7 Mysterious Secrets That Turned Out to Be Absolutely Nothing 

My fave part of early pokémon rumours is that something as simple as "there is a Mew under that truck" wasn't true but "have these letters in your name then talk to this NPC then fly to a completely different town and surf on the coast to encounter pokémon above level cap, one of which is a glitched out mess not in the pokédex that also duplicates the 6th item in your inventory (it might corrupt your game though) " WAS true

In Skyrim there were bugs in jars that I was convinced were important but couldn’t find any clues. Turns out it was a really a part of a quest that got taken out but they left the bug jars in.

A rare James sighting! And all it took was for Luke to be disembowelled off-screen

In Little Nightmares, I carried a book from one end of the last level of the DLC to the other to open a secret door. What was behind the door? A creepy painting with no relation to the lore as we understand it, and a vase with nothing in it.

In a similar vein, I think “plot lines in games that went nowhere or were mysteriously dropped halfway through” would be a fun video. Like that bit in tears of the kingdom in gerudo town where that guy is in jail and you can’t like… tell his wife to go help him or to go see her daughter that misses her. It had the same feeling as this video of “something in the game that makes you search around for hours trying to figure out how to do a thing only to find out there is no thing at all and you are left forever unsatisfied”

"Has anything good ever come out of going underwater in a video game?" Sounds like this would make a great list!

I suspect that cave in Zora's Domain probably had a heart piece meant for Adult Link, but was moved elsewhere due to Zora's Domain remaining frozen.

there's also the missing 3rd meteorite in rdr2. they already don't have any use but the counter being permanently stuck at "2 out of 3" in the inventory drives me up the wall lmao

Oh man… the bit about the Banjo Kazooie ice key… I remember my whole household was intrigued and trying to discover what it was for. Good times

It really speaks to Outside Xtra’s brilliance that they are still going so strong after all these years.

Still here campaigning for Benny’s secret evacuation tunnel from Fallout New Vegas! Also gonna need the autopsy results on Luke for clues to the ice key’s whereabouts.

In Thief (the 2014 remake) there’s a handful of “smuggler’s maps” which point to different areas in The City. Eventually they lead to a couple of buttons hidden behind a waterfall in Eel’s End. The buttons do absolutely nothing and aren’t able to be interacted with. I personally shot the buttons a dozen times, tried to get up close enough to press them, and finally went online for the answer only to find other people exactly as confused as me about what was supposed to be going on there.

You could do a whole documentary on the "Shadow of the Colossus" fandom's search for the "last big secret" based on a misinterpreted interview answer with game designer Fumito Ueda. Doesn't help that the Forbidden Lands the game is set in are full of mysterious ruins with doorways and archways impossible to reach by the players. There's no *single* spot in the game to use for a list like this, but rather dozens (and you can triple that at the very least if you want to count all the random bits of texture that *look* a bit mysterious... *if you squint.* It did turn up proof of a planned path to the VERY top of the Shrine of Worship that got removed for draw distance reasons, and an entire removed dam location left in the data but outside the roamable landscape but no "last big secret." ...turns out the 'secret' was the already well-known fact that the garden floor of the Shrine of Worship seen in the ending cutscene was accessible in-game if you got Wander's stamina high enough. Ueda just didn't know players had figured that out. Womp womp.

We have gotten to a point in games where I can't walk past ANY staircase or waterfall without looking under it and in roughly 60% of those cases the time was wasted.

Game developers could solve so many misunderstandings by putting a sign that reads: "NO SECRET HERE" in suspicious places.

I spent HOURS upon HOURS hunting for the Werewolf in Bully. Great list guys. I enjoyed a 15m video about nothing! Never thought I'd say that.

I remember Rare used to purposefully put pick ups out of reach to keep players guessing how to get them. Highlights include the piece of Chocolate behind the grate in Conker's Bad Fur Day, and the Medkit in the vents of Perfect Dark. Heck, the official strategy guide of Perfect Dark teased the unreachable Medkit.

For the Pokemon one, it is not necessary to sequence break. If you get knocked out while aboard the SS Anne, you can still access the area once you get Surf. There's also a glitch that can be done using Surf that will allow you to Surf on tiles and access it that way. Of course, the method changes nothing- the truck cannot be interacted with at all. The truck was part of a cut city removed long before the game released. Sometimes there are problems when you try removing an asset, so I can see why it was just shoved out of sight.

Final Fantasy VII (original) could make a whole list by itself. The mysterious locked chests in Kalm you can never access. The cave in the mountain on the way to the Forgotten Capital you can never access. The key items "letter to a wife in Kalm" and "letter to a daughter" ...

I had no idea there was a secret cave in Zora's Domain. I never looked down below the water over there.

I half remember hearing about the supposed last secret of Shadow of the Colossus, it was some hidden final area that was hinted at by some piece of narration but ended up being nothing but hopeful thinking by the community

KOTOR 2 HK-47 copy factory. Went over every inch of every planet and replayed with HK by my side assuming I'd missed a quest, secret hatch. No, they just didn't finish the quest before release.

One mystery that keeps me up at night is definitely Pokémon XY Locked Power Plant, like it looks like it was gonna be used for something but nothing comes of it

So in game design, it's often more time/cost effective to leave something in & just "switch it off" than it it is to try to redesign an area.

Spyro Reignited was the most recent game to do this to me! They added a brand new giant door to the Artisans homeworld. It shudders like a locked door when you charge it. It screams "Secrets here!" And... nothing. Just... added a door with animations and just... nothing.

Generation 1 Pokemon had a ton of "mysteries", and there were countless schoolyard rumors about them. What I heard regarding the truck is that you had to use Cut to destroy its tires, then Strength to move it to find Mew.

Luke: "Do we worship it?" QI Klaxon: "WORSHIP IT"

Seigfried in Final Fantasy 6. As a child I spent so much time in the colosseum trying to get more of his story. Specifically, I was obsessed with finding out why his name was sometime spelled Zeigfried or Sigfried. Good ol' translation errors

Two things had me spending hours looking for no reason, both in Secret of Mana: the mysterious masks in the ocean and the extra bit of map that Flannie couldn't travel down to that appeared to be near the Empire North town. I spent so many hours going through old save data and new save data between the raising of the continents and checking for shortcuts in both North and Southtowns to learn that the faces were just some sort of Easter egg and the town was cut content

Another fun one in Ocarina of Time is the hookshot accessible passages in the windows of the Kakariko Village windmill. There is a cucco in there for seemingly no reason. My friends and I tried every combination of things we could think of, including using it to hover over the well and switch to the iron boots to try and smash through the oddly dimpled bottom of the empty well.

Skyrims Insect in Jars kinda had the community scratching their heads, it was eventually found out that there was a plan for them but time and resources didn't allow it and no information was given one what the plan for them was.

Heres one for the future next 7 list: in Kingdom Hearts 1 in the Deep Jungle there are flowers where the purple fruit boss is fought that can be hit with magic to change their color and open them up. Sadly doing any combination of colors or just opening them up leads to nothing; just a message that tells you that the flowers grow dark when darkness is near and they reset whenever you leave the location...

The biggest mystery that was nothing for me was back in my EQ days - the Sleeper. There's many hours of video talking about how it went. Essentially, the second expansion to the leading mmorpg at the time had a final area called Sleepers Tomb. It took forever to get keys to get in, and you needed 40+ people to do anything. The final room had The Sleeper, a massive crystal dragon, who was guarded by 4 guards. When all 4 were killed, the Sleeper awoke and flew around the world, generally angry at everything and killing zones at a time. This could only be done once per server. Ypu could farm the guards for great loot though, leaving one alive until the Weekly reset. Eventually, people killed all the guards and the Karafyrm (the Sleeper) did his bit. On one server though, they tried to kill it. There's a ton of background here but at like 50% health, the devs killed The Sleeper to avoid having him die. It should be mentioned that Kara had AE attacks that were instant death and people were essentially dying, rezzing, running back in, and dying again. For hours. After people lost their minds at the devs killing Kara without giving these guys a chance, they respawned it. The fight lasted 3 hours. Of chain deaths by the thousands. Eventually the unkillable monster died...and dropped nothing. Not a sausage.

Waterfalls in video games. Why is it programmed so deep inside me that behind waterfalls = secrets, yet there never are any.

Fun fact about that bloodborne door: if you drop a stone or two at the base, and can make it thru the map to the other side, you can see the glow of the stones.

Funny how you specified the Ice Key for an example of Rareware abandoned secrets. When the Banjo games were remastered for XBLA, it was the only Stop 'n' Swop item actually worth getting, since it unlocked the Dragon Kazooie transformation, as originally intended all those years ago. The eggs just unlocked random tat for your Xbox profile, IIRC.

I had a sort of similar experience with Shining Force. I was convinced that the character Shell could be reqruited to your party and I spent a lot of time trying to find out how. Why did I think that? Because she had a unique character portrait, something only the main bosses and your reqruitable party members had! But no, turns out she was just a regular npc that the developers had bestoved with her own character portrait for some random reason.

Back in the day, when Neopets was a big thing, there was an RPG-style game called Neoquest (and its sequel, Neoquest II) that had some areas that were notorious in the community for being impossible to get to, but there were hints that it was possible to access them. In Neoquest I, on the Techo Mountain Caves 3 map, there was an inaccessible room behind a locked door. You can partially see into the room on the screen when you approach, and you can walk around the area that room is located, but there's no key or way to access it. The staff at Neopets swore for years that there was a way to access it... but a few years ago, after the site was bought out and most of the long time staff laid off, we finally got an answer: there was no way to access it. It's impossible.

Maybe the Mew is inside Luke! We need to verify!

A related list idea: Useless Items which technically remain in the game but were supposed to be for a removed quest / gameplay.

In Harvest Moon a Wonderful Life, there was a shed at the edge of the player's farm that's locked, never addressed by any NPC, and ultimately unopenable with no code associated with it anywhere. In a game where the town slightly changes over time, there are completely missable gameplay opportunities/mechanics, and clear mystical elements, it seemed likely that there'd be some way to get in. Some speculated that you'd be able to enter on the last day of your character's life to find a scrapbook, some said that you needed to complete certain difficult tasks, but if i recall correctly, the shed was only meant to be a horse stable until they moved horses to the barn.

Wow so glad I never noticed that cave in ocarina, it would have driven me crazy

Surprised the pendant from Dark Souls 1 isn't on the list, but that's a rather famous one. There was the door in the original Demon's Souls that went nowhere, but then in the BluePoint remake it'll open if you get 26 ceramic coins and give them to Sparkly. 13 in pure white tendency and 13 in pure black. You get a key to open the door and it'll lead you to the Penetrator's armor set.

Important detail about the truck in pokemon, that is the only place in the game where that sprite can be found. For a game that was hold by tape and dreams, one would expect that they wouldn't want to put uneccessary stuff, so it seems strange that there is random unique truck in a place your average player can't even reach

Imagine getting eaten by sharks while the Sonic drowning music plays. Ultimate terror.

1:50 I always swore I saw Link approaching the triforce somewhere, glad I wasn't insane

At the very end of Lufia, past the final boss, there is an empty doorframe on the wall, looking like its missing door might pop in, once you hit a switch or arrive at the scene having fulfilled some precondition, but alas, it seems to be nothing but some leftover decoration. Quite heartbreaking, as there was much speculation that behind that door one might find the means to turn fate even further and change the story's bittersweet ending.

In Illusions of Gaia, there's a hole in a wall near the 2nd dungeon's entrance that seems to be the exact size for the player to Psycho Slide through, but you don't get the Psycho Slide ability until later in the game. Hacking the game to get Psycho Slide early will reveal that the hole is purely decorative and can't be slid through.

Can't forget the hidden book in Mario Sunshine. Behind an unopenable door in a level that had nothing to with it, that thing drove us crazy for ages. Most people agreed that it was probably part of a scrapped mission in the level, but I don't think we've ever gotten any official word on it.

This was not a big one, but when Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly came out, there was a door in the starting area that everyone assumed would open when you completed the game 100% since that's what happened in previous games. When the door didn't open, people ran to the forums to see if anyone managed to open the door, how they did it, and what they found. Turns out there was no way to open it, it was just a set piece that appeared open in a cutscene, and that, in-game, the only thing there was an empty room.

I remember spending hours trying to figure out why the power plant area was included in megaman legends. There is nothing there! It was the only place in the game where there was nothing!

In Kingdom Hearts 2, there's a large building in Twilight Town that you cannot see unless you yank control of the camera, pull it way up into the sky, and look around. It looks almost like an auditorium? A baseball field with a ceiling? It definitely stands out as big and unique, but there is no way to normally see it during gameplay. I bet it's an integral plot point in Kingdom Hearts 7.

Outside xbox has been around longer than my first car's engine, second car loan, and my childhood hopes and dreams. Much longer they'll have beat my 20's too. Really says the quality of making rating videos with community engagement. Keep up the great work!

Mario Kart 64, Peach's Castle. Turning off into that Castle area looks really cool, but after wasting a lap and a half looking for a "secret", you just need to turn around and leave

I love the Mew truck. I love how you have to be a clever so-and-so to find it in the first place and how it made clever so-and-sos think "Wait! What if I were _even cleverer_ a so-and-so?"

There's actually one I found in Baldur's Gate 3; inside the Szarr Palace (Act 3, Astarion's companion quest) when you get to the ballroom there are two tower rooms, only one of which is open. If you send one party member into it and press the button inside it locks them in but opens the other tower. Go into that one to the dining room, and at the back is a chest; if you move this it reveals a hatch. Going down there leads to a chamber that seems to be unfinished yet wasn't cut; it has a pressure plate puzzle that sort of works (you can also just pick the lock), and a lever puzzle that does nothing (two of the levers aren't even levers as far as the game is concerned). Intriguing though.

My mind went instantly to the infamous 15th wish from Destiny 2. There have been many Destiny mysteries and theories that didn't amount to anything, but none were bigger than the 15th wish. There were massive joint community efforts on discord and reddit trying to solve this puzzle that, as it turns out, didn't actually exist. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some diehard believers still trying to work it out to this day.

That damn truck in Pokémon. I didn’t even believe it was there originally when I heard my friends gossip about it. Then I tried it. So many hours looking up stuff and guides and going to that one slot machine in the casino that has someone keys sitting on it.

This has been an exceptionally nostalgic episode

Notice that at least half of these *were* meant to be something, but had been removed at some point. Game devs just love to toy with us, their playthings.

Cackling at James splitting Luke's chest open for the ice key 6:48

The missing princess from RDR2.

The version of the Mew under the truck rumor I had heard was in Pokemon Yellow you had to trade for the Machoke one of the npcs has, evolving it into Machamp, then get it to level 100 and have it use strength on the Truck, because Machamp was the physically strongest Pokemon in the game and getting it to level 100 would make it the only Pokemon strong enough to push the truck. I spent many hours grinding to be able to do it, only for it to be one of the greatest moments of disappointment in young me's life when I found out that, of course, it did not work.

God I can't bring any to mind now, but I feel like I was CONSTANTLY hearing about a bunch of video game urban legends as a kid that ended up being nothing. It was a favourite pastime of kids in my school I guess.

The Pendant in the first Dark Souls is one of my favorite examples of this, because the game itself tells you it does nothing, but players weren't convinced. They spent years trying to figure out what it did, and came to the conclusion that, like the item says, it does nothing. Then Miyazaki said offhandedly in an interview "I'm surprised people haven't figured out what the Pendant does yet," which re-ignited the search! Then Miyazaki later revealed he said that just to mess with people, because the Pendant does, in fact, do absolutely nothing. Outstanding troll by the master himself.

The bugs in jars in Skyrim! We all wondered for years what kind of message from Oblivion was etched onto the lids until a developer said in a tweet they were nothing, just standard cut content, didn't even remember what kind of quest they were related to

the one "secret" i spent hours and hours and hours trying to uncover when i was a kid was in pokemon channel (not hey you pikachu), on cobalt coast there is a faraway island that pikachu even shows interest in. at the time when the game came out there were all kinds of rumors about how you had to befriend lapras to take you to the island and on the island is where you'd meet latias. i spent, WAY too long trying to get to that island only to later find out it wasn't anything special aksdjg and aside from the latias part of the rumor, most of the "rumor" was left over instructions from a similar island on cobalt coast in hey you pikachu

It's interesting to see that while many times gamers are a bit overly enthusiastic and end up obsessing over stuff that never had any kind of special meaning sometimes there _was_ supposed to be something there and it ended up dummied out for whatever reason. As someone who gets a kick out of development hell stories, many times I find the cut content stories much more interesting than when the secrets actually exist in the game. Speaking of which, how about a video on interesting cut content from popular games, huh?

The Triforce is there in the water temple. My friend's dad's cousin's brother found it by putting in the code; up, down, up, down, L trigger, R trigger, then spin around in a circle, jump down wise, brush your right eyebrow and spit on the floor. Hey presto!

What about the mystery door in Shadow of the Colossus? People spent literal years trying to find what was behind that door, and at last discovered it was nothing at all.

This was an absolutely wild watch--especially seeing as I usually am at least peripherally aware of around 1/3 to 1/2 of entries in an OXBOX or OXTRA list vid, seeing one in which I knew absolutely nothing was quite novel!

Have you tried getting the broom closet ending in the Stanley Parable? That is my favorite! Specifically the original game version.

Luke's committal to ludicrous lines always cracks me up. "Should we be worshipping the pillar?!?" 🤣🤣

The Triforce is in OoT, I've seen the TAS, it also shows off the Twitch chat integration. (it's an arbitrary code execution trick)

The method to get to the truck in Pokémon isn't as wild a sequence break as you think - simply leave a single trainer on SS Anne undefeated, and after you get the Cut HM deliberately lose the fight to that trainer so that you're teleported to the Pokécenter instead of walking off the ship yourself. You can then come back on your own time with Surf to go see the truck, which incidentally is just there "to see if players could find it".

I am a bit surprised that the one closed hatch in the Byrgenwerth (is it written like that?) Building never caused such a ruckus. It has the exact same model as every other hatch you can find and open (tho if I remember correct, there weren't much of those either), but there is also no way to open it.

Ellen saying what the door in Bloodborne does had to be rewound several times. Her face was so so good in that moment.

Do you mean that my friend from childhood, who had an uncle who worked at Nintendo, was lying about the pokemon truck?!

In Xenogears, in the city of Kislev, there's a fully-3D-modeled three wheeled vehicle sitting incongruously in the middle of a small plaza. No reason or purpose for it, its just there. I think this is more "cut content" than "huge secret" but its a really neat design that has fascinated me for 25 years. I keep a save file on my PS3 for that game that allows me to go back and enjoy it whenever I want.

I would constantly try to explore every nook and cranny of games. I remember taking a vehicle in San Andreas and seeing how far I could drive until I hit the end of the world's map.

I forget which yearly shooter game it was but I still sometimes wonder about that invisible pyramid mystery that players were solving too fast so it got patched out entirely with 0 payoff ever

I played the heck out of Ocarina of Time back then, and I learned a bunch of glitches specifically to go see parts of the game the devs didn't intend me to see, especially that Zora's cave. I got pretty good at edgewalking, too

Ill always remember the hours i spent in Star wars Kotor 2 in Telos military base, trying to get in to the military base sub level. Was there a terminal somewhere I was supposed to access? Was the HK50 that exploded straight away something to do with it? Nope just turned out it was cut content. 20 years later and im still annoyed about it.

The real mystery is how I managed to be this early

Total Distortion's teleporter artifact is completely non-functional but they left in all of the puzzles to get the parts to build it. It's a massive detriment to spend all the time and mental energy to assemble the artifact, just to have it do literally nothing.

Having a list of all the codes for Banjo Kazooie helped acquire all the items intended to be used for the sequel, even if it never worked as intended. I really need to try those codes and see if they still work in the NSO version.

Not a secret area, but a secret item. In Xenoblade Chronicles, there exists an unique item called "Mumkahr's razor" that you can only get at an Extremely specific time after completing certain side quests and you can entirely miss it. It does nothing and has no purpose.

I have an old school one - Ant Attack spectrum 48k - Secret Ammo Dump in the desert. Follow in line away from city wall to find it. A box with letters on each side spelling AMMO. Once found, it does absolutely nothing!

Love the braid Ellen, thanks y’all for your work ❤

fun fact: There was actually a way to get Mew in the original pokemon red and blue.... no it had nothing to do with the truck, the actual mehtod was quit complicated and you basicly had to start a new game but it worked

Probably a little too niche to make this list but there's a pair of locked doors at the back of Omduil's Manor in 'Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II' that drove me crazy when I was younger! There are plenty of other doors in the game that you can't open but they're all non-interactable textures, So far as I can recall, these are the only doors in the game you can attempt to open but will remain locked thoughout! Was 100% convinced that you'd be able to open them at some point, if you finished Omduil's Side Quest or something but no. There's nothing!!

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, I saw something golden glowing and kept trying to get to it. After wasting like 5-10 minutes, I looked it up. It was a "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" easter egg. I thought it was something I could grab.

So many childhood dreams crushed in Ocarina of Time when we realized it was nothing and the Triforce was NOT in fact in the game.

The mystery of the "Y"s in Halo 3 ODST, which created interest for many years and rekindling it recently only for developers to finally tell the truth. The purpose of them where precisely to make players question "why" and it's purpose.

Just gotta shout out Ellen's amazing tee in this video. Good Enough is a mantra for all :D

Please take it as a complement when I say this has wonderful 1990s/early 2000s UK games TV energy

You should also do a list of secrets that are definitely something but can't be accessed for whatever reason. Case in point, there's a hatch in The Legend of Dragoon in the town of Lohan, which -- in the original Japanese release -- opens into an underground adventure and culminates in you getting an extra item bag that doubles your capacity. But for whatever reason, in the American import, the entire adventure was cut from the game. I have vivid memories of returning to that hatch over and over and over again because it was so obviously *something*, but never being able to access it. Your character is literally invited to "go on an underground adventure" in the same room where the hatch is, but you simply can't get there. The crappy thing about it is that because your carrying capacity for items was just 32, missing out on this item made the American version significantly harder than the Japanese one. You had to painstakingly sell and manage your items between healing items, attack items, status-cure items, AND a handful of unique items that can be used once per battle but never get used up.

There's a ton of such dead ends and false clues in Conan Exiles, but that's due to them having all the intent in the world and none of the time. There is a story, hints to where to go, and lore, but you have to find it and not be disappointed when it leads to nothing. (The sandstorm madman's poem has cost me so much time...)

Thank you Ellen and Luke :) and producer John :)

Gotta say, "it's in you, isn't it" aren't words I ever expected to hear on Outside Xtra.