December 2, 2007
Easter eggs are the little things you find in technology that serve no usable purpose. Games have had plenty of those. Here are my top five.
5. The Nintendo Gamecube had one neat Easter egg. Holding down the z button when the system was turning on produced weird noises in the startup logo. Also, pressing the a button repeatedly on multiple controllers would result in the logo spinning all the way around.
4. After you collect all 120 stars in Super Mario 64, you can ride cannon to the roof of the castle. Yoshi awaits you there to give you as many lives as you can hold. However, since you would have already finished the game, this is only an Easter egg.
3. In Paper Mario, you can walk into a jar inside Boo's Mansion, and you'll come out as Mario from Super Mario Bros. How very retro of you Nintendo.
2. The Secret of Monkey Island and The Curse of Monkey Island for the computer both had a similar Easter egg. In the first game, you could try to enter a stump, but it would say that you must insert a floppy disk that didn't exist. The game predated CD's, so you had to constantly swap these square data storage devices. In The second game that mentioned (now on CD), you can peek out of a crypt to see out of the stump from the first game. You can also walk into an underwater scene from the first game by leaving a beach.
1. Banjo Kazooie had the biggest easter egg of all. It was something called Stop'n'Swop.
Below is a quote from Boltdragoon on Geocities.
"What is Stop N Swop? To answer this question, you must go all of the way back to the "taunts" of B-K. We all remember the Ice Key in Freezeezy Peak, swirling around and untouchable. Sharkfood Island was only a few millimeters away, except it was behind the invisable barrier of the Cove. Finally, there was an unbreakable door in Gobi's Valley. Mumbo Jumbo shows us pictures of getting the Ice Key and getting inside of the island and door. We were told to wait until Banjo-Tooie to get these items.
We did, and we were disappointed.
The Icy Key and the 2 eggs were in Banjo-Tooie, but not like we expected. They were in bouncing game packs, half their B-K size, and not in the levels! It seemed as if Rare lied straight in our faces. Well, they didn't.
Ever since Mumbo showed the pictures, people have tried to get them in the game. How? With a gameshark. I never tried this because I feared of my game being damaged. I was even told by a friend that his game was ruined after he sharked the key. Then I read on another site that Kazooie talks after getting the key. Why would Rare make a character respond to something that you cheat to get? This made me believe that there was a way to get them legally.
As it turns out, I and many others were right. Thanks to some game hackers, the Cheato codes to get the key and 6 eggs have been discovered. Along with them, something else was too... STOP N SWOP!
Though no one knows what it was for sure, SNS seemed to have been some way to link BK and BT and transer the Mystery Items between them. Unfortunatly, this interesting feature was dropped. Nintendo says:
"The Stop N Swap option was not implemented in the game, and although we know there is a code that opens this menu, it does not do anything at all. And as much as I would like to be able to answer your question about why it was not implemented in the game, this is not information that our Consumer Service Department has access to."
That brings up the current question...
QUESTION: Why was SNS dropped, and why isn't Rare saying anything about it?
Bolt's Theory (Theory 1): (See the main page for a final word on this)
We discovered the Stop N Swop menu using a videogame enhancer called a Gameshark. Videogame companies hate game enhancers, because they are used to hack their games. Different versions of games come out partially to foil the effects of enchancers. Companies try at any cost to stop people from using them. For example, Nintendo says that using a gameshark to get Mew in Pokemon can permanetly ruin your game AND the Mew won't be like the real one that they can give you. That statement is a big lie. You'll only ruin your game if you don't know what you're doing, and the Mew is the same as the "official" one.
We all know what type of people Rare is made up of- a bunch of jokesters. Nonetheless, they hate game enchancers just the same. If we never used a "hacking device" in the first place, we would have never known about Stop N Swop. Remember, Mumbo said that we would get the items in BT, NOT go back into BK and get them. So we were naughty and hacked our way into something that was really none of our business. Combine that with their personality, and you get why they aren't apeaking:
Rare isn't speaking because THEY DON'T HAVE TO.
This is what Rare is probably saying: "We've told you time and time again not to use those stupid Gamsharks to cheat in our games. Now only do you still do that, but you hack into the programming to find things that are really none of your beeswax. Were you ever supposed to know about the SNS? No. Did you do what we asked? No. Do we have to say anything about our project that you had no right to know about? NO! Maybe one day you'll learn..."
What does this have to do with them being jokesters? Instead of saying the above, they'll just say "Stop N Swop? What is that?" They'll pretend like they don't know what SNS is, so any emails about this mysterious thing must have been sent to the wrong address, and will be deleted. =P
Theory 2:
(From Green Mamba)
"I've been thinking about Stop 'n Swop for a while. My theory is that Stop
'n Swop was dropped fairly early. The three secrets that they kept--The Pink Egg, the
Blue Egg, and the Ice Key were kept because they wanted some sort of preview for
Banjo-Tooie, but didn't know what to show. So, they took some remains from Stop 'n
Swop, and put them there. Since they had left it in there, Rareware thought
that, maybe they could get it with the items that were shown at the end of Banjo-Kazooie. However, they realized that they said that you'd be able to get the eggs and
key in Banjo-Tooie, not Banjo-Kazooie. So, when Banjo-Tooie came around, they didn't even try to put the Stop 'n Swop in the game. The logic behind that is, well, Rare usually leaves old stuff that aren't needed in games, and there is no evidence that Stop 'n
Swop was going to be used in Banjo-Kazooie. As for the base egg programming in
Banjo-Tooie, maybe they were going to be that big in the first place. If that were Stop
'n Swop, then where is the super huge Ice Key?"
Basically, Green Mamba is saying that the secrets at the end of B-K and in B-T are not linked to SNS, but instead are remains of it. Isn't that interesting?
Theory 3: The Backwards SNS Theory! (derived from mine and Green Mamba's)
This theory states that SNS was dropped very early, before the game was released. Rare, however, wanted to do something in BK to make people want BT badly and start drooling; kinda like a preview. They decided to use remains of their old project, Stop N Swop. The tools? The Ice Key and 2 eggs. They would show us these items and say we could get them in BT. They also showed us the original way to get them in BK to make use more anxious. Remember, we were never supposed to know about SNS. We were to get the eggs and key in BT and be happy.
As soon as a game comes out, people are able to start hacking it. Rare knew that the remains of SNS would be found. Being the evil people they are, they decided to get revenge on the hackers. They figured we would assume some swopping of data. This is why they used words to manipulate and lead us down a path with nothing at the end. We assumed more than reality. Did we get the items promised? Yes. Did we get them in BK and use them in BT? Yes, literally. Did we get what we assumed? 'Course not! Rare even drove us more insane by putting Mumbo's pictures across BT.
To recap "The Backwards Theory of SNS":
- SNS was a dropped project
- Rare used its remains to keep people interested in BT
- Rare gave us the items but taunted us while doing so
(Why is it backwards? Because instead of the items leading to SNS, SNS led to the items as we know them.)"