When a person plays a game, it can feel as if there is a large distance between them and the developer. Most of us don't know exactly what it takes to create a game, especially when we're confronted with a triple-A title with gorgeous graphics and intricately designed gameplay and a jaw-dropping story. There are so many parts to a game that collectively make a masterpiece, and it usually takes a vast amount of people to make it happen. You know those end credits you'll see at the end of a game (the ones you skip if you have no time to appreciate the work dozens of people have put into the game you just played)? Every single one of those persons credited made the game you played possible.

But unlike, let's say, a book, the distance between creator and audience with a video game can be massive. With a book, the words the author wrote are the words the reader will read. Simple. But with a game, we don't always have the pleasure of feeling a direct connection to the developers.

One of the ways developers bridge this gap are with hidden messages within their game. We as players go crazy trying to find them, and they as developers make sure that these messages are fun and exciting. Whether these messages are intended to spoil a game's ending for us, hint at an upcoming game, creep us out, or be just a personal message from developer to gamer, they certainly create some transparency in the wall that separates us from developers. Here's a list of some of the best hidden messages in some of our favorite games.

25 Shocking Ending Spoiled

via: bioshock.wikia.com

BioShock is one of the greatest games of all times. Yes, it is one of my all-time favorites, and if it is not one of yours, well, it should be. This game is fan-freaking-tastic. And its endings is one of the most well-known twist endings in gaming history. I'm going to spoil it here, but here's a warning for you poor souls who haven't played the game. SPOILER ALERT. When your character crash lands into the ocean and makes his way to the underwater city of Rapture, he's led along by someone who we assume is a good Samaritan. Little did we know until more than halfway through the game, that we were a mind-controlled drone sent to kill Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture. Our supposed savior was using us as a tool. This ending is spoiled by a message that is hidden beneath some stairs in Neptune's Bounty. Turns out, only those genetically related to Andrew Ryan can access the Bathyspheres, transports from one area to another, something our protagonist has been doing the entire game. And our protagonist just happens to be a genetically created/modified, mind-controlled human drone.

24 Never Intended To Reach Your Ears

via: half-life.wikia.com

Audio recordings are one of gaming's better ideas when it comes to giving gamers bits and pieces of a story. Sometimes there are time constraints when telling a narrative, and when developers want to include extra parts of the story, they have to make do with using audio messages or text. Some people can't handle a bit of reading (I'm looking at you, TL;DR people), so audio messages are a great alternative. You don't necessarily have to pause the game, and good voice acting makes the experience more thrilling. In Portal 2, some audio files were dropped from the game, but for a good reason. We found out that GLaDOS was made from Cave Johnson's assistant, Caroline, during the latter half of the game, but some audio files revealed that some voice recordings had been made that actually showed the transformation. In the files, you hear Caroline screaming out and protesting. The whole thing sounded... not good. That's one message developers definitely did not want you to hear.

23 All That Trouble

via: youtube.com (Relentless Rogues)

One of the most controversial game series around is Grand Theft Auto. Being an open-world game that encourages freedom means that developers allow players to do nearly anything that comes to mind, whether that's running over pedestrians with their vehicles, going to strip clubs, or robbing convenience stores. This quality of the Grand Theft Auto games simultaneously provides the series with the luster of exploration and the smear of profane behavior. Whether you like or dislike this aspect of the series, GTA has always been superb at giving gamers hidden messages to suss out within their very large games. One of the best messages we had to locate was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In order to reach it, we had to construct a jet pack and fly to the very top of the Gant Bridge. Once there, we saw that the developers had left us the message, "There are no Easter Eggs up here. Go away." Upon reading this, we had no choice but to jump off the bridge, amused and dissatisfied at the same time.

22 Love Is A Bloodstain And Bullet Holes

via: youtube.com (Maka 91 Productions)

Gifts are great. I doubt there is anyone who would dispute that. What kind of gift you might like to receive is an entirely different matter. What I would like as a gift is going to be different from what you would like for a gift (probably). But I think we all have to admit, getting the gift of an Easter Egg in your honor is a pretty sweet gift. One of the developers on Halo: Combat Evolved created an Easter Egg as a message of love to his girlfriend, Meg. This Easter Egg is now fondly known as the Megg. In order to get it, you have to set the difficulty up to Legendary, and on the first level, you have to attack friendly forces, including Captain Keyes. Cortana, Master Chief's AI, will say that the Master Chief is going rampant, heralding the arrival of elite soldiers to eradicate you. The soldiers (who will most likely kill you at such a high difficulty setting) enter from a room that was otherwise closed. If you survive the encounter with the soldiers and go into this room, you will see a bloodstain on the ceiling in the shape of a heart and the letter "M" formed with bullet holes.

21 The Silent Hill Helpline

via: youtube.com (TheASHfire06 - ASH's PSP Games)

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an odd game. It follows the same story as the first Silent Hill game, where father Harry Mason tries to find his daughter, but its plot is not exactly the same and many facets of the original are changed. It is not a remake, but it is also not its own game, as it wouldn't exist without the first. One of the additions to Shattered Memories is the inclusion of a phone. Phone numbers can be found around the town of Silent Hill, and you can dial and call them, with varying results depending on who you called. If the player decides to be whimsical and dial Konami's (the publisher's) Customer Support, someone will answer and tell Harry that he is beyond even their help. Talk about meta.

20 Attack Of The Fungus

via: gamepur.com

In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, developer Naughty Dog sent gamers a message about their upcoming game, a little title known as The Last of Us. Shocking, right? There's a newspaper that Nathan Drake can come across with a headline referring to a "deadly fungus." You may not know this about The Last of Us, but what made the zombies, well, zombies was a fungus commonly known as Cordyceps. Cordyceps are actually real, based on a genus of parasitic fungus that inhabits ants and other small animals. The fungus forces them to move to a place where the fungus could thrive, usually someplace damp, and then has them die in the perfect Cordyceps-growing spot. My fascination with Cordyceps aside, I think it is amazing how Naughty Dog hid a sneak peek of their new game in Uncharted 3. Only downside of it is that perhaps Nathan Drake exists in the same timeline as Joel and Ellie. And who knows if he survived the outbreak. (For more on the Uncharted series, check out this list.)

19 Devastating City Plans

via: steamcommunity.com

There weren't many good super hero games before the Arkham series came around. You might disagree with me about that. You might point out some super hero game you did enjoy from way back when, or you might insist that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a crappy game. But I believe that the first Arkham game was a gem. It made combat smooth (slightly unrealistic, but still smooth) and it gave us great performances from both Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy as the Joker and Batman respectively. There's a reason why it spawned so many sequels. Arkham Asylum hinted at its sequel in the shape of a map that outlined Quincy Sharp's idea for an "Arkham City." In Sharp's office, there's a secret room where the map is located. It was pretty confident of the game's developers to include sequel ideas in their first game, but hey, Batman: Arkham Asylum was that good.

18 Flash Goes The Camera, Down Goes The Man

via: youtube.com (Joseph Harris)

Boxing in an arcade or with a console at home can be entertaining while reducing the risk of harming yourself dramatically when compared to boxing as a sport. A single button press, which requires you to tap your finger, is different from cocking your arm back and then thrusting it forward to deliver a punch. For some of us, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! was the closest we ever got to an actual boxing match. While it was never as intense as fighting a real person, a degree of difficulty was involved in the game. And for me, there was never an opponent so difficult as Bald Bull. His signature move was the "Bull Charge," where he would bum-rush my guy and leave me down on the ground in one move. The only way to stop his move would be to wait for the right time to counter with a hook. If my timing was off, I would fail. What I didn't know was that the developers had left us a little message that could help us time a hook perfectly. In the background, a camera would flash from the audience, and that was supposed to help us time the punch. Alas, if only I had seen it.

17 Erasing The Past

via: youtube.com (Alejandra Mallea)

Whether this was a deliberate message from Hideo Kojima or just an accidental prediction of the future, this side mission from Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is eerie. The mission tasks you with using a gun that projects a ray of light to uncover prior MGS game titles on different surfaces and then erase them. If you complete this mission, your character will state that while you erased the markings, the memories will remain. This erasure of Kojima's titles creepily foreshadows the split between him and publisher Konami, predicting the removal of his name from the MGS games. It has not been confirmed (yet) whether this was Kojima secretly letting gamers know of his impending fate or if it was just pure coincidence. Even if it was pure coincidence, it is still pretty unfortunate.

16 The Art Of Possession

via: youtube.com (Princess Iolite Montonoke)

Possession is the first Vigor you get when you play BioShock Infinite. It's definitely handy, as you can use it to "possess" enemies and machines and have them work for you. When you take that first sip, soft, indecipherable whispers caress your ears. If you were like me, you just grinned at having your first set of magical powers and then went on your merry way. Other, more intrepid gamers took the audio they heard and played it in reverse, revealing that the unintelligible whispers were actually words from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. That's all very poetical, except it takes a turn for the disturbing when you take into account one of the Aids you can get for the power of Possession. This upgrade to Possession makes it so that your human victims who have been possessed are forced to kill themselves once the power wears off. And we all know what Romeo and Juliet did at the end of Romeo and Juliet.

15 There's A Rat In The Walls

via: reclaimer105.wordpress.com

Sometimes, when developers want to spoil their game for players, they let characters do it for them. In Portal, the game is spoiled for us by the mysterious Rat Man, the only employee of the facility to survive the flooding of neurotoxin that GLaDOS, the supreme AI of the place, released. He lives behind the walls of the testing chambers that our character performs in, and if we squeeze in past some wall panels, we can see evidence of his existence. One of the messages the Rat Man leaves for us are the infamous words, "The cake is a lie," showing us (if we found them in time) that GLaDOS' promise of cake after testing is completed is not to be trusted. The Rat Man's scribbled words and drawings persist throughout several chambers, and it is thanks to him (and the game's developers) that we have one of our most enduring memes ever.

14 Your Destiny Is Out There

via: bleedingcool.com

The chutzpah of some developers in promoting their next games never ceases to astonish me. What also astonishes me is how I never realize what they were promoting until way after the fact. I had to be shown this particular message by friends, even though I had re-played Halo 3: ODST numerous times already. In several areas of ODST's maps, a poster can be found, showing a large spherical Earth orbited by what we assume is the moon. Above this image are the words, "Destiny Awaits." If you've been living under a rock, you may not know what Destiny is. Let me tell you, it is one of the most popular first-person shooters available to play today. The developer of Destiny is the ever-talented Bungie, and Bungie is also well-known for creating the Halo series, including Halo 3: ODST. That poster is a blatant spoiler, I tell you, a blatant spoiler.

13 Here's To You, Chris

arcade sushi.com

Some messages were placed in games intended to be found. However, just because the messages were placed in games to be found, doesn't mean they were found quickly. There was a contest people could enter to see if their name would be placed in an upcoming Nintendo game. The game's title was never announced, but when The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was made for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), gamers finally got to see the winner of the contest. Chris Houlihan got his name placed in a room that Link gets sent to if the game glitches out. It contains some rupees and some text that indicates that this is Chris' room.

12 Dear Diary

via: newnormative.com

Jill Valentine's diary is a much coveted hidden message for gamers (such as myself) who enjoy a good read. Not only do I like to read, but I like discovering hidden links between two storylines, and Jill's diary offers information that covers the gap between the first game and Resident Evil 3. The diary can be collected only if the player has gathered all the game files in the right order on the highest difficulty, and it must be read before the game is completed. While I may have some qualms about the suitability of Jill's outfit in fighting zombies, I have no problem following the instructions to get Jill's diary. It's tough, but worth it in my opinion.

11 A Bite Of Jill's Sandwich

via: youtube.com (Zombie Fesl 99)

Speaking of Jill Valentine, one game decided to offer up a message of tribute to her and the original Resident Evil in a subtle, yet blatant homage. The voice acting in the original Resident Evil was less than stellar. It was downright hilarious at times, like when a man who was mortally wounded said, "Ouch," as if he had just gotten a paper cut. One of the more hilariously delivered lines was when Barry Burton, Jill Valentine's partner, saved her from the classic ceiling-is-descending trap. After saving her, he remarks that she was almost turned into a Jill-sandwich. Dead Rising, an open-world survival horror game, featured a restaurant that your character could walk into called "Jill's Sandwiches." It's a genial nod at one of the grandfathers of the survival horror genre.

10 From City To Knight

via: youtube.com (Fig 76)

The Arkham series sure does love to hint at its next games. In Arkham Asylum, the map in Quincy Sharp's office clued us in to the existence of Arkham City, and in Arkham City, with a little bit of finagling, gamers could find a secret message about the events of Batman: Arkham Knight. If players set the date of their PC or console to December 13th, 2004 and then visit Calendar Man, he will give a short message to Batman/players. That date in December is the day that the developer Rocksteady was founded. Once you make your way to Calendar man, he says he was there at the beginning and that he will be there at the end. Fast forward to Arkham Knight and in Batman's final moments, we can make out Calendar Man in the crowd, fulfilling his promise from the past game.

9 We Found Woods

via: youtube.com (WARF3RE)

In Call of Duty: Black Ops, we're introduced to Frank Woods. Not to be too harsh to the Call of Duty series, but Woods was your typical character in such a game. He was tough, don't get me wrong, but one of the only things that separated him from the hundreds of other tough characters in Call of Duty was that he died saving the main character's life. I'm not trying to hate on CoD, but let's be honest with each other. No one really plays Call of Duty for the campaigns. Anyways, there is a hidden message that can be located in the Call of Duty: Black Ops main menu screen that reveals that Woods survived his supposed death, which, if you played the game and saw how Frank Woods died, seemed pretty unbelievable. But it was true. Woods came out in the sequels.

8 Donkey Kong Developer

via: youtube.com (leearco)

Someone who wrote the port for the original Donkey Kong hid an Easter Egg that is notoriously impossible to find, and the payoff if you do find it is simply the programmer's initials on the title screen. If you want to try and find this hidden message anyways, feel free to look it up (it's oddly complex) and follow the steps minutely. This message was so difficult to find, the man who discovered it had to examine the game's code in order to find it. Wanting credit for porting the game all by yourself is understandable. I admittedly know next to nothing about coding, but I imagine it can be difficult if you're doing it alone. So for his sake, if you want to try and find it, go ahead. Just don't expect anything more than initials.

7 Gee, That's Offensive

via: playstation.com

In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Naughty Dog supposedly left gamers quite the piece of advice. Engraved on a headstone in Spanish, there is reputedly a message that declares if we have found and translated this message, we are nerds and should go out and get girlfriends. I personally have not found this message, but if it's there (and I'm going to replay Uncharted and find out for sure imminently), I think it's quite a gutsy move on Naughty Dog's part. Gamers are what give Naughty Dog their bread and butter. Suggesting we put the game down and get a life is like saying they don't want our money. Well, Naughty Dog, I think I'll reject your idea of a life and stick with playing my video games, thank you very much.

6 Nicole Is Dead

via: mhvt.net

I think this is my favorite hidden message on this list because it is a message that is hidden in plain sight, literally! In case you've never played Dead Space (shame on you), the story goes that engineer Isaac Clarke travels to a broken down space ship looking for his missing girlfriend Nicole, who worked on the space ship as a doctor. The space ship ends up being riddled with Necromorphs, dead crew members infected with an alien organism, but Isaac still holds on to the idea that Nicole could have survived with the help of the occasional hallucination or two. At the very end, it is revealed that Nicole did, in fact, die; she killed herself. The developers hid a message for us that revealed this though. Using the beginning initial of each chapter's title spells out the sentence "NICOLE IS DEAD." How insane is that! It was there the whole time!