standing on the baby and picking up the crate you could fly over walls at an early point in Half-Life 2's development.

Thank you so much for having captions on your videos. I find myself needing them more and more frequently, and its getting to be increasingly difficult to watch Clip-Share videos.
Thank you!! You made me whole day 🤗

Adding symbols to the keypad wouldn't double the amount of permutations, it would change it from 10^4 to 12^4, which is 20736, so it is actually close to double.
But considering that he already checked the ones without symbols, there's 12^4-10^4 left to check, ie 10736 left to check

The music is the best part of Oddheader's videos, together with the voiceover. It really sounds creepy and eerie. I love it

This channel will always feel nostalgic no matter what time it is

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet but for the Broken Sword unsolved discovery, it's just an added reference to an area found in Broken Sword 3 which was set to come out a year after the gba release of BS1. In BS3, you return to these sewers and visit this added area.

Alright here's something you might want to hear. The crate baby thing was an inside joke that the devs had because players would challenge themselves to bring the baby crate all the way to the end of the game. The devs thought this was funny, so they made the gnome achievement in episode 2 as a reference to this, thus why they say "which led to the gnome achievement"

Reason I like to watch oddheader #495: he is what I imagine myself to be if I ever record a video. I mean, look at him, he is a master of covering his real awkwardness with pretentious awkwardness. Give this man an Oscar for his acting already!

Im pretty sure the crate baby refers to the devs attempting to bring the baby in a crate throughout the entire game. This would explain how it relates to the gnome in episode 2

I did that Wind Waker one shot on kalle demos when I was 10. It’s hinted at somewhere I think in the figurine gallery maybe. It was surely discovered within the first year of the games release by many players. The guy in chat knew what he was doing.

One time I was playing aliens vs predator and I ended up finding a glitch where after I died a few or more times as the predator when you are escaping the facility, I ended up respawning at a checkpoint before the checkpoint that I was supposed to respawn in. The place that I was in look destroyed and had missing textures and invisible objects

I love the scary ones, other youtubers just dont dredge them up like you do. It’s a persisting addiction of something like 10 years at this point

My best guess for the ff06b5 is a missing texture reference, that colour of magenta is often used in engines to draw attention to missing materials or textures, and the developers comments was just a way to make people keep engaging with the game. Maybe I'm just being vicious lol, but I recall seeing a few "missing texture refence" messages scrolling around some of the signs in the game and at first I laughed thinking it was like an intentional nod to sometime you'll see windows error message or BSOD on modern signs and billboards but later realized it was actually a bug.

I discovered The Wind Waker one when I was a kid, I thought it was common knowledge, until I found out it isn't lol

The wind waker one was known for years. I remember hearing about that trick when I was in school after the game came out.

This actually might be my favourite youtube channel ever. Your videos are so interesting i really love them!

6:43 I like to imagine that it's danny devito giving the player an egg.

My guess is that the egg is a simple reference to finding the easter egg. There might be more to it, it might lead or unlock another secret room

That Mankind Divided mystery is the closest we'll get to any Deus Ex story continuation :'(

Whatculture, outside xtra, and many other gaming "top ten list channels have featured the windwaker insta-kill for the plant boss YEARS ago. It is so not a secret, I'm so surprised that it made this list in 2021. I wish I still had the official strategy guide for the GameCube version. It is LITERALLY written on the page on the how-to beat the boss easily.

The cratebaby trick probably refers to playtesting and the physics playground where players liked to put the baby in the crate. I vaguely remember this being a thing. However it wouldn't do anything for the speedrun, other than making it look cooler and therefore cutting the speedrun in half.

7:15 You forgot that when you start a new save file afterwards and play through the entire game, the fridge will still have 2 eggs, even when you don't pick up any more

Some days I'm happy to see you upload, others I get CRAZY hyped! This was a great video, thank you for all the hard work brotha, it was a nice way to wake up and get ready for work.

The water from the sacred forest is considered special and probably has purifying properties. Considering the boss is an evil parasite, that's probably why it kills it in one shot.

My educated guess for the Broken Sword one is in fact the room and scene in question existed in the original game, but was intentionally disabled/removed before release as it wasn't needed anymore for one reason or another. When they ported it to the gameboy advance, that single room was accidentally included again, making it a fun little glimpse into the world of developer iteration. This has happened a few times before.

Ahhh yes, I bet we'll have a helluva lot to talk about when Deltarune comes out. Toby's knows how to do some wacky secrets

The Wind Waker water trick I’m pretty sure is hinted at in game. I used to do this all the time when replaying the game but can’t imagine I’d have thought of it without a prompt!

I remember finding the sewer gator on my first play though and having to reset to the last checkpoint just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating lol

For the Deus Ex secret, I wonder if this has an untold story element to it, as the series has been cut short by the negative reception of Mankind Divided. I wonder if they had a 3rd game lined up that told more of Jensen's story, as a large part of the story arc was about Adams ability to take augmentations without issues. Another game likely won't be conceptualized now.

After tearing all his hair out, oddheader has quite an *odd head.*

I'd love to see a video updating us on all the old mysteries that have been solved since you covered them

The wind waker thing wasn't a secret, it was in the official guide book I had when I was a kid lmao I'm surprised that more people didn't know this existed. Lore wise the purity and magic of the water that surrounds the great deku tree kills the corruption of the boss.

The Assassin's Creed II squid thing was mentioned in one of those walkthrough books, I remember doing it as a kid and there were instructions on how to make it appear.

I believe soon after in the Half Life speed run they explain that the crate baby came about because of Valve's testing method, where everyone on staff plays the games whenever they are not working on them, which lead to in office speed runs and jokes. The Crate Baby was a challenge in the office to pick up the baby in the crate at the start and try to go as far as possible which is very difficult. and thus lead to Gnome in Ep. 2 and subsequently Left 4 Dead 2's Gnome Chomsky.
I am also pretty sure for the Berserk game the keypad could just be brute forced again including the symbols, yes it will take a lot longer but it seems odd to do one and then not the whole thing to really be sure. If time is really a huge hurdle, parallelise it either with VMs playing the game in multiple virtual sessions, or just multiple physical PCs, that each have a section of the range to try and then all start together.
Similarly for Assassins Creed, has no one made a free cam yet? Surely the Boundary Break series has done this or can get the attention to get it done. Seems like an easy thing to make not a mystery anymore.

Does anyone know how the plant-thing evaded both the general gamingcommunity and proper documentation? Everyone in the Zeldafanbase seems to know about it.

I can’t explain how many times I’ve played broken sword as a kid and I’ve NEVER known about that skull door

The closing scene of baldheader on the couch surrounded by hair is just immaculate

Eggs are one of the key items you receive early on in Breath of Fire 3 for the PS1. You get them in the McNeil manor and you carry them in your key items for the rest of the game, even though they do nothing. Maybe a nod to that absolutely fantastic RPG?

I always thought the Assassins creed squid was normal. I had played the game back in the day and that swam past as soon as I got to that ledge I had thought it was part of the level but forgot about it until now. I remember I had forgot about the squid because the platforming in this level was too hard for me when I was a kid and it frustrated me to the point of forgetting the rest of the level

I love how he looks more interested in his lost hair then the fact it’s off his scalp

The concept of a menagerie of sentient sex robots desperately desiring freedom is far more terrifying to me than anything I've encountered yet

fun fact: there is possibly no way to get the baby doll through the entire game, as there is a teleportation sequence which might glitch the doll out, and perhaps make it not even bringable with you.

VNN talked about the crate baby thing with some devs and basically it was an in joke. Some of the playtesters would put a baby in a crate and see how far they could take it through the game.

Crate baby seems to be that they found you could put the baby in the crate and carry it around, which inspired having the Gnome achievement from them trying to keep the baby as long as possible. They're joking about crate baby holding the secrets to speedrunning.

3:50 I actually had a similar experience. However, it was on The Ancient Gods P2. I found a barrel that had the sprite of the zombieman dead on a spike on top of it. I've still got the image, thankfully. I knew there'd be something else similar somewhere else in the game.

I remember coming across that in Watch Dogs 2, I just assumed it's the remains of a cut side mission

The idea of Adam Jensen being a clone could also explain why no one knew about the hidden implants.

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…
That’s a very thematic way to summon an eldritch entity

I remember discovering the Zelda trick back in the day when the game came out, I'm surprised to find out that not too many people knew about it. When you first meet the deku tree makes mention of how the water around him purifies anything. I always took that as an in-game hint that the boss could be killed with it and lead me to believe all the other bosses probably have hidden insta kills too.

Honestly, ive looked into alot of the mysteries in cyberpunk, and the sad thing is, theres more in the game files as pointed out by someone on that subreddit dedicated to the statue mystery, basically hinting that the easter egg might possibly be incomplete still until we get some more content in the game...i hope its connected to mr blue eyes

I think that with the 'Giant Squid' in the water maybe was meant to be a cutscene showing a guardian of these ruin like waters, prompting you to avoid the water to avoid a gruesome fate

The crate baby was probably a way for devs to test the functionality of the achievement