Developers love tucking away hidden features in their games, and back in the '90s, it was common to find things like secret debug menus buried deep in the code. These were designed to aid with development and locate potential issues, and some of them are still accessible in the final retail versions—if you know how to unlock them, of course.
Bo Bayles is a name that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has followed the documentation of such hidden features over the years, and Bayles has another doozy to serve up today: a hidden debug menu which can only be accessed if you take part in a secret mini-game where you match animal sounds to button presses.
"Shining The Holy Ark, the 1996 RPG for Saturn, has the strangest hidden feature I’ve ever seen," says Bayles. "It has unused code for a sound-matching minigame."
The mini-game code—which is unused in the final version of the game—plays a series of animal sound effects, and the player is supposed to press X, Y, or Z, depending on which sound plays.
Should you miss less than three matches, the debug menu becomes accessible—the catch is that there's no indication of which sound matches which button, and the sounds play at such a frantic pace that success is difficult.
Bayles has created a patch which re-enables the matching game in the game and is challenging users to become the first person to successfully unlock the debug menu.
"If you're the first to show that you can finish the sound matching game, I'll let you pick the next Rings of Saturn article topic," Bayles adds.