Mickey's texture is not loaded into Depot, and it's in 2 parts, so not really possible a random bit hit would cause this. Also, if you do XBLA, and set to the "retro graphics", what appears in that spot? I'm not clear exactly what spot you're at there to compare to original, but would be interesting to compare to retail. My guess is they just did things like that as a work in progress sort of fun, but never intended it to stay. I think the story got mixed up with the "Rare logo" appearing on Depot, versus an unused depot decal texture that was listed on TCRF. And there is that random decal showing up in Aztec that is not well known, hidden up high that Ben Colclough noticed recently (probably others have seen just not well known).
In this video, I was toggling the retro graphics and the Mickey graffito is there. That being said, you are right that it's in two parts, making a bit flip unlikely.
@@subdrag I just checked, and there is actually *no* graffiti in the spot where Mickey appears in the XBLA version! It's a blue crate near the starting area.
Hey goose, in regards to the Brit having a save file in a sealed game, he is. It alone anymore. It happened to me with goldeneye as well as a few other games over the years. I'd have to rack my brain to remember them all but I do te!ember it being that way for me on goldeneye for N64 and ridge racer for PS1. Not super common but I don't understand why the Brit has ent heard similar stories. I would bet money that it has happened to all of us at some point. Just probably didn't notice... Also, I'm chris. Melissa's husband. Been watching you for a couple years now. Good stuff bud. Keep on keepin on. Cheers from alabama.
@@GamerFolklore yeah could be that the OP got hold of a preview reviewers copy or something, but I would imagine if such a thing existed someone would've found it by now but I guess its possible that if the build was very very near the final build they mightve stuck it in a mock up final build case to allow the publisher to get their own photos of the cart, so its possible that copy is currently sitting in someone collection right now, just sitting in the bottom of that box of loose carts you picked up unceremoniously holding Mickey hostage one added note that makes this theory more plausible is that the XBLA build also had the Mickey texture present, which would imply they had Mickey in the game right up until the end of development and it was one of the last things to be cut, probably with the advice of their lawyers or Nintendo's lawyers, and when the XBLA copy was being developed they had lost that last minute pre-gold patch from the archived source code and ended up using the 0.99 build from before Mickey was cut the only issue I have is that the OP posted his story after the XBLA leak, so its possible he is just making up the story because it would be plausible, if he had posted this story before the XBLA leak I would've 100% said this was the most likely scenario but after, it becomes just as plausible he made it up as it would be believable
I've had weird stuff like this happen to me in games in the past. The N64 is pretty infamous for having weird things happen if the cartridge isn't inserted properly, and since it's still in the games code, something could have triggered its reappearance, especially if it was a launch console/copy of the game etc.
I had something weird happen in Bully: Scholarship Edition on the Xbox where one of the nerds that I was making Jimmy pick on in the dormitory just straight up “female doggo” slapped Jimmy in the midst of the fight and I actually stopped playing in complete shock before laughing my behind off since I had never seen the nerd in question (I think it was Algie or the one nerd who plays tabletop RPGs in the library) do that before or since. Knowing that game’s hectic development, I’m not surprised I discovered something purely by chance that I haven’t seen anybody discussing online so far.
This is along the lines of what I was thinking. Either a super early run of the Goldeneye and/or the OP unknowingly triggered a glitch which caused the graffiti to appear.
Interestingly, one of the least known pieces of graffiti in Depot is there in plain sight: the Rare logo spray painted on a wall near the train at the end. People run right by it thousands of times while speedrunning and never notice it.
As soon as you mentioned the Mickey Mouse graffiti, my first reaction was "yeah, of course, it's on the Depot level." To get to the end of the video and discover it's not in the N64 game? I'm truly spooked. What can I say, I'm with OP here.
6:14 Like other commenters, my first reaction was also that there's definitely Mickey Mouse graffiti on those shipping containers. And then when you showed this clip, and I'm pretty sure that's what I was registering and remembering as Mickey Mouse. To me that's easy to call Mickey Mouse at a glance. That looks like Fantasia Mickey Mouse without the hat and maybe with the ears in a slightly off position. And I'd be hard pressed to say that's definitely not Mickey Mouse.
I don't think it looks much like Mickey Mouse when you can thoroughly inspect it in high resolution, but glancing at it on an old CRT would very easily make it come across as Mickey.
Yeah it totally does look like Micky, I’d bet my house on that being what the OP saw…but if it’s NOT Micky, then that’d be one hell of a coincidence that an unused Micky graphic actually was in the game also lol… I personally think the used graphic that looks like Micky, was an edit of the actual unused Micky graphic, which allowed them to use it.
Every copy of Goldeneye is Personalized. But in all seriousness, I think either OP misremembered the other red and white graffiti, then seeing the unused Mickey Mouse graphic online, his brain auto-filled it onto the other texture in his mind, or possibly it got brought back by someone using a gameshark on the cartridge without OP knowing.
@@uchusky08 he did say that he remembered specifically that it was weird having the mickey mouse franchise in a 007 game but this could easily be a memory to fill in the gaps as it had been years since he had read the blog post and our memory isn't the most reliable
right but its interesting in his original post he specifically mentioned it was in the "back" of depot, and that other red and white graffiti is in plain sight. and then in the xbla leak, the mickey texture is on the back of a container.
I had a similar to Mandela effect type situation happen to me a few year ago. Basically when i was a kid around 1987 or so i played Rush'N Attack in the arcades. I fell in love with the game and one day a friend of mine told me he had Rush'N Attack on the NES. I didn't belive him, but sure enough he had it and lent it to me and naturally loved it as well. Then one day another friend of mine lent me a Nintendo strategy guide. While going through it, i found there was a small section for Rush'N Attack which indicated a secret underground passageway on a particular level, after blowing up some mines, it even had some screenshots. I was amazed as i never saw that in the game and immediately fired up my NES and went in search of that passageway. After reaching the location in the screenshot, to my dissapointment i was unable to reveal the ladder to the secret underground level. Didn't know if i was doing something wrong or if it was at a different place. I kept going back to the game again and again to see if i could somehow have missed something? but it was pretty straightforward. Reach a specific set of mines on what appeared to be level 4, blow them up and the ladder should be there. So after a while i returned the strategy guide to my friend. And while i did eventually purchase my own copy of Rush'N Attack, i was never able to find those levels. As time went by I gave up on looking for those levels and then forgot about it. Then around the early 2000's when information about Nintendo games and strategy's were starting to show up on the internet. I remembered the Rush'N Attack secret and thought maybe someone has the definitive tip on this and maybe it was done differently than what the guide indicated? So i started searching and searching but couldn't find anything referencing that particular secret. I even started asking my friends about it but nobody recalled ever seeing that secret ladder and the underground passageway. I wanted to get my hands on that guide again but by then I couldn't remember the name of it that eventually started thinking maybe i imagined it all? After searching the internet for weeks i came up on a particular strategy guide that seemed very very familiar. It was called "The Official Nintendo Players guide". I thought to myself this was it! This was the guide that will prove if i was right or if my imagination played tricks on me! So i immediately went throught the process of purchasing and couldn't wait to verify if this was in fact that book. A few days went by and my package arrived, i carefully went through it as to not miss anything, but i was becoming more and more familair with each page i turned confirming this was the correct guide. I finally reached the Rush'N Attack section... and sure enough the infamous secret passageway was there! I read thoroughly, but again there was no special method just straightforward. Blow the mines up on what seemed level 4 in a specific area and reveal the ladder. By that time there were emulators so i started searching for different versions online with no luck. I even started purchasing different revisions of it for the NES, i believe there are 3 one was A the other B and one third one i can't remember but i do have them all. But have never been able to find any differences with them. Researching for days i was finally able to solve the mystery! After emulating different games for the famicom. I was not able to find Rush N attack for it BUT i did notice that the famicom disk system version of games had differences in them, so after searching a bit more i came upon Green Beret which was the actual name of the game in Japan. Downloaded, played, reached the section, blew up the mines and sure enough the ladder and the underground passegaway was there! After many many years i was able to get to the bottom of this! i wasn't crazy after all! Turns out the guide never mentions this particular detail and when it was made they obviously played the famicom disk version of the game and probably did not know that for the NES that particular area would be removed. Don't know the exact reason but i assume to save memory. Anyways if you want to verify for yourself, below is the link to the guide and it is on page 93. archive.org/details/The_Official_Nintendo_Players_Guide_1987/mode/2up As for the N64 Mickey sprite in this video i would say, what if OP had a very particular version of that game? as one key detail is that he remembers it vividly. Had he used GS or something else he would probably remember that as well. So i would say maybe attempt to track that cartridge down even if he sold it and then verify as it could be a one of a kind cartridge.
Holy smokes! That was a great story. I'm glad you managed to "solve" the mystery in the end. Your hypothesis sounds right, they played the JP version and didn't know the secret wouldn't cross over. Very intriguing, thank you for sharing!!
@@GamerFolklore Thank you! I did have a friend have a genuine Mandela Effect with the game Simon's Quest which in itself was very cryptic and mysterious but that's probably a story for another day. 😄
i'm 35. I speak about "Russian Attack" at least once a year always asking if anybody has played it before and nobody ever has. I can't believe there is somebody like you on this earth that put this much time into this and I can't find somebody who has even played it lmao. Dude, this is fucking great!
It's important to note that N64 cartridges (games) have different software revisions. For example, bugs were fixed, and newer cartridges replaced old ones in stores. If you download ROMs off the internet, or even just look at the copyright screens (during the intros) for Goldeneye, or Perfect Dark, you'll see version numbers. So it could be that they removed this in a later revision to avoid legal issues from Disney. Obviously, we didn't know about this back in the day because patches on consoles were not a thing. Edit: I feel this could be true because the code was commented out, as you said. It's common to comment out code rather than deleting it, because you never know what sort of domino effect you can have on the rest of the game. RARE even slipped a ZXSpectrum emulator WITH GAMES [that they developed] into Goldeneye, which can be re-enabled with a ROM edit. They just commented it out, AFAIK.
Sure, games had revisions but the thing is, I don't think GE ever had revisions that changed a whole lot. From the top of my head, in the JP version, they added a couple of BAs and improved auto-aim. Otherwise, like Goose explored in older videos, the game is very solid code-wise. In fact, there are only 2 OoB known (pulling that from memory): in Silo and Train. Neither help speedrunning and hard to execute.
@@kholdfuzion4538 Even then, this revision only removed the code that didn't do anything and something the user didn't even see. So, my point still stand in a way.
I don’t know if this means much but I got my copy on release day and I played the shit out of it. I specifically went looking for Easter eggs, never saw the mouse.
It may lend credence to one or more theories to know whether the graffiti appears on the same set of crates OP remembers. If yes, he may have legitimately seen the texture in game, and if no, it points to mismatched memory
@@freedustin That's what I was referring to. What I meant was whether the texture, when re-enabled, showed up on the same set of crates that was mentioned here. I haven't played the game so I don't have any knowledge of the map to know for sure.
@@TheHappyWhale there is no such thing a re-enable a texture. they are placed individually and manually onto objects...once that's deleted there is no way to know which crate it was intended for. But he did say, it was a specific group in the back. But that ROM hack proves there is no way to just restore it to its pre-release intentions.
If it was legitimately seen in game and it was an issue with the cartridge then it would more likely have been a replacement of another texture in a different spot. An accidental bit flip could reference the wrong texture from the game data since that texture is still there, their game just loads the wrong one... or you're right and the reference is still there in the same spot in the n64 release but the developers just reference something like texture 9 which is transparent to hide it while texture 8 was the mickey mouse one.
Could be similar to old the wrong warp/item swap/fairy jar technique. Some parameter is fulfilled which shunts the texture memory along a few digits, causing the game to display the mouse. It makes sense as those codes would be stored next to/near each other in the RAM. Sounds plausible.
Another point to the Mismemory theory: the Philadelphia track in Mickey's Speedway USA has some similarities to Depot and could reinforce the association between Mickey and Depot in OP's mind. Actually that game's tracks may contain many assets from previous Rareware games.
@@audreyazwell by the very nature of a Mandela effect, you're wrong, but the social contagion of this memory is conflating with your memories of childhood and causing what is effectively a mass hysteria event where a common misremembrance is occurring due to subconscious peer pressure. For the same reason that feinting plagues exist for no medical reason. One girl feints on a hot day in a crowd and causes a stir, the next thing you know kids are dropping left, right and centre in feinting spells for the next few days, weeks and months. Or you could look to this one hysteria event from Spain where there was some religious mumbo jumbo about the sun and Christianity and a crowd of like 10,000 people came out to witness some sign, obviously nothing actually happened because no one outside of the event saw anything, nor did the sun change its course around the sun, nor we around it, but a huge portion of the crowd would testify that they absolutely 100% saw the sun rocket towards them like a fireball and then morph into some holy sign and return to normal. Collective shared false memory, passed through the crowd by the power of suggestion.
If the textures *are* on the original cartridge, but there is some flag to not render them, it is very much possible that OPs cartridge was somehow "damaged", where the flag was set incorrectly - meaning the asset was rendered when it wasn't meant to. Yes, it is very unlikely, but also not impossibly so.
@@PlutonianPenguin Some other comment mentioned that the texture isn't even loaded in that level and that it consists of two parts. That means that a single bit flip (or even a dozen) is not enough.
I want to share something similar that could possibly explain it When I was a kid I owned Final Fantasy 3 American Version (AKA FF6 in Japan) One day I load up the game and the screen went white, I quickly shut it off removed the cart, put it back and it started up fine. However when I checked my characters I now had 999 Excaliburs, Gem Boxes, Economizers, Offerings, and various other things like graphics got warped or changed. No, this wasn't the sketch bug, because it happened when I booted the game, nor was a game genie ever used As a young kid I remember calling the Nintendo hotline asking if my game had a "virus" The point I'm getting at here is both games have the ability to save and write data, by some miracle some random save code changed how my cart worked, could the same happen here even without the use of a game genie
That is a very interesting story! Thanks for sharing. I wonder how many of these "one off" or near-one-off stories many of us experienced back in the day. Especially knowing now how computer memory can be altered by external factors. Maybe there are thousands of similar stories, and we'll never truly be able to get to the bottom of them all!
Oh yeah, that's an option I hadn't considered... cartridge games were very prone to data and code corruption if the cartridge was removed or "tilted" while playing. Some people deliberately did that to achieve some specific effect, but most of the time the results of those kind of scenarios always seemed very wild and unpredictable. Maybe something like that happened? Either that or it was simply a damaged cartridge, but in both cases I suppose the same principle of unpredictable alteration applies.
also to add, that save file was stupidly overpowered every warrior type could attack 8 times Offering+ genji glove every spell caster could double cast Ultima each turn for 2 mana and Shadow was throwing Excaliburs at trash tier enemies just for fun
I had a similar event once whilst playing Theme Park on the mega drive. I remember the cart getting knocked whilst playing and the game crashed so I hit reset. When the game loaded up again I basically had infinite money. I saved the game and rebooted and yup, infinite money. I tried to replicate it on a different cart but couldn't so who knows 🤷♂️
Textures and items are two separate kind of data so yes its possible to get a glitch who give us stuff, but it can't activate unused textures. What happened to your textures is way more simple: like you said they been changed and warped, in other words they have been altered in the data. Textures are like everything else in a game: corruptable, thats what your glitch did. It corrupted your cartridge data. But its absolutly not possible for any data corruption to had an unused texture, as it only alter the textures themself and not change which or callee by the game to be shown on screen.
Although not as 100% certain as OP is, I vaguely remember seeing the Mickey Mouse as well. I had a 1997 launch copy of the game and Nintendo was no stranger to change content and patching games for subsequent batches of cartridges. I believe it's legit.
That would be a reasonable avenue of investigation: nab rom dumps of the earliest release version in various regions and see if the graphic appears there. With Disney being Disney, I could see an initial release with the graphic, then Disney stepping in and going "no" and then all versions after having the graphic removed.
@@emilymarriott5927 I've seen these release version changes before. My launch Wii Sports doesn't match other people's copies. So I know it's possible to have multiple versions. My launch Smash Bros Melee also feels different for the same reason to the point where I couldn't play a later revision.
@emilymarriott5927 Ocarina of Time is a living proof of it. I also got the golden relase cartridge in which the mirror shield has the same symbol as the Turkey flag and temple of fire has some religious chanting. Both things were famously changed on later cartridges.
I mean it's been over 25 years at this point they might not remember doing any of the graffiti art much less the Mickey Mouse one they were told to remove
I'm guessing it was a build flag that needed to be added to REMOVE it after the big whiga at Nintendo told them they didn't want that art there for obvious reasons. So rather than go back to the developer tools to etch it outz they just essentially ran a new build that injected code in similar way GameShark to remove their art. Makes sense the Xbox live leak they were not aware or not bothering to add their flag each time they were building and it came back.
The fourth and most plausible theory is that OP had a build that was accidentally shipped (probably close to release) that still had the Mickey Mouse grafitti in it. Small changes like these are often last minute changes in game development. It's very possible not all the carts that were being produced were updated or checked over because of how inconsequential it was.
I'll corroborate that it's possible to have obtained a cart containing a not-for-retail build and not realized. I still own a copy of Jet Force Gemini with a "NOT FOR RESALE" label on it (which I didn't notice as a 14-year-old kid...). You can get as far as the second level, where one of the panels to free the last hostage isn't there, so it softlocks. I believe it was meant for demo only. Wouldn't be too surprised if this story were true.
@@himethisismethat was probably for store demos and manufactured for that purpose. The idea that an early build leaked into the retail manufacturing is much less likely
@@toddjenkins2561 Maybe. It doesn't seem super unrealistic that an early build might have wound up in circulation somehow, either from a round of QA or from a store demo copy shipped before the release date. I know the dev cycle wasn't nearly as tight in the 90s as it is now, but it was still possible that the build was altered in the weeks before release.
@@himethisisme agree, not impossible, just saying that an intended created cart is different and known. I know Ocarina had multiple versions released so maybe the first 100 in a certain factory had mickey still in or something. Def possible. Maybe it was a last second removal for copyright concerns
A thought, since this wasn't made clear in the video. Since we know of one location the graffiti exists in the xbla version, has anyone gone back to the different n64 rom versions that exist and check if that location still has an extra texture in that location? It's possible that when noticed, the developer could have simply removed the pointer for the correct texture, resulting in a transparent texture that still exists in the code. This could help confirm if the texture was ever in that location on any released rom.
I am reminded of the Tick Tock Clock "upwarp" phenomenon on SM64. The working theory is that a cosmic ray flipped a single bit of data which caused Mario to warp up the way he did. If this specific graffiti asset was toggled on and off using a binary flag, then could it be a working theory also that a cosmic ray caused Mickey Mouse to appear? Damn, I've just envisioned a future where speerunners spend a million hours playing a level omitting an objective, praying for the cosmos to literally align and flip the specific bit relating to said objective. "Calle W Jr gets a 0:52 completion on Dam SA after 20,000 hours invested".
The problem with this is that the art is actually stored as two separate textures, so a bit flip would have to occur twice in an incredibly specific way
@@dekufiremage7808 Ah, I see, so not a working idea then. Thanks for clearing that up. What about the notion that a limited supply of beta cartridges were released (possibly by mistake) which contained a few non-final level designs? Unlikely, but possible nonetheless, although these cartridges would probably have had unique "NUS" serial IDs
@dynagamerproductions8249 It's either that, simple mismemory from seeing that other red and black texture combined with the mickey mouse blog posts, or thirdly just an outright lie from someone wanting to craft a Mandela Effect story
The upwarp "cosmic ray" theory is one of most widely spreads bits of game misinformation. The runner had a faulty cartridge and console and even had trouble getting the game to work earlier in the stream. It would also take more than a single bit flip to cause an upwarp.
The version of GoldenEye 007 that was released was technically a ROM hack of the version submitted to Nintendo for final certification. While the game was undergoing said last-minute testing, an issue was discovered with the game's memory that caused glitches in the textures featured in the Frigate level. To combat this, programmer Mark Edmonds wrote a tool to extract the game's code and data from the ROM, adjusted the hex values in the game's memory to improve the performance in the level, recompressed it, and directly added it back into the ROM image without recompiling. This version was sent back to Nintendo and certified for release as the final version of the game... someone should have asked OP what country he was from. If from the UK or Japan, much higher likelihood of development chain of custody shenanigans. I am curious if there are ROM region differences with the textures.
OP here, Cart was purchased winter of 1997 around Christmas time on a local toys R-Us in south Texas, NTSC along with the n64. Nothing special about it except they were out of stock everywhere and got lucky at the last minute. The cart came in a normal box nothing out of the ordinary. I truly believe this is a Mandela effect, otherwise someone would of uploaded a rom version online already.
@@levioch I'm not entirely convinced. Watching this I thought, yeah, I remember that specific image somewhere slightly obscure, couldn't think where exactly and I thought it was much smaller. I'm well aware that memory is fallible and unreliable and sometimes conflated or invented. I'm half believing that I've seen the graphic in a more recent game or something, maybe it was snuck into the instruction manual, I certainly remember seeing it and thinking "why is that there, it's not related to this game in any way". We had the PAL version for Christmas 1997(?) (sadly I sold all my N64 stuff during Covid lockdown, I had a bit of a nostalgic revisit 10 years prior). I think we only had two games (other was DKR), we played Goldeneye to death as teenagers. My brother was annoyingly good and one of his friends was insanely good, I'm sure we were matching some of the speed records in N64 magazine (maybe that was mostly DKR? Not sure, the magazines went with the N64 ebay sale) and my brother's friend had beaten a few, I think he even recorded it and sent a VHS tape as proof. I played the game quite differently and investigated every crevice. Watching some of Goose's videos over this weekend has reminded me of things that I thought only I experienced like the ghost door in Archives... and the competition with my bro on fastest times, I 100% everything and we got very fast in 1997-98. I was taken aback when my bro walked through pipes on Frigate and Houdini'd out of the cell in Bunker, we were one-shotting the cameras and guard back then but we didn't think to use the pause speed trick even though I had noticed it gets quicker each time, pretty sure I accidentally took a successful pic from final hallway once and never looked back, so to speak. We put a lot of thinking, and experimentation practice into it while observing each other to learn what the game was doing. I digress, we played it a lot, we didn't do much else. Never used a Gameshark, was aware of them, not sure I ever even saw one though. I did download a ROM emulator and a couple of N64 games on my HTC phone around 2009-2010, didn't play much at all, just gave it a try and I don't think Goldeneye was one of the games and if it was I didn't get as far as that level.
Talking about rare phenomenon in the game reminded me of the time one of those weird things happened in one of my old N64 cartridges, albeigh not with GE but with Diddy Kong Racing. I clearly remember one day I went to play just a couple races in Track Mode and I saw all the races from the final world, the Space Stage (idk the correct name) were unlocked. It was a huge shock because I was never able to beat Wizpig and therefore never was able to unlock those tracks as you were supposed to. I played all those stages for hours, since that was something I had always wanted to unlock, and was very sad when I realized they would probably be gone the next time I had to turn off the console. And I was correct, once I turned it off they were never unlocked again. I tried replicating that glitch but it never occurred again.
I can totally envision this happening, it's like the "opposite" of when the game deletes your save files, but they come back after a reset. I wonder what causes it? It's so strange. Thank you for sharing!!
I strongly remember being at my neighbors house when I we were 7 years old and my friend Nick saying, "psh.. mickey mouse? that's gey!" and blasting it while I was asking him for the controller.
This story kind of reminds me of my weird broken version of Call of Duty Black ops 1 that had all the levels unlocked from the start when I got it, which allowed me to get the achievement from doing the campaign on Veteran by just doing the last mission before I even got some of the mandatory achievements for doing other story missions. Only thing I have to prove this is that my Xbox profile has the achievements unlocked in a non sensical order (With the dates they were earned) which doesn't make sense if I would have played the levels in the correct order and unlocked them normally.
Possible idea is that the area on the disc where it stores the values for the save where errored with some of the scratches?? Idk exactly, i know my copy of wwf SmackDown just bring it sometimes corrupts files when attempting to save sometimes @@zeroone8800
Great vid, would love to see more of these. I agree with your 1st theory, guy saw that image and simply got his wires crossed when seeing the Mickey image, causing his original memory to be Mickey. Doesn't explain the location difference though...
This video has opened my eyes. My brother, cousin and I would all play an N64 that my parents got us second hand. It came in the original box but you could tell someone had been in it. I thought nothing of it until this post. Some of the videos Goose has done has happened to me. The mickey mouse one happened to us. Among other things. We didn't have anything to mess with the code personally. Our cart could access the other bond characters in multiplayer (with a few inputs, ) giving us access to Connery etc. This N64 was given away a few years later. I bought another one myself a years after that. I have never been able to find or replicate any of the strange things since. Conclusion: it was either the cart and the console that was unique or altered in some way. I can only apologise that I don't have the original hardware I once had to check for sure.
I can't say I ever saw that while playing. Strangest thing I do remember is getting enemies to pull out DD44's by wounding them. Thanks for the lore as always bud.
If the graffiti did exist in a pre-release version of the game, it's possible that there was a leak and there were people out there who made "fake" Goldeneye cartridges using this old build of the game. I'm basing this on a story about people who did a similar thing in the 90s by buying cheaper Gameboy games, deleting the data, and uploading Pokemon Red to them for resale.
I was thinking the same thing, sometimes bootlegers will even find unused code in the game and re add it and try to use that as a selling point for the boot leg, like this version has features that the real one doesn't have.
17:50 That happened to me too, I'm also from the UK. The first time I emulated Goldeneye I was confused when there weren't four 007 files by default, I wrote it off as a difference between the NTSC and PAL versions
Me too! I'm Canadian though...but my uncle got it for me for Christmas and it was still in the original packaging. I had no idea this wasn't normal! I just assumed the developers gave us a file labeled "007" with all cheats unlocked as a bit of a joke - like 007 had played this game himself and beaten everything with ease
here is the most likely explanation... he had a bootleg cart that used a beta version of Goldeneye which is the same version used as the basis for the XBLA remaster. at a fleamarket I used to go to as a kid every Saturday, there was a guy who on occasion sold games ahead of launch, and they were almost always bootleg repros with beta versions on them. he sold Pokemon Gold/Silver weeks before eu launch and the versions he sold were super buggy alpha versions, where your PC boxes would completely glitch out any Pokémon you stored in your boxes. so you'd store a hoothoot lvl 10 and sometimes it turned into a level 99 Lugia n shit. so yeah, I know first hand that leaked beta/alpha repros of Nintendo published games existed in the early 2000s... so it is 100% plausible that the guy got a repro of a beta version. and the XBLA version having the texture enabled almost confirms it imo, since it shows at one point the texture was enabled by Rare.
That's interesting about the gold/silver bootlegs...I swear that I rented (yes, you could rent portable games at fucking Blockbuster back about 24 years ago) a version of Pokemon Silver that had a skateboard, as well, and you could clearly see the character scooting himself around, 1 foot on the skateboard. Later, I see that there was an unused skateboard back when the beta of Gold and Silver was leaked, and my brain immediately jumped to that strange memory I had. It may be unrelated, but yeah.
@@DonnyKirkMusic the one I and my friends had was easy to identify as a bootleg, the cart was black and pretty cheap plastic. it didn't have a skateboard tho, it was just a very buggy version of Gold and Silver 😭
You'd think the the pre-cheated-in-the-box cartridge would be an example of factory testing. Every (say) 10000 carts, they'd pluck a cart off the assembly line and see if it works. Such a task could possibly get boring for the guy who had to do it, and maybe they just happened to mess around with a gameshark that time. Once the cart is verified, it's put back in the line to be packaged and sold.
They'd never need to manually play a cart to test it, they'd just scan its contents to make sure it was byte-for-byte identical with the master copy. Such a verification step is standard with any EEPROM burn I've ever done, so I would be shocked if it weren't part of the game cartridge manufacturing process and applied to literally every single ROM chip they made.
Using things like a gameshark doesn't modify the ROM (read-only memory), so it would have to do with save data, which I find very unlikely that there's a flag to make that graffito appear.
He's talking about the files not mickey mouse pretty sure & I agree with him. Sure something can scan out fine but testing a game every hour or so as they print or even more frequently makes a heck of a lot of sense & they just forgot to delete the save.
I remember a Mickey Mouse graffiti on this level. Didnt know this was a thing. I still have the same cartridge game. Will definitely check this out next time i travel back to visit my parents.
I wonder if a cart-tilt glitch could cause the textures to appear? I know that, though rare, people have been able to get access to the Arwing ship in OoT with tilting the cartridge in the console while it's running.
Correct me if I am wrong, but in the days when game carts used Mask ROMS, wouldn't it have been really hard (prohibitively uneconomical) to have just a couple of the ROMS be different? Since you need a new mask to create a different version of the ROM, you would certainly make an entire production run of that ROM version from any given mask, not just a few one-offs.
My brother to this day still recalls the time he was playing frigate and Xenia and the helicopter pilot appeared,I remember him constantly replaying that level trying to get it to trigger again.
Is it possible that it does appear in the vanilla game, but theres something(s) you have to do to get it to appear and no one noticed? Ive seen a similar thing in fnaf 2 where a certain puppet render gets labeled as "unused" but in reality it just flashes by so fast that people dont see it
It doesn't seem too far fetched that somehow a few copies of an early version of the game slipped through the cracks. I wonder if there were any other inconsistencies on that game cartridge.
It's funny, the instant I saw the image on your video I knew exactly which crate to at. I used an Action Replay Pro back then. I'm the guy who originally made the code to unlock all the multi-player characters to spare you the long push button code sequence. I'm gonna have to get the N64 out of storage and look into this.
So was OP really a dev for GE64 and fabricated the childhood memory to get players to find an unused asset that OP knew was in the game? I'm from the Berenstein universe.
This does seem to be odd cuz I think I remember the Mickey mouse in the original N64. I was big into graffiti when I was a teenager so I would look around in games at the graffiti. I haven't played the N64 version in over a decade but I can replay it and see if it's in there I still have my original cartridge.
The fact that the textures are actually in the game files makes me wonder if this some kind of undiscovered easter egg, where a specific set of conditions would cause it to load into the level.
I believe it was a glitch, I had a friend that had it. When I later bought the game from him he deleted all his saves and I never saw it on my play throughs.
@@tsiefhtes I beleive it. Stranger things have happened. People are still discovering new things from 20+ year old games to this day. The textures are there, so its hard to just pass this off as a mandella effect.
6:15 I think one could perceive this very much for a mickey mouse, especially if you look for it. His ears are to the right, the face s white looking to the left. Looks like he's yawning or sticking his fist into his mouth. It's just way too close to the searched graphic to not confuse them them if you've seen it before.
When I read the title of this video I thought, "oh yeah, I forgot there was a Mickey mouse in the Depot level" and I was fairly sure I had seen it. I think what actually happened is I read somewhere that there was a Mickey mouse graffiti and I saw the image of it online. Then I went and looked through the level but never found it. I didn't know it wasn't really there, pretty sure I just got bored of looking. It's easy to invent memories and then go on believing that they're real.
Two conclusions of mine: 1. I'd say the developers put the true Fantasia Mickey graffiti in the game but it got removed in development due to copyright issues, so they replaced it with the 6:21 lookalike graffiti as a joke (it looks like Mickey sticking his tongue out). The original graffiti lived on in code, which is why it ended up in the XBLA version. 2. OP saw it through a gameshark in the 90s. I know he said he didn't own a gameshark, but possibly he did and has forgotten, or his brother got the gameshark and OP didn't know.
the most wild one of these ive ever seen: i was showing my friend the game "Iron brigade" i left him shopping in the game store, and went to the bathroom. when i came back he had unknowingly accessed a weapon that simply didnt exist in the game "The water cooled machinegun" high end weapons in that game do like 300 damage per shot. this full auto did 9999. i feel like it was a dev tool, but i was never able to get back to it
I'm gonna believe whichever is the most fun to believe, if I'm honest. Life is too short to pick the most likely, realistic scenario for why someone remembers a texture in a video being there when it isn't. More fun to believe some unfinished build got out with Mickey Mouse intact and that someone at the factory 100%ed Goldeneye and then put it back in its box to be sold as brand new. Really interesting video as always!
If the XBLA had Mickey it implies that he was in it late into development as they would have likely been working with as close to release code as they could get. So if a pre-release build got stolen and pirated it might have had Mickey in it. Back in the day piracy was harder to do but it did happen and the pirated versions were often sold as normal versions by smaller retail stores.
It's possible that something that the OP did during his playthrough of the level somehow caused the image to be loaded. Perhaps it was assumed by the devs to be completely disabled but there may have been one or two ways the image could still be enabled, such as loading the level textures and geometry from a certain place on the map that might have been unusual for most players.
6:17 I'm assuming OP saw that and agreed it's not what he's remembering? Cuz if I saw that anf made a mental note of it in elementary school and then just thought about it as an adult I'd def call it and remember it as mickey.
For years, I searched for a room in Jurassic Park for SNES... it had 2 generators in it. I had seen it many times when I was a kid but could only ever find the room with a single generator as an adult. It drove me nuts for years and I played several physical and emulated copies trying to find it. I began questioning my sanity/memory but then one day I found it: A screenshot on the back of the box, presumably from an earlier build before release. It isn't in the game but I had seen that box so many times, it had burned into my mind as a kid.
When it comes to the Mandela effect in gaming I’m on both sides of the aisle. Yes I’m sure what it really is, is our mind remembering an event a bit differently and or confusing it entirely with a similar situation but at the same time… what I personally experienced was insane and you can’t tell me otherwise. I remember playing a 100% copy of SM64 when I was a kid and just running around sandbox style goofing with all the levels and power ups but one particular thing I always remembered doing was shooting myself into one of the castle windows outside the castle using the canon you get once 100% the game. I would always go to this room and treat it as a vantage point just to look around at the castle grounds and eventually just jump out into the water. The room was dark, not big at all probably only a few feet in width and length and not significant. Fast forward years later after 100% the game I went to shoot myself at the window to relive those old moments one last time only to smash my head against every last damn window with no results. That had me thinking hard like I know what I did back then and I vividly remember doing this all for it to have never existed. UA-camd it googled it searched redit, nothing, nothing at all and that’s why as crazy as I think that whole Mandela effect is I also can’t completely dismiss it.
Great theories! I imagine it was released intentionally as an Easter egg. You would be the coolest kid on the block with that cartridge. I am eagerly awaiting the next video!!
Have you considered the Not for Resale version of Goldeneye? Perhaps that cartridge has the same (or similar) build as the XBOX leak and OP unknowingly had it. EDIT: I've read that there are no differences between most NFRs and their released versions, but it would be super interesting to have an expert like yourself get an ISO of the NFR and compare it to V1.0.0 of the game.
It could just be a hoax. By 2022 (when op's post went up) all the things mentioned by op were publicly available like the leaked 360 beta in 2021. If the post was before the texture discovery or 360 beta leak it would be more convincing.
Are we certain there wasn't an early (but publicly released) version that had it? Maybe one of the devs snuck it in, but it was caught soon after launch and taken out? Just a thought/theory.
Who knows, maybe Rare had to put an early build on the first batch of carts bc the game wasnt 100% totally done (all bugs worked out and such) by launch date. Or maybe some lawyer got wind of such cross contamination and the code of all subsequent cartridges produced (the majority of production) didnt have mickey
So I think I have a simple explanation. OP saw this 6:20 for years, and between playing the game back in the days and posting on reddit about mickey Mouse - he also stumbled upon the article on Cutting Room Floor and simply mixed 6:20 with the image on CRF page. I mean, they ARE similar. Goose says the image at 6:20 does not resemble Mickey Mouse in the slightest, but I disagree. It looks very much like that MM image only flipped horizontally and without the hat, and some details about the hands position are different, but... it DOES look like some cartoon character, and is mostly white and red. I know I would sure mix up these two images in my mind and convince myself that I saw that Mickey Mouse graffiti from CRF page in my game back in '97. EDIT: Oh. So yeah, basically, what Goose says at 13:50 :D EDIT 2: This might be my second favorite video on the channel from now on. The first will always be about the Perfect Dark ghost. Was it ever seen after the video went live? Is the Chicago Ghost Case solved?
It’s probably a case of misremembering. I think OP saw the graffiti that looks like Mickey (because let’s be honest, they look very similar) and then discovered the actual Mickey graffiti when doing a deep dive look at the game’s files. Interesting to find out about that Mickey shit, never knew it was not only in the game’s files but on the XBLA port too
it is Mickey! You say "it looks similar", okay... Point to the texture that isn't Mickey and looks like it! The one shown at 6:15 in the video is Mickey, because there is simply no other texture to achieve what you've seen on screen.
Just past 17:10, you mention youre not sure if the code would still be active after the gameshark was removed, like the n64 cart could be permanently changed by the gs or not. I had a gameshark for both n64 and gameboy color back in the day, me and my brother would mess around with both all the time. Never had it happen on the n64 that i remember, but for sure remember that our copy of pokemon yellow on gameboy got completely corrupted from using the gameshark. The gameshark permanently altered the gameboy cart so that pikachu who follows u everywhere in that game, would only loosely follow u, and randomly would dash across across the screen very fast lol. So id totally believe a gameshark could f with the memory on an n64 cart permanently, i saw it happen on a gameboy cart, why not. Great video as usual thanks
Thanks for sharing! I agree that a Gameshark could have permanent effects, but I wasn't sure. Always cool to hear additional stories supporting this thesis.
18:20 not impossible. My original sealed copy of FF3 in the 90's had a save file already. Bought it on release day from Kmart. Still shrink wrapped and everything. I guess they could have had one of the shrink wrappers, but I always assumed it was someone at the warehouse playing ahead of release.
Could be like the Mario 64 upboost that happened during that one speedrun. Neutrinos from the sun flipped the coding in real time to make the graffiti visible.
Yeah neutrinos pass through the game's memory every second of every day and the enormously-vast majority do absolutely nothing. Though from what I understand, this explanation, while technically possible, is more often used as a sort of short-hand for "the cartridge got tilted by accident and they didn't notice". But there's a problem. If OP says that he encountered the texture many times and not just once, glitches (and I mean the original meaning of the word: a short-lived, usually externally-caused random error) would be extra-ordinarily unlikely as an explanation. It's plausible for a jerked crooked cartridge to create noise on the data lines and corrupt memory such that the texture would appear. It's not nearly as plausible for the same chip glitching to bug the game in such a way that it *always* displays the texture even after power-cycling, since the required changes to memory would be a lot more complex.
@@kargaroc386 So of course I'm just speculating but I think of it this way: the cartridge got tilted/glitched/neutrino-whatever once and it happened to be that OP noticed the Mickey Mouse graffiti that day. He took a moment to sort of marvel at it, let's say, and then moved along. Now, maybe it never appeared again but he just always assumed it was there? And now, years later, his memory of the one time he saw it FEELS like he saw it many times. I hope I'm making sense.
No, I don't remember a Mickey Mouse in my game. However, it reminds me of a bit flip. You know that strange upward teleport in SM64 that some streamer experienced during a friendly race with a friend? That kind of bit flip. Maybe, OP got a bit flip to save in his save file? Hmm...
So one thing I remember about the gameshark is that there were codes to unlock the hidden bond picture assets on the character screen and after the gameshark was removed they remained. Maybe this is a save flag?
As far as why it’s there in the XBLA version, when they chose a code branch as foundation for the project, they wouldn’t have chosen the retail release with all debug code removed as well as any inside dev jokes cleaned up for release like Mickey Mouse. You touched on this in the video, but this confirms that the Mickey Mouse would’ve been there until just before they prepped for retail release. As for OPs memory, it’s either him misremembering that other graffiti you pointed out in the video, GameShark, or he saw the Mickey Mouse more recently but his memory is telling him he saw it long ago. I’ve experienced something like that before. Another idea is you’ve checked all the retail carts you could, but what about when you start activating cheats in the cheat menu if one or a combo of them triggers the Mickey Mouse either as a side effect bug or intentionally. It would be a lot of work to check that but another possibility.
Theory 3 is definitely more believable than a change in space-time making Mickey disappear from Goldeneye, but knowing how the brain can get memories so very wrong I still think Theory 1 is probably the most likely. The brain is very open to suggestion especially when trying to call up an old memory, it will fill in any gaps the best it can
The Mandela Effect talk is so funny to me. The explanation could be as simple as "oh, you misremembered", but instead people will say "That can't be true. It's more likely that our universe merged with another similar universe, and the only remnants of this is completely banal details like Pikachu's tail changing".
What seems most obvious to me, is that as rare as it is, a realworld enviromental phenomenal of some kind flipped a single bit in the the n64 runtime memory at the right point and caused the game to load the next or previous texture, and that on the same night, OP and his bro were like "damn look at this" enough to solidify it in their memory. More likely than those other theories imo.
Another Rare-developed game series, Banjo Kazooie, had the idea of using cartridge swapping to keep data in the console's memory and apply to a different game cart. This is, as I understand it, possible because if you swap cartridges without turning the console off, some data remains in the console's memory and can interfere with the new cartridge inserted afterward. It is a possibility that OP did this at some point, with the right/wrong data in console memory causing the mickey texture to be loaded instead of another. Hotswapping like this is used in speedruns of Paper Mario on the N64 where an Ocarina of Time cart is used to execute arbitrary code so we know the effects can be both powerful and weird. OP doing this on a smaller scale by accident is more than possible.
I had the Mickey too, I remember showing my neighbour who didn’t have it on his. I got it in 97/98 maybe? The cartridge came with a full complete file and all cheats/levels unlocked on the first save without me having played. I’m guessing it was a certain build. I wish I still had the cartridge, it was PAL if that matters.
For the sealed cart that had a save file, one thing that it could be is a forgotten wipe of a cart chosen for testing in the factory. I think there's been a few cases of similar things to that happening where it's essentially a pick a few random carts from a run or portion of a run (something like 1/1000 or similar) that they plug into a test thing and try out a few things. Probably, artificially, loading a save to let them try a few things at random on each one. They're normally wiped and put back in the packing line for it if there isn't anything wrong. If things go wrong, that run gets scrapped and remade while they figure out what went wrong with it. Having someone get lazy and just skip the wiping stage is possible there
Something that could be a possibility is OP got a version of the game that had the texture enabled. Kinda like how there's different region versions and sometimes there's games out there with different version numbers
Odd manufacturing mistakes do sometimes happen. I've not really heard of it effecting date on cartridges, but who knows? I once bought a commercial VHS tape (one of the Neon Genesis: Evangelion series) that had no 'tape' inside, just the clear lead going from one reel straight to another.
That’s like when I had a gold bar in school and it’s supposed to be caramac gold surrounded by biscuit but this one day it turned out to be solid golden chocolate. I was elated.
My theory would be dirty or not fully inserted cartridge, if the OP did actually see Mickey Mouse. That or the texture you showed off, which I would describe as a "glitched" version of the Mickey Mouse texture without the hat looked enough like Mickey on an old, flickery CRT. Fascinating video though!
I have never played Goldeneye, but could it be possible that the graffiti appears by a (currently) unknown easter egg? There was a similar thing with "Mario's Early Years: Fun With Numbers" on the SNES where an easter egg went undiscovered for over 25 years, to the point people thought it was some weird cut content, which involved clicking a very specific pixel, to activate the easter egg of the developers' heads singing. Don't think it's entirely out of the question OP did something that triggered it that he has no idea of. Could also be a slightly earlier cartridge release too, especially if it OP got theirs on release.
I remember buying used games in the days of cartridge memory could be interesting to say the least. My goldeneye had every cheat unlocked, and my pokemon was broken because the previous owner captured missingno, causing all sorts of crazy glitches. Perhaps its possible that the memory was modified with a game shark?
One of my biggest regrets for a long time was getting rid of my lime gbc. Pretty sure you could fix that cart but might have needed a gameshark to do so.
My favorite self insert was naming a smg gun the KLOBB, for Kenneth lobb a Nintendo employee. I forgot what he did. Too lazy to google it but I’m pretty sure he was a producer.
Theory 4: it was a review copy of a close to finish build that he received later as a kid. Remember: if you were "big enough", you would sometimes receive "review copies" of the game sometimes a month in advance. These copies sometimes had old versions on them that worked well enough and were close to the finished product. This was not uncommon. Heck, when I was 'working' for a gaming website a few months, I was allowed to review Ghost Busters on the Xbox 360. However, this was the NTSC version. I live in Europe, we were only able to play PAL unless the 360 was modified or... or the game build allowed you to play it. Which was the case for me. That version was different than the ones sold in stores (it also had a big fat "review copy" label on the cover art). I reviewed a dozen or so games, but most of them were basically the release versions without any differences. Ghostbusters was the only odd one out in my memory.
I have another interesting story, 20+ years ago my friend told me once he had found a weird gun he had never seen before in Archives, ive spent hours trying to find it never found it
Memories are so weird. I downloaded steam again for the first time in probably 8 years. There was a game I owned that I had logged over 60 hours playing and I have no memories whatsoever of playing it.
He downloaded the build dude. The statistical likelihood of it being that close is insane. He obviously actually played it and then mixed up his memories. I'm shocked anyone took him seriously after that reveal.
Mickey's texture is not loaded into Depot, and it's in 2 parts, so not really possible a random bit hit would cause this.
Also, if you do XBLA, and set to the "retro graphics", what appears in that spot? I'm not clear exactly what spot you're at there to compare to original, but would be interesting to compare to retail. My guess is they just did things like that as a work in progress sort of fun, but never intended it to stay.
I think the story got mixed up with the "Rare logo" appearing on Depot, versus an unused depot decal texture that was listed on TCRF. And there is that random decal showing up in Aztec that is not well known, hidden up high that Ben Colclough noticed recently (probably others have seen just not well known).
In this video, I was toggling the retro graphics and the Mickey graffito is there. That being said, you are right that it's in two parts, making a bit flip unlikely.
@@GamerFolkloreah Ok that's good. I can't tell where it is. But in original N64 version what graffiti is there?
@@subdrag I just checked, and there is actually *no* graffiti in the spot where Mickey appears in the XBLA version! It's a blue crate near the starting area.
Hey goose, in regards to the Brit having a save file in a sealed game, he is. It alone anymore. It happened to me with goldeneye as well as a few other games over the years. I'd have to rack my brain to remember them all but I do te!ember it being that way for me on goldeneye for N64 and ridge racer for PS1. Not super common but I don't understand why the Brit has ent heard similar stories. I would bet money that it has happened to all of us at some point. Just probably didn't notice... Also, I'm chris. Melissa's husband. Been watching you for a couple years now. Good stuff bud. Keep on keepin on. Cheers from alabama.
@@GamerFolklore yeah could be that the OP got hold of a preview reviewers copy or something, but I would imagine if such a thing existed someone would've found it by now but I guess its possible that if the build was very very near the final build they mightve stuck it in a mock up final build case to allow the publisher to get their own photos of the cart, so its possible that copy is currently sitting in someone collection right now, just sitting in the bottom of that box of loose carts you picked up unceremoniously holding Mickey hostage
one added note that makes this theory more plausible is that the XBLA build also had the Mickey texture present, which would imply they had Mickey in the game right up until the end of development and it was one of the last things to be cut, probably with the advice of their lawyers or Nintendo's lawyers, and when the XBLA copy was being developed they had lost that last minute pre-gold patch from the archived source code and ended up using the 0.99 build from before Mickey was cut
the only issue I have is that the OP posted his story after the XBLA leak, so its possible he is just making up the story because it would be plausible, if he had posted this story before the XBLA leak I would've 100% said this was the most likely scenario but after, it becomes just as plausible he made it up as it would be believable
I've had weird stuff like this happen to me in games in the past.
The N64 is pretty infamous for having weird things happen if the cartridge isn't inserted properly, and since it's still in the games code, something could have triggered its reappearance, especially if it was a launch console/copy of the game etc.
It could also be a certain batch of copies that went out with the code active, either by mistake or faulty copying.
I had something weird happen in Bully: Scholarship Edition on the Xbox where one of the nerds that I was making Jimmy pick on in the dormitory just straight up “female doggo” slapped Jimmy in the midst of the fight and I actually stopped playing in complete shock before laughing my behind off since I had never seen the nerd in question (I think it was Algie or the one nerd who plays tabletop RPGs in the library) do that before or since. Knowing that game’s hectic development, I’m not surprised I discovered something purely by chance that I haven’t seen anybody discussing online so far.
Hello you
Love your content Larry!
This is along the lines of what I was thinking. Either a super early run of the Goldeneye and/or the OP unknowingly triggered a glitch which caused the graffiti to appear.
Interestingly, one of the least known pieces of graffiti in Depot is there in plain sight: the Rare logo spray painted on a wall near the train at the end. People run right by it thousands of times while speedrunning and never notice it.
I literally only discovered this the other night while getting some footage for this video. And I was stunned!!
As soon as you mentioned the Mickey Mouse graffiti, my first reaction was "yeah, of course, it's on the Depot level." To get to the end of the video and discover it's not in the N64 game? I'm truly spooked. What can I say, I'm with OP here.
Do you still have your game cartridge ?
I did the same thing.
I have an n64 and og goldeneye cart (though not the same one I had back in the late 90's), almost want to dig them out and see
@@AngryChineseWoman Alas, I sold my PAL game collection long ago. The mystery continues..
@@lh8vd69same
@@lh8vd69
6:14 Like other commenters, my first reaction was also that there's definitely Mickey Mouse graffiti on those shipping containers. And then when you showed this clip, and I'm pretty sure that's what I was registering and remembering as Mickey Mouse. To me that's easy to call Mickey Mouse at a glance. That looks like Fantasia Mickey Mouse without the hat and maybe with the ears in a slightly off position. And I'd be hard pressed to say that's definitely not Mickey Mouse.
I don't think it looks much like Mickey Mouse when you can thoroughly inspect it in high resolution, but glancing at it on an old CRT would very easily make it come across as Mickey.
@@dekufiremage7808 I was gonna say, through a typical CRT TV that could be easily mistaken as the same texture.
Yeah it totally does look like Micky, I’d bet my house on that being what the OP saw…but if it’s NOT Micky, then that’d be one hell of a coincidence that an unused Micky graphic actually was in the game also lol… I personally think the used graphic that looks like Micky, was an edit of the actual unused Micky graphic, which allowed them to use it.
This is the correct answer
Looks like Mickey to me, what is it if it's not mickey. What's the actual graphic?
Every copy of Goldeneye is Personalized.
But in all seriousness, I think either OP misremembered the other red and white graffiti, then seeing the unused Mickey Mouse graphic online, his brain auto-filled it onto the other texture in his mind, or possibly it got brought back by someone using a gameshark on the cartridge without OP knowing.
Yes, when I saw that other red and white graffiti, I said "that's it. That's what OP is remembering"
You combine that with the blog and boom
@@uchusky08 he did say that he remembered specifically that it was weird having the mickey mouse franchise in a 007 game but this could easily be a memory to fill in the gaps as it had been years since he had read the blog post and our memory isn't the most reliable
it actually looks so similar to a mickey mouse@@uchusky08
The cartridges are also different for locations (US, EU, AU & JP).
right but its interesting in his original post he specifically mentioned it was in the "back" of depot, and that other red and white graffiti is in plain sight. and then in the xbla leak, the mickey texture is on the back of a container.
I had a similar to Mandela effect type situation happen to me a few year ago.
Basically when i was a kid around 1987 or so i played Rush'N Attack in the arcades. I fell in love with the game and one day a friend of mine told me he had Rush'N Attack on the NES. I didn't belive him, but sure enough he had it and lent it to me and naturally loved it as well.
Then one day another friend of mine lent me a Nintendo strategy guide. While going through it, i found there was a small section for Rush'N Attack which indicated a secret underground passageway on a particular level, after blowing up some mines, it even had some screenshots.
I was amazed as i never saw that in the game and immediately fired up my NES and went in search of that passageway.
After reaching the location in the screenshot, to my dissapointment i was unable to reveal the ladder to the secret underground level. Didn't know if i was doing something wrong or if it was at a different place. I kept going back to the game again and again to see if i could somehow have missed something? but it was pretty straightforward. Reach a specific set of mines on what appeared to be level 4, blow them up and the ladder should be there.
So after a while i returned the strategy guide to my friend. And while i did eventually purchase my own copy of Rush'N Attack, i was never able to find those levels.
As time went by I gave up on looking for those levels and then forgot about it.
Then around the early 2000's when information about Nintendo games and strategy's were starting to show up on the internet. I remembered the Rush'N Attack secret and thought maybe someone has the definitive tip on this and maybe it was done differently than what the guide indicated? So i started searching and searching but couldn't find anything referencing that particular secret.
I even started asking my friends about it but nobody recalled ever seeing that secret ladder and the underground passageway.
I wanted to get my hands on that guide again but by then I couldn't remember the name of it that eventually started thinking maybe i imagined it all?
After searching the internet for weeks i came up on a particular strategy guide that seemed very very familiar. It was called "The Official Nintendo Players guide". I thought to myself this was it! This was the guide that will prove if i was right or if my imagination played tricks on me!
So i immediately went throught the process of purchasing and couldn't wait to verify if this was in fact that book.
A few days went by and my package arrived, i carefully went through it as to not miss anything, but i was becoming more and more familair with each page i turned confirming this was the correct guide.
I finally reached the Rush'N Attack section... and sure enough the infamous secret passageway was there!
I read thoroughly, but again there was no special method just straightforward. Blow the mines up on what seemed level 4 in a specific area and reveal the ladder.
By that time there were emulators so i started searching for different versions online with no luck.
I even started purchasing different revisions of it for the NES, i believe there are 3 one was A the other B and one third one i can't remember but i do have them all. But have never been able to find any differences with them.
Researching for days i was finally able to solve the mystery!
After emulating different games for the famicom. I was not able to find Rush N attack for it BUT i did notice that the famicom disk system version of games had differences in them, so after searching a bit more i came upon Green Beret which was the actual name of the game in Japan.
Downloaded, played, reached the section, blew up the mines and sure enough the ladder and the underground passegaway was there!
After many many years i was able to get to the bottom of this! i wasn't crazy after all!
Turns out the guide never mentions this particular detail and when it was made they obviously played the famicom disk version of the game and probably did not know that for the NES that particular area would be removed. Don't know the exact reason but i assume to save memory.
Anyways if you want to verify for yourself, below is the link to the guide and it is on page 93.
archive.org/details/The_Official_Nintendo_Players_Guide_1987/mode/2up
As for the N64 Mickey sprite in this video i would say, what if OP had a very particular version of that game? as one key detail is that he remembers it vividly. Had he used GS or something else he would probably remember that as well. So i would say maybe attempt to track that cartridge down even if he sold it and then verify as it could be a one of a kind cartridge.
Holy smokes! That was a great story. I'm glad you managed to "solve" the mystery in the end. Your hypothesis sounds right, they played the JP version and didn't know the secret wouldn't cross over. Very intriguing, thank you for sharing!!
@@GamerFolklore Thank you! I did have a friend have a genuine Mandela Effect with the game Simon's Quest which in itself was very cryptic and mysterious but that's probably a story for another day. 😄
This story was better than the video. Thanks
@@viewer54322 Thank you!
i'm 35. I speak about "Russian Attack" at least once a year always asking if anybody has played it before and nobody ever has. I can't believe there is somebody like you on this earth that put this much time into this and I can't find somebody who has even played it lmao.
Dude, this is fucking great!
It's important to note that N64 cartridges (games) have different software revisions. For example, bugs were fixed, and newer cartridges replaced old ones in stores. If you download ROMs off the internet, or even just look at the copyright screens (during the intros) for Goldeneye, or Perfect Dark, you'll see version numbers. So it could be that they removed this in a later revision to avoid legal issues from Disney.
Obviously, we didn't know about this back in the day because patches on consoles were not a thing.
Edit: I feel this could be true because the code was commented out, as you said. It's common to comment out code rather than deleting it, because you never know what sort of domino effect you can have on the rest of the game. RARE even slipped a ZXSpectrum emulator WITH GAMES [that they developed] into Goldeneye, which can be re-enabled with a ROM edit. They just commented it out, AFAIK.
Sure, games had revisions but the thing is, I don't think GE ever had revisions that changed a whole lot. From the top of my head, in the JP version, they added a couple of BAs and improved auto-aim. Otherwise, like Goose explored in older videos, the game is very solid code-wise. In fact, there are only 2 OoB known (pulling that from memory): in Silo and Train. Neither help speedrunning and hard to execute.
the biggest change ge had was in the pal version they removed spectrum emu and most of the rest of the leftover debug code, about 4% of the codebase.
@@kholdfuzion4538 Even then, this revision only removed the code that didn't do anything and something the user didn't even see. So, my point still stand in a way.
Peope should look at the other versions and see
I don’t know if this means much but I got my copy on release day and I played the shit out of it. I specifically went looking for Easter eggs, never saw the mouse.
It may lend credence to one or more theories to know whether the graffiti appears on the same set of crates OP remembers. If yes, he may have legitimately seen the texture in game, and if no, it points to mismatched memory
This is the crucial inquiry and I suspect it is not on the same set of crates or it would have been mentioned.
the crate location was mentioned early on 2:25...how you guys get mandela'd in less than 20 minutes?
@@freedustin That's what I was referring to. What I meant was whether the texture, when re-enabled, showed up on the same set of crates that was mentioned here. I haven't played the game so I don't have any knowledge of the map to know for sure.
@@TheHappyWhale there is no such thing a re-enable a texture. they are placed individually and manually onto objects...once that's deleted there is no way to know which crate it was intended for.
But he did say, it was a specific group in the back. But that ROM hack proves there is no way to just restore it to its pre-release intentions.
If it was legitimately seen in game and it was an issue with the cartridge then it would more likely have been a replacement of another texture in a different spot. An accidental bit flip could reference the wrong texture from the game data since that texture is still there, their game just loads the wrong one... or you're right and the reference is still there in the same spot in the n64 release but the developers just reference something like texture 9 which is transparent to hide it while texture 8 was the mickey mouse one.
Could be similar to old the wrong warp/item swap/fairy jar technique. Some parameter is fulfilled which shunts the texture memory along a few digits, causing the game to display the mouse. It makes sense as those codes would be stored next to/near each other in the RAM. Sounds plausible.
Another point to the Mismemory theory: the Philadelphia track in Mickey's Speedway USA has some similarities to Depot and could reinforce the association between Mickey and Depot in OP's mind. Actually that game's tracks may contain many assets from previous Rareware games.
I remember it & never played mickeys speedway
OP here, never played that game even in emulation, much less owned it. No confusion there.
@@leviochFake N64 fan confirmed
Most likely just a mismemory thing. Memory is really unreliable even if we dont think so from a 1st person perspective.
@@audreyazwell by the very nature of a Mandela effect, you're wrong, but the social contagion of this memory is conflating with your memories of childhood and causing what is effectively a mass hysteria event where a common misremembrance is occurring due to subconscious peer pressure. For the same reason that feinting plagues exist for no medical reason. One girl feints on a hot day in a crowd and causes a stir, the next thing you know kids are dropping left, right and centre in feinting spells for the next few days, weeks and months. Or you could look to this one hysteria event from Spain where there was some religious mumbo jumbo about the sun and Christianity and a crowd of like 10,000 people came out to witness some sign, obviously nothing actually happened because no one outside of the event saw anything, nor did the sun change its course around the sun, nor we around it, but a huge portion of the crowd would testify that they absolutely 100% saw the sun rocket towards them like a fireball and then morph into some holy sign and return to normal. Collective shared false memory, passed through the crowd by the power of suggestion.
If the textures *are* on the original cartridge, but there is some flag to not render them, it is very much possible that OPs cartridge was somehow "damaged", where the flag was set incorrectly - meaning the asset was rendered when it wasn't meant to.
Yes, it is very unlikely, but also not impossibly so.
I wonder if it's just a single bit flag to tells them not to display. If so, it's very likely that bit could be flipped by a cosmic ray.
@@PlutonianPenguin Some other comment mentioned that the texture isn't even loaded in that level and that it consists of two parts. That means that a single bit flip (or even a dozen) is not enough.
@@gragogflying-anvil3605 Unless it's a flag that handles both parts there
I want to share something similar that could possibly explain it
When I was a kid I owned Final Fantasy 3 American Version (AKA FF6 in Japan)
One day I load up the game and the screen went white, I quickly shut it off removed the cart, put it back and it started up fine.
However when I checked my characters I now had 999 Excaliburs, Gem Boxes, Economizers, Offerings, and various other things like graphics got warped or changed.
No, this wasn't the sketch bug, because it happened when I booted the game, nor was a game genie ever used
As a young kid I remember calling the Nintendo hotline asking if my game had a "virus"
The point I'm getting at here is both games have the ability to save and write data, by some miracle some random save code changed how my cart worked, could the same happen here even without the use of a game genie
That is a very interesting story! Thanks for sharing. I wonder how many of these "one off" or near-one-off stories many of us experienced back in the day. Especially knowing now how computer memory can be altered by external factors. Maybe there are thousands of similar stories, and we'll never truly be able to get to the bottom of them all!
Oh yeah, that's an option I hadn't considered... cartridge games were very prone to data and code corruption if the cartridge was removed or "tilted" while playing.
Some people deliberately did that to achieve some specific effect, but most of the time the results of those kind of scenarios always seemed very wild and unpredictable.
Maybe something like that happened? Either that or it was simply a damaged cartridge, but in both cases I suppose the same principle of unpredictable alteration applies.
also to add, that save file was stupidly overpowered
every warrior type could attack 8 times Offering+ genji glove
every spell caster could double cast Ultima each turn for 2 mana
and Shadow was throwing Excaliburs at trash tier enemies just for fun
I had a similar event once whilst playing Theme Park on the mega drive. I remember the cart getting knocked whilst playing and the game crashed so I hit reset. When the game loaded up again I basically had infinite money. I saved the game and rebooted and yup, infinite money. I tried to replicate it on a different cart but couldn't so who knows 🤷♂️
Textures and items are two separate kind of data so yes its possible to get a glitch who give us stuff, but it can't activate unused textures. What happened to your textures is way more simple: like you said they been changed and warped, in other words they have been altered in the data. Textures are like everything else in a game: corruptable, thats what your glitch did. It corrupted your cartridge data. But its absolutly not possible for any data corruption to had an unused texture, as it only alter the textures themself and not change which or callee by the game to be shown on screen.
Although not as 100% certain as OP is, I vaguely remember seeing the Mickey Mouse as well. I had a 1997 launch copy of the game and Nintendo was no stranger to change content and patching games for subsequent batches of cartridges. I believe it's legit.
That would be a reasonable avenue of investigation: nab rom dumps of the earliest release version in various regions and see if the graphic appears there. With Disney being Disney, I could see an initial release with the graphic, then Disney stepping in and going "no" and then all versions after having the graphic removed.
@@emilymarriott5927 I've seen these release version changes before. My launch Wii Sports doesn't match other people's copies. So I know it's possible to have multiple versions. My launch Smash Bros Melee also feels different for the same reason to the point where I couldn't play a later revision.
I feel like I remember it too, like a shitty bug eyed version of mickey as a rat
@emilymarriott5927 Ocarina of Time is a living proof of it. I also got the golden relase cartridge in which the mirror shield has the same symbol as the Turkey flag and temple of fire has some religious chanting. Both things were famously changed on later cartridges.
It would be interesting to have Goldeneye developers' take on this
Yup, honestly they are the ones that can answer this easily
I mean it's been over 25 years at this point they might not remember doing any of the graffiti art much less the Mickey Mouse one they were told to remove
I'm guessing it was a build flag that needed to be added to REMOVE it after the big whiga at Nintendo told them they didn't want that art there for obvious reasons.
So rather than go back to the developer tools to etch it outz they just essentially ran a new build that injected code in similar way GameShark to remove their art.
Makes sense the Xbox live leak they were not aware or not bothering to add their flag each time they were building and it came back.
The fourth and most plausible theory is that OP had a build that was accidentally shipped (probably close to release) that still had the Mickey Mouse grafitti in it. Small changes like these are often last minute changes in game development. It's very possible not all the carts that were being produced were updated or checked over because of how inconsequential it was.
I'll corroborate that it's possible to have obtained a cart containing a not-for-retail build and not realized. I still own a copy of Jet Force Gemini with a "NOT FOR RESALE" label on it (which I didn't notice as a 14-year-old kid...). You can get as far as the second level, where one of the panels to free the last hostage isn't there, so it softlocks. I believe it was meant for demo only. Wouldn't be too surprised if this story were true.
@@himethisismethat was probably for store demos and manufactured for that purpose. The idea that an early build leaked into the retail manufacturing is much less likely
@@toddjenkins2561 Maybe. It doesn't seem super unrealistic that an early build might have wound up in circulation somehow, either from a round of QA or from a store demo copy shipped before the release date. I know the dev cycle wasn't nearly as tight in the 90s as it is now, but it was still possible that the build was altered in the weeks before release.
@@himethisisme agree, not impossible, just saying that an intended created cart is different and known. I know Ocarina had multiple versions released so maybe the first 100 in a certain factory had mickey still in or something. Def possible. Maybe it was a last second removal for copyright concerns
@@toddjenkins2561 I completely agree. Definitely plausible but not confirmed by any stretch.
I thought this was going to be some clickbait nonsense, but there's a lot of substance to this. I subbed, keep up the good job bro! ❤🎮🕹
A thought, since this wasn't made clear in the video. Since we know of one location the graffiti exists in the xbla version, has anyone gone back to the different n64 rom versions that exist and check if that location still has an extra texture in that location?
It's possible that when noticed, the developer could have simply removed the pointer for the correct texture, resulting in a transparent texture that still exists in the code. This could help confirm if the texture was ever in that location on any released rom.
I believe the third theory. After all, the 'spyder' is listed in the manual of some golderneye versions as a weapon so this could be the same thing.
20+ years ago my friend told me once he had found a weird gun he had never seen before in Archives, ive spent hours trying to find it never found it
@@uobilo I was told back then you could open Ourumovs briefcase in silo under certain conditions. The 90s were a wild time for rumors.
I am reminded of the Tick Tock Clock "upwarp" phenomenon on SM64. The working theory is that a cosmic ray flipped a single bit of data which caused Mario to warp up the way he did. If this specific graffiti asset was toggled on and off using a binary flag, then could it be a working theory also that a cosmic ray caused Mickey Mouse to appear?
Damn, I've just envisioned a future where speerunners spend a million hours playing a level omitting an objective, praying for the cosmos to literally align and flip the specific bit relating to said objective. "Calle W Jr gets a 0:52 completion on Dam SA after 20,000 hours invested".
The problem with this is that the art is actually stored as two separate textures, so a bit flip would have to occur twice in an incredibly specific way
@@dekufiremage7808 Ah, I see, so not a working idea then. Thanks for clearing that up. What about the notion that a limited supply of beta cartridges were released (possibly by mistake) which contained a few non-final level designs? Unlikely, but possible nonetheless, although these cartridges would probably have had unique "NUS" serial IDs
@dynagamerproductions8249 It's either that, simple mismemory from seeing that other red and black texture combined with the mickey mouse blog posts, or thirdly just an outright lie from someone wanting to craft a Mandela Effect story
The upwarp "cosmic ray" theory is one of most widely spreads bits of game misinformation. The runner had a faulty cartridge and console and even had trouble getting the game to work earlier in the stream. It would also take more than a single bit flip to cause an upwarp.
The version of GoldenEye 007 that was released was technically a ROM hack of the version submitted to Nintendo for final certification. While the game was undergoing said last-minute testing, an issue was discovered with the game's memory that caused glitches in the textures featured in the Frigate level. To combat this, programmer Mark Edmonds wrote a tool to extract the game's code and data from the ROM, adjusted the hex values in the game's memory to improve the performance in the level, recompressed it, and directly added it back into the ROM image without recompiling. This version was sent back to Nintendo and certified for release as the final version of the game... someone should have asked OP what country he was from. If from the UK or Japan, much higher likelihood of development chain of custody shenanigans. I am curious if there are ROM region differences with the textures.
That's super fascinating.
OP here, Cart was purchased winter of 1997 around Christmas time on a local toys R-Us in south Texas, NTSC along with the n64. Nothing special about it except they were out of stock everywhere and got lucky at the last minute. The cart came in a normal box nothing out of the ordinary. I truly believe this is a Mandela effect, otherwise someone would of uploaded a rom version online already.
@@levioch I'm not entirely convinced.
Watching this I thought, yeah, I remember that specific image somewhere slightly obscure, couldn't think where exactly and I thought it was much smaller. I'm well aware that memory is fallible and unreliable and sometimes conflated or invented. I'm half believing that I've seen the graphic in a more recent game or something, maybe it was snuck into the instruction manual, I certainly remember seeing it and thinking "why is that there, it's not related to this game in any way".
We had the PAL version for Christmas 1997(?) (sadly I sold all my N64 stuff during Covid lockdown, I had a bit of a nostalgic revisit 10 years prior).
I think we only had two games (other was DKR), we played Goldeneye to death as teenagers. My brother was annoyingly good and one of his friends was insanely good, I'm sure we were matching some of the speed records in N64 magazine (maybe that was mostly DKR? Not sure, the magazines went with the N64 ebay sale) and my brother's friend had beaten a few, I think he even recorded it and sent a VHS tape as proof. I played the game quite differently and investigated every crevice.
Watching some of Goose's videos over this weekend has reminded me of things that I thought only I experienced like the ghost door in Archives... and the competition with my bro on fastest times, I 100% everything and we got very fast in 1997-98. I was taken aback when my bro walked through pipes on Frigate and Houdini'd out of the cell in Bunker, we were one-shotting the cameras and guard back then but we didn't think to use the pause speed trick even though I had noticed it gets quicker each time, pretty sure I accidentally took a successful pic from final hallway once and never looked back, so to speak. We put a lot of thinking, and experimentation practice into it while observing each other to learn what the game was doing. I digress, we played it a lot, we didn't do much else.
Never used a Gameshark, was aware of them, not sure I ever even saw one though.
I did download a ROM emulator and a couple of N64 games on my HTC phone around 2009-2010, didn't play much at all, just gave it a try and I don't think Goldeneye was one of the games and if it was I didn't get as far as that level.
Poindexter autism post
My friends, it just keeps happening... or does it?!
Talking about rare phenomenon in the game reminded me of the time one of those weird things happened in one of my old N64 cartridges, albeigh not with GE but with Diddy Kong Racing. I clearly remember one day I went to play just a couple races in Track Mode and I saw all the races from the final world, the Space Stage (idk the correct name) were unlocked. It was a huge shock because I was never able to beat Wizpig and therefore never was able to unlock those tracks as you were supposed to. I played all those stages for hours, since that was something I had always wanted to unlock, and was very sad when I realized they would probably be gone the next time I had to turn off the console. And I was correct, once I turned it off they were never unlocked again. I tried replicating that glitch but it never occurred again.
I can totally envision this happening, it's like the "opposite" of when the game deletes your save files, but they come back after a reset. I wonder what causes it? It's so strange. Thank you for sharing!!
@@GamerFolklore Cosmic rays.
I strongly remember being at my neighbors house when I we were 7 years old and my friend Nick saying, "psh.. mickey mouse? that's gey!" and blasting it while I was asking him for the controller.
This story kind of reminds me of my weird broken version of Call of Duty Black ops 1 that had all the levels unlocked from the start when I got it, which allowed me to get the achievement from doing the campaign on Veteran by just doing the last mission before I even got some of the mandatory achievements for doing other story missions. Only thing I have to prove this is that my Xbox profile has the achievements unlocked in a non sensical order (With the dates they were earned) which doesn't make sense if I would have played the levels in the correct order and unlocked them normally.
How would that work on disc. I could believe that for cartridges, but how would that work with discs?
Possible idea is that the area on the disc where it stores the values for the save where errored with some of the scratches?? Idk exactly, i know my copy of wwf SmackDown just bring it sometimes corrupts files when attempting to save sometimes @@zeroone8800
Great vid, would love to see more of these. I agree with your 1st theory, guy saw that image and simply got his wires crossed when seeing the Mickey image, causing his original memory to be Mickey. Doesn't explain the location difference though...
This video has opened my eyes. My brother, cousin and I would all play an N64 that my parents got us second hand. It came in the original box but you could tell someone had been in it. I thought nothing of it until this post.
Some of the videos Goose has done has happened to me. The mickey mouse one happened to us. Among other things. We didn't have anything to mess with the code personally. Our cart could access the other bond characters in multiplayer (with a few inputs, ) giving us access to Connery etc.
This N64 was given away a few years later. I bought another one myself a years after that. I have never been able to find or replicate any of the strange things since. Conclusion: it was either the cart and the console that was unique or altered in some way. I can only apologise that I don't have the original hardware I once had to check for sure.
I can't say I ever saw that while playing. Strangest thing I do remember is getting enemies to pull out DD44's by wounding them. Thanks for the lore as always bud.
Scientists do that.
even stranger- very rarely they even pulled a grenade lol
If the graffiti did exist in a pre-release version of the game, it's possible that there was a leak and there were people out there who made "fake" Goldeneye cartridges using this old build of the game.
I'm basing this on a story about people who did a similar thing in the 90s by buying cheaper Gameboy games, deleting the data, and uploading Pokemon Red to them for resale.
I was thinking the same thing, sometimes bootlegers will even find unused code in the game and re add it and try to use that as a selling point for the boot leg, like this version has features that the real one doesn't have.
17:50 That happened to me too, I'm also from the UK. The first time I emulated Goldeneye I was confused when there weren't four 007 files by default, I wrote it off as a difference between the NTSC and PAL versions
Me too! I'm Canadian though...but my uncle got it for me for Christmas and it was still in the original packaging. I had no idea this wasn't normal! I just assumed the developers gave us a file labeled "007" with all cheats unlocked as a bit of a joke - like 007 had played this game himself and beaten everything with ease
@@pukipwner Dude, same here honestly and I'm from Australia
here is the most likely explanation... he had a bootleg cart that used a beta version of Goldeneye which is the same version used as the basis for the XBLA remaster.
at a fleamarket I used to go to as a kid every Saturday, there was a guy who on occasion sold games ahead of launch, and they were almost always bootleg repros with beta versions on them. he sold Pokemon Gold/Silver weeks before eu launch and the versions he sold were super buggy alpha versions, where your PC boxes would completely glitch out any Pokémon you stored in your boxes. so you'd store a hoothoot lvl 10 and sometimes it turned into a level 99 Lugia n shit.
so yeah, I know first hand that leaked beta/alpha repros of Nintendo published games existed in the early 2000s... so it is 100% plausible that the guy got a repro of a beta version. and the XBLA version having the texture enabled almost confirms it imo, since it shows at one point the texture was enabled by Rare.
That's interesting about the gold/silver bootlegs...I swear that I rented (yes, you could rent portable games at fucking Blockbuster back about 24 years ago) a version of Pokemon Silver that had a skateboard, as well, and you could clearly see the character scooting himself around, 1 foot on the skateboard. Later, I see that there was an unused skateboard back when the beta of Gold and Silver was leaked, and my brain immediately jumped to that strange memory I had. It may be unrelated, but yeah.
@@DonnyKirkMusic the one I and my friends had was easy to identify as a bootleg, the cart was black and pretty cheap plastic. it didn't have a skateboard tho, it was just a very buggy version of Gold and Silver 😭
It would be interesting if Goose could ask OP if he remembered the cart coming in a retail box, or any other information about it's origin.
You'd think the the pre-cheated-in-the-box cartridge would be an example of factory testing. Every (say) 10000 carts, they'd pluck a cart off the assembly line and see if it works. Such a task could possibly get boring for the guy who had to do it, and maybe they just happened to mess around with a gameshark that time. Once the cart is verified, it's put back in the line to be packaged and sold.
They'd never need to manually play a cart to test it, they'd just scan its contents to make sure it was byte-for-byte identical with the master copy.
Such a verification step is standard with any EEPROM burn I've ever done, so I would be shocked if it weren't part of the game cartridge manufacturing process and applied to literally every single ROM chip they made.
Using things like a gameshark doesn't modify the ROM (read-only memory), so it would have to do with save data, which I find very unlikely that there's a flag to make that graffito appear.
He's talking about the files not mickey mouse pretty sure & I agree with him. Sure something can scan out fine but testing a game every hour or so as they print or even more frequently makes a heck of a lot of sense & they just forgot to delete the save.
I remember a Mickey Mouse graffiti on this level. Didnt know this was a thing. I still have the same cartridge game. Will definitely check this out next time i travel back to visit my parents.
Please update us!!
@@seanissomething will do but I won't be flying to parents until at least Christmas. I'm hoping this is not a mismemory 🤞
commenting to see what happens
Pretty cool Christmas will be here soon
Following for updates
I wonder if a cart-tilt glitch could cause the textures to appear? I know that, though rare, people have been able to get access to the Arwing ship in OoT with tilting the cartridge in the console while it's running.
Another fascinating video, Goose. I'm always eager to see this kind of content of video game mysteries.
Thank you Ludosus! The N64 Iceberg will be coming soon!
Would be pretty funny if the devs somehow got the publishers to print a few cartridges with Mickey just for shits and giggles.
Or like it's triggered in a weird way
that's like those memes where someone has a ridiculous encounter with a famous person and they say "try and tell people, they'll never believe you."
Correct me if I am wrong, but in the days when game carts used Mask ROMS, wouldn't it have been really hard (prohibitively uneconomical) to have just a couple of the ROMS be different? Since you need a new mask to create a different version of the ROM, you would certainly make an entire production run of that ROM version from any given mask, not just a few one-offs.
My brother to this day still recalls the time he was playing frigate and Xenia and the helicopter pilot appeared,I remember him constantly replaying that level trying to get it to trigger again.
Is it possible that it does appear in the vanilla game, but theres something(s) you have to do to get it to appear and no one noticed? Ive seen a similar thing in fnaf 2 where a certain puppet render gets labeled as "unused" but in reality it just flashes by so fast that people dont see it
It doesn't seem too far fetched that somehow a few copies of an early version of the game slipped through the cracks. I wonder if there were any other inconsistencies on that game cartridge.
It's funny, the instant I saw the image on your video I knew exactly which crate to at.
I used an Action Replay Pro back then.
I'm the guy who originally made the code to unlock all the multi-player characters to spare you the long push button code sequence.
I'm gonna have to get the N64 out of storage and look into this.
So was OP really a dev for GE64 and fabricated the childhood memory to get players to find an unused asset that OP knew was in the game? I'm from the Berenstein universe.
Nah Man, im the OP, I was turning 17 then, just a kid.
This does seem to be odd cuz I think I remember the Mickey mouse in the original N64. I was big into graffiti when I was a teenager so I would look around in games at the graffiti. I haven't played the N64 version in over a decade but I can replay it and see if it's in there I still have my original cartridge.
Please do.
The fact that the textures are actually in the game files makes me wonder if this some kind of undiscovered easter egg, where a specific set of conditions would cause it to load into the level.
Thats what I was thinking. Like the extremely unlikely event with the rabbit on toilet in grunty industries in banjo tooie
see the pinned comment, seems like that would be impossible since it isn't coded to load into the level at all.
I believe it was a glitch, I had a friend that had it. When I later bought the game from him he deleted all his saves and I never saw it on my play throughs.
@@tsiefhtes I beleive it. Stranger things have happened. People are still discovering new things from 20+ year old games to this day. The textures are there, so its hard to just pass this off as a mandella effect.
6:15 I think one could perceive this very much for a mickey mouse, especially if you look for it. His ears are to the right, the face s white looking to the left. Looks like he's yawning or sticking his fist into his mouth. It's just way too close to the searched graphic to not confuse them them if you've seen it before.
When I read the title of this video I thought, "oh yeah, I forgot there was a Mickey mouse in the Depot level" and I was fairly sure I had seen it. I think what actually happened is I read somewhere that there was a Mickey mouse graffiti and I saw the image of it online. Then I went and looked through the level but never found it. I didn't know it wasn't really there, pretty sure I just got bored of looking. It's easy to invent memories and then go on believing that they're real.
Sounds like he knew about it and just pretended like he didnt just so he could make up a mandela effect.
Two conclusions of mine: 1. I'd say the developers put the true Fantasia Mickey graffiti in the game but it got removed in development due to copyright issues, so they replaced it with the 6:21 lookalike graffiti as a joke (it looks like Mickey sticking his tongue out). The original graffiti lived on in code, which is why it ended up in the XBLA version. 2. OP saw it through a gameshark in the 90s. I know he said he didn't own a gameshark, but possibly he did and has forgotten, or his brother got the gameshark and OP didn't know.
the most wild one of these ive ever seen: i was showing my friend the game "Iron brigade" i left him shopping in the game store, and went to the bathroom. when i came back he had unknowingly accessed a weapon that simply didnt exist in the game "The water cooled machinegun" high end weapons in that game do like 300 damage per shot. this full auto did 9999. i feel like it was a dev tool, but i was never able to get back to it
Your logo/pfp is awesome. I haven't seen a more stylish one on UA-cam, and I'm including most top brands as well not just random UA-camrs.
I'm gonna believe whichever is the most fun to believe, if I'm honest. Life is too short to pick the most likely, realistic scenario for why someone remembers a texture in a video being there when it isn't. More fun to believe some unfinished build got out with Mickey Mouse intact and that someone at the factory 100%ed Goldeneye and then put it back in its box to be sold as brand new. Really interesting video as always!
there HAVE been instances of employees at stores taking games, playing them, and then repackaging them with shrink wrap.
None of these mandela effect memories are right, it's just internet memes for clout, or misremembered childhoods.
I've read plausible reasons for the "Mandela Effect" that don't involve alternative universes, etc.
If the XBLA had Mickey it implies that he was in it late into development as they would have likely been working with as close to release code as they could get. So if a pre-release build got stolen and pirated it might have had Mickey in it. Back in the day piracy was harder to do but it did happen and the pirated versions were often sold as normal versions by smaller retail stores.
It's possible that something that the OP did during his playthrough of the level somehow caused the image to be loaded. Perhaps it was assumed by the devs to be completely disabled but there may have been one or two ways the image could still be enabled, such as loading the level textures and geometry from a certain place on the map that might have been unusual for most players.
6:17
I'm assuming OP saw that and agreed it's not what he's remembering? Cuz if I saw that anf made a mental note of it in elementary school and then just thought about it as an adult I'd def call it and remember it as mickey.
What about cartridge tipping, it's a feature in Rares Banjo Kazooie or DK can't remember.
For years, I searched for a room in Jurassic Park for SNES... it had 2 generators in it. I had seen it many times when I was a kid but could only ever find the room with a single generator as an adult. It drove me nuts for years and I played several physical and emulated copies trying to find it. I began questioning my sanity/memory but then one day I found it: A screenshot on the back of the box, presumably from an earlier build before release. It isn't in the game but I had seen that box so many times, it had burned into my mind as a kid.
I remember the KF7 Soviet looking more like a real AK on the back of the actual box art of goldeneye. I always thought that version looked better.
When it comes to the Mandela effect in gaming I’m on both sides of the aisle. Yes I’m sure what it really is, is our mind remembering an event a bit differently and or confusing it entirely with a similar situation but at the same time… what I personally experienced was insane and you can’t tell me otherwise. I remember playing a 100% copy of SM64 when I was a kid and just running around sandbox style goofing with all the levels and power ups but one particular thing I always remembered doing was shooting myself into one of the castle windows outside the castle using the canon you get once 100% the game. I would always go to this room and treat it as a vantage point just to look around at the castle grounds and eventually just jump out into the water. The room was dark, not big at all probably only a few feet in width and length and not significant.
Fast forward years later after 100% the game I went to shoot myself at the window to relive those old moments one last time only to smash my head against every last damn window with no results. That had me thinking hard like I know what I did back then and I vividly remember doing this all for it to have never existed. UA-camd it googled it searched redit, nothing, nothing at all and that’s why as crazy as I think that whole Mandela effect is I also can’t completely dismiss it.
Great theories! I imagine it was released intentionally as an Easter egg. You would be the coolest kid on the block with that cartridge. I am eagerly awaiting the next video!!
Have you considered the Not for Resale version of Goldeneye? Perhaps that cartridge has the same (or similar) build as the XBOX leak and OP unknowingly had it.
EDIT:
I've read that there are no differences between most NFRs and their released versions, but it would be super interesting to have an expert like yourself get an ISO of the NFR and compare it to V1.0.0 of the game.
GE007 NFR has been verified to be US retail build sadly :(
It could just be a hoax. By 2022 (when op's post went up) all the things mentioned by op were publicly available like the leaked 360 beta in 2021. If the post was before the texture discovery or 360 beta leak it would be more convincing.
Are we certain there wasn't an early (but publicly released) version that had it? Maybe one of the devs snuck it in, but it was caught soon after launch and taken out? Just a thought/theory.
possibly a counterfeit cart, modified copy protection accidentally re enabling the texture
I personally believe the 3rd explanation where OP had some weird early build cartridge... This reminds me of your vid about the PD Chicago ghost
I'm of the same opinion
Who knows, maybe Rare had to put an early build on the first batch of carts bc the game wasnt 100% totally done (all bugs worked out and such) by launch date. Or maybe some lawyer got wind of such cross contamination and the code of all subsequent cartridges produced (the majority of production) didnt have mickey
So I think I have a simple explanation. OP saw this 6:20 for years, and between playing the game back in the days and posting on reddit about mickey Mouse - he also stumbled upon the article on Cutting Room Floor and simply mixed 6:20 with the image on CRF page. I mean, they ARE similar. Goose says the image at 6:20 does not resemble Mickey Mouse in the slightest, but I disagree. It looks very much like that MM image only flipped horizontally and without the hat, and some details about the hands position are different, but... it DOES look like some cartoon character, and is mostly white and red. I know I would sure mix up these two images in my mind and convince myself that I saw that Mickey Mouse graffiti from CRF page in my game back in '97.
EDIT: Oh. So yeah, basically, what Goose says at 13:50 :D
EDIT 2: This might be my second favorite video on the channel from now on. The first will always be about the Perfect Dark ghost. Was it ever seen after the video went live? Is the Chicago Ghost Case solved?
It’s probably a case of misremembering. I think OP saw the graffiti that looks like Mickey (because let’s be honest, they look very similar) and then discovered the actual Mickey graffiti when doing a deep dive look at the game’s files. Interesting to find out about that Mickey shit, never knew it was not only in the game’s files but on the XBLA port too
it is Mickey! You say "it looks similar", okay... Point to the texture that isn't Mickey and looks like it!
The one shown at 6:15 in the video is Mickey, because there is simply no other texture to achieve what you've seen on screen.
TIER 5: THE DEPTHS - EVERY COPY OF GOLDENEYE 64 IS PERSONALIZED
Just past 17:10, you mention youre not sure if the code would still be active after the gameshark was removed, like the n64 cart could be permanently changed by the gs or not. I had a gameshark for both n64 and gameboy color back in the day, me and my brother would mess around with both all the time. Never had it happen on the n64 that i remember, but for sure remember that our copy of pokemon yellow on gameboy got completely corrupted from using the gameshark. The gameshark permanently altered the gameboy cart so that pikachu who follows u everywhere in that game, would only loosely follow u, and randomly would dash across across the screen very fast lol. So id totally believe a gameshark could f with the memory on an n64 cart permanently, i saw it happen on a gameboy cart, why not. Great video as usual thanks
Thanks for sharing! I agree that a Gameshark could have permanent effects, but I wasn't sure. Always cool to hear additional stories supporting this thesis.
18:20 not impossible. My original sealed copy of FF3 in the 90's had a save file already. Bought it on release day from Kmart. Still shrink wrapped and everything. I guess they could have had one of the shrink wrappers, but I always assumed it was someone at the warehouse playing ahead of release.
Could be like the Mario 64 upboost that happened during that one speedrun. Neutrinos from the sun flipped the coding in real time to make the graffiti visible.
This is honestly my theory as well (maybe a gamma ray burst instead of neutrinos but regardless, something shot out from the sun)
It's definitely a good theory.
Yeah neutrinos pass through the game's memory every second of every day and the enormously-vast majority do absolutely nothing.
Though from what I understand, this explanation, while technically possible, is more often used as a sort of short-hand for "the cartridge got tilted by accident and they didn't notice".
But there's a problem. If OP says that he encountered the texture many times and not just once, glitches (and I mean the original meaning of the word: a short-lived, usually externally-caused random error) would be extra-ordinarily unlikely as an explanation. It's plausible for a jerked crooked cartridge to create noise on the data lines and corrupt memory such that the texture would appear.
It's not nearly as plausible for the same chip glitching to bug the game in such a way that it *always* displays the texture even after power-cycling, since the required changes to memory would be a lot more complex.
@@kargaroc386 So of course I'm just speculating but I think of it this way: the cartridge got tilted/glitched/neutrino-whatever once and it happened to be that OP noticed the Mickey Mouse graffiti that day. He took a moment to sort of marvel at it, let's say, and then moved along.
Now, maybe it never appeared again but he just always assumed it was there? And now, years later, his memory of the one time he saw it FEELS like he saw it many times. I hope I'm making sense.
Neutrinos don’t interact with matter on a level high enough to do that. You are thinking high energy space particles, such as gamma rays.
Paint ball and golden gun were the best. There was no micky
No, I don't remember a Mickey Mouse in my game.
However, it reminds me of a bit flip. You know that strange upward teleport in SM64 that some streamer experienced during a friendly race with a friend? That kind of bit flip. Maybe, OP got a bit flip to save in his save file? Hmm...
So one thing I remember about the gameshark is that there were codes to unlock the hidden bond picture assets on the character screen and after the gameshark was removed they remained. Maybe this is a save flag?
I believe I seen it I’ll ask my brothers all 5 of us played this a lot , maybe it was early copies
Thanks again Ryan for the infinite wisdom.
As far as why it’s there in the XBLA version, when they chose a code branch as foundation for the project, they wouldn’t have chosen the retail release with all debug code removed as well as any inside dev jokes cleaned up for release like Mickey Mouse. You touched on this in the video, but this confirms that the Mickey Mouse would’ve been there until just before they prepped for retail release.
As for OPs memory, it’s either him misremembering that other graffiti you pointed out in the video, GameShark, or he saw the Mickey Mouse more recently but his memory is telling him he saw it long ago. I’ve experienced something like that before.
Another idea is you’ve checked all the retail carts you could, but what about when you start activating cheats in the cheat menu if one or a combo of them triggers the Mickey Mouse either as a side effect bug or intentionally. It would be a lot of work to check that but another possibility.
This is why I love UA-cam.
There is no other home for 20min of obscure gaming stuff :)
Theory 3 is definitely more believable than a change in space-time making Mickey disappear from Goldeneye, but knowing how the brain can get memories so very wrong I still think Theory 1 is probably the most likely. The brain is very open to suggestion especially when trying to call up an old memory, it will fill in any gaps the best it can
Good stuff Goose, enjoyed this one a lot.
The decal you found looks like the two mickey textures overlayed ontop each other, one upside down and flipped.
~ M Y F R I E N D S ~
It just.... Keeps.... happening...
The Mandela Effect talk is so funny to me. The explanation could be as simple as "oh, you misremembered", but instead people will say "That can't be true. It's more likely that our universe merged with another similar universe, and the only remnants of this is completely banal details like Pikachu's tail changing".
What seems most obvious to me, is that as rare as it is, a realworld enviromental phenomenal of some kind flipped a single bit in the the n64 runtime memory at the right point and caused the game to load the next or previous texture, and that on the same night, OP and his bro were like "damn look at this" enough to solidify it in their memory. More likely than those other theories imo.
Could it be cartridge tilting?
Another Rare-developed game series, Banjo Kazooie, had the idea of using cartridge swapping to keep data in the console's memory and apply to a different game cart. This is, as I understand it, possible because if you swap cartridges without turning the console off, some data remains in the console's memory and can interfere with the new cartridge inserted afterward. It is a possibility that OP did this at some point, with the right/wrong data in console memory causing the mickey texture to be loaded instead of another.
Hotswapping like this is used in speedruns of Paper Mario on the N64 where an Ocarina of Time cart is used to execute arbitrary code so we know the effects can be both powerful and weird. OP doing this on a smaller scale by accident is more than possible.
I had the Mickey too, I remember showing my neighbour who didn’t have it on his. I got it in 97/98 maybe? The cartridge came with a full complete file and all cheats/levels unlocked on the first save without me having played. I’m guessing it was a certain build. I wish I still had the cartridge, it was PAL if that matters.
For the sealed cart that had a save file, one thing that it could be is a forgotten wipe of a cart chosen for testing in the factory. I think there's been a few cases of similar things to that happening where it's essentially a pick a few random carts from a run or portion of a run (something like 1/1000 or similar) that they plug into a test thing and try out a few things. Probably, artificially, loading a save to let them try a few things at random on each one. They're normally wiped and put back in the packing line for it if there isn't anything wrong.
If things go wrong, that run gets scrapped and remade while they figure out what went wrong with it.
Having someone get lazy and just skip the wiping stage is possible there
Something that could be a possibility is OP got a version of the game that had the texture enabled. Kinda like how there's different region versions and sometimes there's games out there with different version numbers
Odd manufacturing mistakes do sometimes happen. I've not really heard of it effecting date on cartridges, but who knows? I once bought a commercial VHS tape (one of the Neon Genesis: Evangelion series) that had no 'tape' inside, just the clear lead going from one reel straight to another.
That’s like when I had a gold bar in school and it’s supposed to be caramac gold surrounded by biscuit but this one day it turned out to be solid golden chocolate. I was elated.
My theory would be dirty or not fully inserted cartridge, if the OP did actually see Mickey Mouse.
That or the texture you showed off, which I would describe as a "glitched" version of the Mickey Mouse texture without the hat looked enough like Mickey on an old, flickery CRT.
Fascinating video though!
As soon as you mentioned the Mickey Mouse graffiti I thought Depot straight away.
I need to find and set up my n64 again. Mind blown 🤯
I have never played Goldeneye, but could it be possible that the graffiti appears by a (currently) unknown easter egg?
There was a similar thing with "Mario's Early Years: Fun With Numbers" on the SNES where an easter egg went undiscovered for over 25 years, to the point people thought it was some weird cut content, which involved clicking a very specific pixel, to activate the easter egg of the developers' heads singing. Don't think it's entirely out of the question OP did something that triggered it that he has no idea of.
Could also be a slightly earlier cartridge release too, especially if it OP got theirs on release.
Another possibility, how complex of a room hack is needed? Could a random manufacturing defect or bit flip change a cartridge enough?
Their are plenty of possibilities for a cart to be damaged in JUST the right way to misplace which hex position to pull.
I remember buying used games in the days of cartridge memory could be interesting to say the least.
My goldeneye had every cheat unlocked, and my pokemon was broken because the previous owner captured missingno, causing all sorts of crazy glitches.
Perhaps its possible that the memory was modified with a game shark?
Does your Red also have a bunch of pokemon with regular names but their picture is Mew? And a Gyarados with Fly?
One of my biggest regrets for a long time was getting rid of my lime gbc. Pretty sure you could fix that cart but might have needed a gameshark to do so.
Nah I remembered that thing.
Also I swear Luigi is real SM64
My favorite self insert was naming a smg gun the KLOBB, for Kenneth lobb a Nintendo employee.
I forgot what he did.
Too lazy to google it but I’m pretty sure he was a producer.
Theory 4: it was a review copy of a close to finish build that he received later as a kid.
Remember: if you were "big enough", you would sometimes receive "review copies" of the game sometimes a month in advance. These copies sometimes had old versions on them that worked well enough and were close to the finished product. This was not uncommon. Heck, when I was 'working' for a gaming website a few months, I was allowed to review Ghost Busters on the Xbox 360. However, this was the NTSC version. I live in Europe, we were only able to play PAL unless the 360 was modified or... or the game build allowed you to play it. Which was the case for me. That version was different than the ones sold in stores (it also had a big fat "review copy" label on the cover art).
I reviewed a dozen or so games, but most of them were basically the release versions without any differences. Ghostbusters was the only odd one out in my memory.
I have another interesting story, 20+ years ago my friend told me once he had found a weird gun he had never seen before in Archives, ive spent hours trying to find it never found it
That sounds truly amazing, a classic playground rumor.
Memories are so weird. I downloaded steam again for the first time in probably 8 years. There was a game I owned that I had logged over 60 hours playing and I have no memories whatsoever of playing it.
He downloaded the build dude. The statistical likelihood of it being that close is insane. He obviously actually played it and then mixed up his memories. I'm shocked anyone took him seriously after that reveal.