Hey Goose, just wanted to say thank you for covering my reddit post. A few things you forgot to mention, however. I also gathered and looked through all the scripts for the Chicago level, which clearly showed that there is no logic that supports the ghost, which means it is certainly a bug. Also, you recreated the situation pretty well, although I was facing the pillar slightly different, and a few cross bow bolts whizzed past me, before one finally made contact and killed me. Thanks again! I'm certain someone will figure this out one day! And when that happens, I get to have a really good "I told you so" moment. Lol.
I wholeheartedly believe you. After watching this video, I had to go look at my childhood copy of perfect dark, and sure enough, it's version 1.0. I might play around with it and see what I can do
No offence but this is sus as fuck and doesn’t make sense from a programming perspective. Is this entire conversation with the dev public, or only his responses? Because I have a hard time believing that you told a developer this exact story and his response was “hmm... it’s possible”. Bugs don’t create NPCs with unique grouping so that they are hostile to both the guards and to the player, let alone one that specifically targets the guards before seeking out the player. If this exists in any version of the game, it was put there intentionally and would be possible to trigger in some way.
Man, I wish I had this game or console so I could do some glitch hunting myself. Kind of in the mood for it. It sounds interesting, and I wish everyone luck in catching it on camera and figuring out what it is.
When I was in design school a teacher put a secret zombie in a level design assignment we were doing that would spawn between 2-6am to kill players testing out their creations as a way of telling them to go to sleep and stop working.
That's infinitely creepier than some horror games (Like that "VHS" one from a year ago). Imagine being the first person that happened to and not knowing what the fuck just happened.
Thats awesome. However, it should be noted that the N64 has no time keeping capabilities. I looked into this during my time looking for the ghost. There is a very specific setup that must be performed, just don't know what it is!
I was one of the designers on this game, my main focus was multiplayer, ai navigation, background hits etc. I never heard of this during testing and I never heard of anyone on the small dev team adding this to mess with you. A few of us did add our own little things in, I added the question marks, and crates on the sewers level, I also added the keyhole on Area 51 as a hats off to super mario world. I will put my 2 cents in though which might add fuel to the fire :) Every polygon in the game had attributes assigned to it to determine if you or the AI could do certain things. I'll give you an example, the railings in these games back then were an alpha channel texture, but behind the scenes, it would have been a single or double sided polygon, obviously this would be something the AI would need to be able to see and shoot through, vs a regular wall so the engine/game/editor give me the ability to define that over a normal wall where the AI cannot see or shoot through otherwise the AI would do silly things that would make it look silly. Its possible an AI at a certain point in time could have fallen into the level. Its also possible the AI there was being used as a pawn for something else to happen (maybe the drone), new stuff would not be coded for everything, often the initial bit of code would copied and pasted in other parts of the game and modded slightly to create a similar outcome to its original design but appear a more unique function. The punk pond, was originally called the pink pony, however the name was copyrighted. I think it was the name of the strip club or drinking bar the original dev team went to in LA around the time of E3 99 or 2000. I can't even recall if it (punk pond) was used in the main game, I know it was going to be, but it possible one of the other designers were testing possibilities and simply give up or run out of time and locked it off and still left some junk there. The next level is G5 building right where the cloaking stuff becomes prominent, maybe it was going to be an ALT entrance or something. Unless someone put it in on purpose which is unlikely, my money its either a glitch which happens from time to time based on other variables in the level which might only happen under certain conditions or its being used to achieve some other function thinking you would never see it. A bit like the flight recorder on Statue Park in Golden Eye. It starts off at one location and then teleport to like one of 9 or something when another state is reached. My best guess guess is this was not intentional, and you're witnessing a bug, or the "ghost" is some kind of place holder that was performing some other function. Possibly the drone that patrols the level. Maybe some junk that got left over from another difficulty level or bonus level setup. If someone had a screen grab of the ghost, I could tell you whose face it was on the teams. P.S. The screen grab you used for this video, the guard with the hat on was Karl Hilton, he was the one who by large designed and build this level before he left Rare to form FRD. So IF
@@GamerFolklore Just to add a tiny morsel of extra backstory: The original 'Pink Pony' name of the club was visible in at least one preview screenshot back in the day (in magazines and/or online), before the final version of Perfect Dark came out. I remember being puzzled that the name had changed once I actually bought the game. I figured Nintendo had censored it for sounding too obviously strip-club-esque. Interesting to hear that it was actually a copyright problem instead.
I know the answer to the Chicago ghost It's very simple and if you worked on it I'm surprised you don't know this. I'm playing perfect dark for the first time and about 20 years just so that I can screen record what the ghost is and how to see it every single time you play this level if you so choose to It's very possible to see this every time you play the Chicago level without failure.
Trent was supposed to be in that cutscene but just didn't render? That makes so much more sense now! I checked my old cartridge and it is indeed 1.0, that cutscene used to confuse me so much!
I know the idea of a sim with no enemies struck you as wrong for something to overflow into a glitch npc elsewhere in the game, but I think discounting the no npc sim because it didn't feel right was a mistake. Let's look at a different game with a famous memory bug as an example of unrelated data causing weird things: Missingno in Gen1 pokemon. Missingno is caused by your name being stored into the wild pokemon region of memory, and then the one strip of cinnabar island doesn't overwrite the wild pokemon region of memory, allowing you to load "pokemon" that are interpreted from your name. In the same way, you don't need an npc in a sim to overflow into another level, you need the right random garbage data to overflow into a place in memory that affects NPC spawning in the next level you play. All this said, it's likely going to take people studying the memory overflow bug in 1.0 to actually derive whether the ghost is caused by the bug and how to trigger it.
Yeah. The NPC don't "walk" between the levels. Actually 0 sims is likely to cause a bug because it would have been tested less. For example what if there is a piece of code that is programmed to always access the "first" bot in the level? When there are none it will do weird stuff.
Not only that, he did the Combat Sim setup wrong. The idea isn't that you play in a CS game by yourself and a ghost appears in Story overnight, but rather that the ghost appears in that match of CS overnight.
LIKE SO GOOSE SEES, possible method of testing the myth detailed below (after my mini rant) Oh God, people are misunderstanding what the developer said and jumping to conclusions without evidence. Look, if the ghost is real, and what the developer said about the 1.0 version being a buggy piece of crap and potentially causing memory overwrite errors in the game is correct, he did NOT mean that you specifically have to play the challenge levels in order to get it to occur. What he said was that the same glitch that is responsible for overwriting a section of memory within ONE SPECIFIC challenge level, COULD potentially be causing other overwrite glitches in other parts of the game, and that he had NO IDEA what those errors might cause to happen or even how to get them to trigger. He did NOT say, "oh, to trigger the ghost you need to play the challenge stages and trigger some unknown glitch that then causes the simulants from the challenge stages to leak out and escape into other parts of the game." That's stupid. Why the hell is everybody jumping to this same conclusion as if it's fact, when that's not at all what's being said? Seriously, is everybody just so desperate to trigger the glitch that you're all just clutching at whatever straws present themselves and playing Telephone with the rumour? You won't find anything that way. Also, a few nights of playing the game and leaving the N64 running all night are NOT in any way a useful sample size. If encountering the ghost is so rare as to be a virtual non-event which the vast majority of PD players don't believe even exists, then you'd need to run hundreds, even thousands of attempts before you could conclusively state that the ghost isn't showing up. Look, go back to the roots of the myth and start again without preconceptions. Everyone's gotten too caught up in the speculation and have forgotten the only accounts with any consistency to them, those being the original rumours. From the ORIGINAL story of the Chicago Ghost, we can determine the following information: 1) The ghost is theorised to to appear in the Chicago Stealth level, or the G5 building itself 2) The ghost is cloaked and wields a crossbow 3) The ghost is most commonly encountered in the Pond Punk club, and will engage the enemy soldiers in the club before you arrive, which seems to result in the door being open without the player needing to aggro any of the guards inside first, though this is not 100% confirmed and may not always be the case 4) The ghost will decloak behind you and then kill you instantly with highly accurate crossbow fire. Since nobody has ever claimed to visually confirm exactly what the ghost looks like, we can infer that it always decloaks out of your line of sight, or at least it always has in any of the stories of encounters with it. 5) The ghost can apparently also appear in the G5 building itself, where its spawn location and behaviour are unknown, save for the fact that it seems to target the player specifically like in the Pond Punk club 6) Encountering the ghost is supposedly so rare as to be a virtual non-event Now, I would be inclined to disbelieve a story like this on the basis that there are so far no confirmed, recorded encounters with the ghost, and the whole story is based purely on hearsay from players who claim they were killed by it. However, an experience with the old action adventure game Primal on the PS2, which I also only ever saw once and was unable to replicate despite multiple hours of attempts, allows me to accept the possibility that there could be a occurrence within a game that is so unlikely to happen that basically nobody has ever seen it. That possibility, at least for now, leads me to believe that there could potentially be some truth to the rumour based on the consistent early reports of encounters with it. So, to go back to Krythic's account, he stated that he encountered the ghost when he and his friend were playing a marathon of Perfect Agent difficulty. This means that, from the information provided, we know they played the game from the start, up to at least the Chicago Stealth level, on Perfect Agent Difficulty, and that they died multiple times in the lead up. That's where people should be focusing their testing for now. The posts from the developer have been misunderstood and are muddying the waters, and we can also not forget the possibility that some of the information from people who say things like "if you start a combat sim map with no simulants, and leave the game running all night, sometimes you wake up to find your player dead" may be misinformation, or indeed, intentional disinformation. Start from the beginning and work from there. I propose that you get 50 players, all with N64s and version 1 copies of Perfect Dark, each making 20 runs of the game on Perfect Agent, up to at least the end of the G5 building, and record their runs. That would provide a sample size of 1000 runs, which is a large enough sample size as to provide some meaningful results. Remember, this thing is so rare that most people don't think it's real, if it exists then the probability of encountering it is extremely low. If nobody finds it, we can assume the chances of it happening are greater than 1 in 1000 and go from there. Also I'm serious that you should do this. Find 50 people in the comments right here who both own a physical N64 and a version 1 copy of Perfect Dark, and have the ability to capture footage and send it to youtube. That means I'm out of the running, as my N64 doesn't have a RAM expansion and I don't own Perfect Dark. But this video has over 2000 likes so far. Finding 50 people out of them who meet the criteria I've outlined shouldn't be difficult. Like so Goose sees. If enough people actively participate in a search for this thing, they should be able to find it. Also, anyone claiming to have encountered the ghost MUST provide footage of them doing so for their submission to count, and said footage must be verified to rule out video editing. Because there is actually a reason why somebody might make a false claim that they've encountered the ghost, and you all know what it is: attention. A person might do it simply because they want to be a part of the urban legend and add new things to the story, and get people talking about it again. So you probably will get some false submissions from people who want their 5 minutes of fame. So, anyone want to be part of the experiment?
Beautifully put. You think like a software engineer. Perhaps you are one? The only thing I would add: don't limit to version 1.0. That's yet more speculation from the dev. Games can have more than one bug, and even more than one memory bug. (not a slight at the lead dev. The team did a very good job on PD... loved that game!) Until we know otherwise by confirming the Ghost's existence and consistently being able to reproduce it, or at least until all the previous reports come back to us and confirm they had v1.0 carts. And that seems unlikely to happen, now. Even Krythic was apparently playing on his friend's cart. So who knows if he could even say?
It'd be a fun story either way, but there's no reason why this definitively could not have happened and the story feels consistent. I'd like to believe it's true, good luck on finding proof.
@@bastardferret869 Why not have 20 players from each version of the game run tests? If it's not for sure limited to the version 1.0 of the game, it could potentially be in the 360 version as well.
I've gotta say, gaming mysteries of this kind always creep me out. Something about something hidden being in the code of the game, international or not, gives me chills. I love it!
I sometimes ran into glitches when I played "Mega Man 2" as a kid, and some of those glitches seemed to actually create new environments. That was really cool, kind of like an unknown parallel dimension in the game's world.
I think it being unintentional makes it even more creepy. Like, the game has sort of evolved its own code but is still limited to the only objective of killing the player.
The bug that Mark was talking about actually involves playing any match with 3 players on the Warehouse level. Trust me, I know. I had two brothers and that bug drove me insane. Mark is misremembering. All that matters is having 3 players on the warehouse level. That alone will crash the game. It's very important to note that it has nothing to do with challenges. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. I remember the crash site cutscene bug too.
I think the findings being on chicago means way more than it we think. The second level of chicago DOES contain a crossbow you can get by knocking out the first guards in the room you spawn in. Guards that DO cloak invisible. Not only that but chicago 1 and 2 are linked weirdly since i remember the bombable wall you destroy in stealth affects how you escape in the infiltration mission. Maybe the guards are in different factions from the cia guys or the bar ones? If one spawns on the previous levels it may go rogue for his not so teammates. Maybe some marathoning between clearing chicago g5 on a previous diffi ulty and then stealth on the next may cause some glitchiness... Addendum: the area 51 guy who screams and opens the phoenix warehouse operates similar. His existence depends om your actions on a previous lelvel.
I know the secret. It's very cool. You are all wrong. 100%. I can't believe that I have the answer to the secret I posted it before and I deleted it because I think maybe I should just make a video showing it I can recreate it every time I start that level.
@@JimBobJoeB0b I think that I used to play this game a lot more in middle school and you know that I always used the best into this room and steal some dudes guns and it just doesn't make any sense to me how this room is a secret to people like it's not really a secret.
@@M4XD4B0ZZ I remember as a kid hearing about tmnt for the nes that shredder would appear on the train tracks at midnight . Ah life before the internet
One time while playing Grid in multiplayer, the elevator that's usually locked in that one narrow area was open, lead to black room that you just fall and die in. Video game memory I'll never forget for sure.
His has happened to me, just a bit different. I would never play on anything above Agent because I was too scared of losing. One day while exploring Chicago I wondered into the club where the doors were open and guards were dead. I'd never been down there before so that's why it stuck in my head. I never saw the ghost and I never got killed by anything, but I saw the dead npcs and wandered through the hitherto locked club for the first time.
I think this is why some people said that the ghost "helped" them. The ghost probably left that place before you got there so they didnt get to kill you giving you the illusion that he helped you.
This one can most likely be explained. It's been well-documented that the game can activate a "Janus guard" which makes an enemy an ally. I've seen it way too many times in the level Pelagic II. Why it happens, we don't know but in your case, this is what most likely happened. Type in "Janus Guard Perfect Dark" in yt and you'll find them.
Same here. Likely on agent, I went down to the punk pond and the doors were open so I could walk in and look around the place, but when I tried again the doors were shut, and that's why I remember it. I can't confirm presence of guards though, alive or otherwise, and I never got killed. The thing that confuses me is that I have the pal 1.1v Is there another way to draw all the guards out, like say a taxi crash?
I have very little to no interest in speed running and yet I am subscribed to you and Karl Jobst because you both have the gift of being excellent story tellers. This video, obviously, is proof positive of this.
I'm a software engineer. I'm not convinced that it can only happen on Version 1.0. It is very much possible that there were other unknown bugs in version 1.0 that were never patched. It is also possible that when they patched version 1.0 that they introduced new bugs and that the ghost might only appear in version 1.1 because of a new bug. It would be helpful to find out which version of the game that the ghost encountered people have and if there is some consistency there.
I have the PAL version so not sure if that makes a difference, all I know is that Trent appears in that cut scene in my copy. And I (and my cousin) have encountered something that killed pretty much a whole floor of enemies on DataDyne and I could hear it and I know how certain simulates fire so it was either a dark or perfect sim. Either way I don’t think it’s locked to V1.0 either.
@@Vereid I'm playing with the game to see if I can encounter these things. Do you have more details about what happened? Such as which floor in Data Dyne, what you were doing leading up to it, what guns you heard, etc.
@@ZAV1010 sorry man I can’t remember what gun or noise it made and I’m afraid if I try to guess I’ll just be talking nonsense. All I remember is that it was a rate of fire that a dark or perfect sim shoot, but honestly even that I’m worried I’m misremembering. I’ve seen another theory that says it might be a glitch with the simulants you get on your side (Velvet) in co-op without playing with another human maybe leaking in. It’s so weird as I KNOW I did not touch (let alone even enter) the floors with the dead guards. Also it was the very first level in the game, and the floor where most of the guards were dead was the floor below Cassandra’s office. I also had another strange incident where all the Mr Blondes on Carrington Institute (when the bomb is deployed) were just missing. None of them showed up, the craft was there but no Mr Blondes neither was there any dropped Maluers which are the weapons they come equipped with on that level. I’ve had some weird things happen on Perfect Dark but I used to play it everyday after school lol. I also specifically remember being killed 3 times very quickly in succession on the Area 52 combat simulator map - but I only had meat sims with pistols on and anybody that has played PD enough knows that Meat Sims take a long time to kill you with anything that isn’t an explosive or 1 shot weapon (and even then they are inaccurate as hell). I know I did glitch the game into having blank simulants show up in combat simulator a couple of times by just rapidly selecting settings via the simulant/bot settings. I need to see if I can recreate that on video because to my knowledge I doubt anyone else has seen that (I also really doubt this is at all related to the ghost, just something I’d point out).
@@Vereid Thanks for all that information. Some of those sound like separate things happening in the game, but it is good knowing about them. Do you know where I can find information on doing the glitch with the blank simulants?
I was going to say: I always remember Trent being in that cutscene (because of his funny upsidedown smile at the end) and I've encountered the ghost multiple times.
No fucking way. This blows my mind and creeps me out a little. I never knew this was supposed to a rare encounter or accepted as fake by the community, i remember clearly having this happen to me and going nuts trying to recreate it. Same thing, went down, guards are dead and suddenly i am too. I never knew about the other things like the crossbow and the cloak. But i remember it so clearly because by that time i had a PS2 and prefered to play Perfect Dark, but after that i thought it might be an indicator that the game and the console might have had too much use and that it was simply a glitch, so i played a lot less on my N64 after it happened. I feel like can't express clearly how mind blowing it is to find out its some kind of underground gaming legend.
As someone who has a working fireplace, it’s not something one does for a video or for ambience of a story. It’s a practical kind of thing that is only used in very few scenarios. If done right the FP will be special is sparingly used. if u notice the fireplace is burning, then it’s Xmas or a super cold ass day!
15:39 - I think the developer was mistaken. From The Cutting Room Floor: A 1.1 release was made in North America, mainly to fix a devastating memory overflow bug which was triggered by simulants entering the ducts in the Warehouse arena. This would overwrite the cartridge's EEPROM save with random garbage, even if a Controller Pak was being used for saving, and could render the game unable to pass the title screen. The version number of the start up screen has not been changed from NTSC version 8.7.
I used to hang out in Pond Punk quite a bit. (Although, I didn't know what a gentlemen's club was back then, so I thought it was a business meeting room for the mafia. :P ) I don't remember if I've ever been killed by the ghost, but I've definitely found stray crossbow bolts in Pond Punk. I've also definitely been locked out of Pond Punk because all the guards inside were already dead - you could see a dead guard through the ticket window. As for challenges to look at, I personally would start with Challenge 15 or Challenge 16. Challenge 16 is the first challenge that introduces the PerfectSim (the second hardest sim in the game) and has no radar on Facility with the K7 and proxy mines, among other things. I remember this one vividly because while I was first playing it, the bot would not reset his inventory when he died. I spawned in the room with proxy mines (it was in the area with the REALLY slowly opening doors) and just kept putting them on the door so the bot would blow himself up when he entered. There were no other guns in the room. But, when the bot eventually spawned in the room, he pulled out a K7 and killed me - a gun which was not in the room. I then exited out of the challenges, started up a normal bot match with one MeatSim (the easiest bot in the game) and farsights, so I could see what was in his inventory at spawn. Sure enough, each time he respawned, he had all the weapons collected up to that point. Since this state persists between games, it also might be related to challenge 15 (Grid with 2 normal sims and grenade launchers - another one I remember being mind-numbingly difficult), but I have nothing specific in 15 that I can point to as evidence. One more thing to note, and this may be different because this bug is still in the XBLA version, but you can also look at the patrolling guard bug in Area 51 Infiltration. Sometimes when you start the level, the guard patrolling the tunnel on the way to the comms objective will be immediately alerted to something suspicious and investigate. He runs from his spawn directly to the PC's spawn, then runs to the PC's current location. Once he sees the player, he'll run back and alert the guards by the comms objective, who then investigate the area where the PC spawn is. As far as I'm aware, this is only triggered by repeatedly playing the level and can happen as often as 1 in 5 tries. Try it with permanent cloaking (RCP120 and infinite ammo) - it's really weird.
One thing I think might be related is the "Janus Guard" phenomenon, something people reported happening occasionally back in the day. Supposedly on Crash Site or Pelagic II a guard would randomly kill the others and join your side as if they were a co-op simulant, and when you would hover your crosshairs over them they would turn blue to indicate they were an ally. I'm not sure if this has ever been proven, but it didn't seem to be met with the same skepticism as the ghost and people generally accepted that it was a real thing that happens. Edit: I found this video showing a Janus Guard ua-cam.com/video/IXPtObezAQU/v-deo.html I had my own ghost experience in either dataDyne Defection or Escape back in the day, but it was too long ago for me to remember anything about what happened at all. I just remember making a thread on GameFAQs about it and getting mocked for it (I believe Your Eliteness in particular was someone who made what seemed to be some mocking joke, so it's amusing to me to see he's someone who believes it's possible all these years later haha). Out of curiosity I went and found my old cartridge to see which version it was but it's a 1.1, so who really knows. More than likely it was just me being a idiot 12-13 year-old.
It's good to bring up another very strange, possibly related glitch. Does the Janus Guard glitch work on both versions? Maybe the bug that can cause the ghost, if it is real, has nothing to do with it being version 1.0 or version 1.1.
Hahah, I remember getting my own Janus guard! Happened once on Pelagic II, came across a massacre and then a guard charged me and just stopped right there! He was prone to running off and it eventually got him killed. PD really gave you chances to screw around with cutscenes, so I was disappointed I couldn't get him to one.
I’ve only had it happen a couple times in the last 20 years on both my childhood 1.0 copy and friends 1.1 copy on dataDyne Defection. I actually asked Dr. Doak about it on Twitter, he tagged Duncan Botwood, Mr. Botwood had said...the most likely explanation though is ‘it’s a bug’ . Glad I’m not the only one that’s it’s happened to all these years later.
This actually did happen me once i got killed totally randomly. I told my friend over and over about something killed me in an empty room but he never believed me.
Everytime someone's say that we feel like "ok stop joke" 😢 , but after random people tell me that i belive but never see before just remember this now because i was cleaning my N64 and remember this .
As a side note: The Pond Punk gentlemen's bar is fairly easy to gain access into. Quickly disarm all three guards, and one will run over and open the door promptly.
@@moonhowler667 I remember I used to do it the same way back in 2000. Not sure if I adapted it from playing combat simulator against perfect sims, and easily disarming them, or reading it from a gaming magazine then. Either way, it works on getting inside the bar fairly fast and easy, basically all the time.
@@moonhowler667 Not guaranteed But as a kid, thats how i always gainned enterance You disarm and injure all the guards near and one is bound to run inside
I don't remember the ghost and never heard the story until now. However, I DO remember: late nights, I'm trying to wind down before bed so I start a match with no sims just to explore an unfamiliar level or just to vibe in general until I feel sleepy, often falling asleep with the game running, sometimes I'd wake up and be dead. I always just assumed my brother was messing with me. Most of my memories of chicago are of trying to speedrun it to unlock the psychosis gun and never going back because that floaty robot boi was terrifying to my little child mind. I hated that level.
I’ve finally gotten a copy of the 1.0 cart. So far the game has really behaved exactly the same. Although there was 2 things that happened to me during my campaign play through. 1:Chasing ghosts: After playing in combat simulator for awhile (complete in several challenges, creating my own one as well) I then went into single player and started up Chicago level. On perfect agent everything was going fine/nothing unusual. But then I did go into pond punk. Inside there were the usual couple guards at the bottom of the stairs/in lobby room. Then things got a little strange. I noticed a spray of cmp150 buckets actually go through the door, the guard on the other side immediately came to the door (usually a lot slower) killed him to allow the door to open all the way. Went inside and nothing. Walked into the bathroom, nothing. Then I came back out into the main room, and an unarmed guard spawned and I’ll be honest it startled me. The guard wasn’t reacting to me being in front of him, so then I went around the guard to verify that there was no weapon in its hand. There wasn’t. Just a plain old g5 guard with no weapon. But then I got up to the guards face and it threw it’s hands up in the air as if he was surrendering. Left him alone, came back and the guard de spawned. Strange stuff, no ghost but still odd
The strangest thing about this mystery is that a cloaking device + crossbow set to the "instant kill" secondary setting would be the perfect "stealth/assassin" setup as far as Perfect Dark is concerned. This makes the whole thing feel deliberate as opposed to a random glitch. Furthermore no enemy in story mode uses the crossbow. Now something that should be noted is according to the Perfect Dark wiki the only other instance of the crossbow appearing in story mode besides Air Base: Espionage is in actuality the G5 building where it apparently can be dropped by a guard at the beginning if you knock out at least two of them with fists. Now this isn't the Chicago mission where the ghost is most commonly reported, but this adds credence to darkmaian23's account in the sense that the G5 Building does load cloaks and the crossbows albeit no enemy uses the crossbow.
I had heard of this ghost encounter many years ago. I always chalked it up to one of the alert guards (those guys appearing when the alarm is raised), spawning as a Janus Guard (a known phenomenon) in the lobby of the Pond Punk. Still, that wouldn't account for other details outlined in this video, such as the Crossbow weapon. If you want to trigger the memory glitch via combat simulator, you should do so with Challenge 7 & with 3 or 4 players, as this is the challenge which is bugged in the 1.0 version of the game. There is a risk, however, of the game becoming totally corrupted and unusable, so proceed with caution, or use an EverDrive. The Mongillo ghost is almost certainly the friendly revolver guard (not Jonathan) shooting at the guards.
I can’t tell you how many hours I put into trying to find the golden warthog in halo 1 & 2 when I was a kid. I read every single gamefaq and cheat form back in the day. All just a farce but I truly believed it was possible
Goose -- always enjoy your stuff, but I think this is your best (non-Speedlore) video in a while -- totally fascinating. Well done. One of these days, do the iceberg meme video!
@@stormbornapostle5188 I hear (this is only a rumor) that the TTC upwarp is actually caused by cartridge tilting. The speedrunner apparently slightly tilted his cartridge to get faster load times, but this may have caused an occasional glitch as well.
@@arlobubble3748 Perhaps, but that doesn't mean he didn't do it with that intention. Kids still hold various button combos after throwing a ball to "increase catch rate" in pokemon to this day.
I didn't expect to make it into a goose video someday haha what an excellent surprise. This turned out to be even more fascinating than I originally imagined! I appreciate you digging into this one and its very clear how much you put into it. The way these videos come out are just top tier! I cant imagine anyone else being able to cover these stories and make them as interesting as you do. Thankyou Always
Honestly, the dev saying how there was a bug in 1.0 dealing with challenge modes... that leads me to believe its possible theres a code leak for solo missions. There just needs to be the proper setup figured out.
If I were a designer of a game similar to "Perfect Dark", then I might have actually thrown in some spooky thing like this at some part in the game, which triggered maybe about 0.01% of the time in a very specific out-of-the-way area, and also only triggered if you had already failed the mission anyway, so that people who decided to just mess around wouldn't lose anything. I feel like this would be a cool detail that would be highly intriguing to players, and add some fun mystery and controversy to everything.
All i want to say is i 100% remember seeing at least 2 guards dead in the bar in the Chicago level when going downstairs. It was actually the first time I had ever saw the door open, that's why I remember it. I wondered why there was dead guards behind a normally locked door. I don't remember entering the room, or if I did i dont remember being killed, but i do remeber the dead guards.
Whenever something is spawned by the game, in most games, unless the designers set specific coordinates for the entity's spawn point, the entity will default to spawn at map coordinate 0, 0, 0. This makes me very curious to know where 0, 0, 0 is in Chicago. Imagine if 0, 0, 0 is not only around the secret club, but in such a spot where any AI that would spawn at the 0,0,0 location, would be inclined to open the locked door! That would be some crazy good evidence in favor of the ghost, and it would only take opening Chicago on a level editor of sorts. I'd most sincerely do it, but I have absolutely 0 knowledge about the game, I haven't even beaten it casually xD. Seriously though, can any n64 tech savant with free time check this out?
@@jlewwis1995 For the sake of finding the origin (0,0,0) of Chicago, I don't think you'll need to have 1.0. Level geometry coordinates rarely ever change in updates. But yeah, for the sake of trying to reproduce the ghost guard 1.0 will be probably our best bet, and I also couldn't find a 1.0 rom :(
I love the idea of it being James Bond as the ghost, because the club is called "Punk Pond" and there was a game series made by another British developer called James Pond
I did some modding using the GE Setup Editor to test a few things, and found some stuff worth considering. First of all, I wasn't even sure if the Crossbow was a valid weapon for a guard to use, so I tested that. Solo guards can use the crossbow, but it is not a one hit kill weapon when they use it on the player. Even on Perfect Agent, the Crossbow does a fairly low amount of damage, along with the sedative effect. I discovered also that when a solo guard is using a crossbow, that they are able to hit their allies, which does result in an instant knockout, whereas friendly fire does not occur with most other weapons in the game. Secondly, I tested how simulant AI reacts with solo guards, by forcing some dataDyne guards into a multiplayer level. Simulants do not appear to acknowledge the existence of solo guards, and vice versa, which makes sense given the two are never supposed to exist in the same space. Simulants will not directly attack solo guards, but can hit them by accident while trying to attack the player. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think solo guards are able to use cloaking devices of their own volition, and it's part of a scripted sequence (eg the Deep Sea shotgun guards)
There's this "CHR_HIDDENGUY" function that is used to control distance or view for the flying robot on Chicago. A couple of these guards used to perform a function in-game whichever level they're used on. My guess is that it got unset by chance and we have our crossbow killer, but I think other conditions might have to be met too. On A51 Infiltration, there's a similar function but it's used to clone guards and he just runs wild on his own allies. I believe these non-Janus killers are set to unhidden by accident or maybe in A51's case a mistaken function call. Interesting bits: Moon jump where she's standing in right before she decides she jumps the gate. There's non-collisions all around that floor. I'm basically trying to make the hidden guard fall to its death and see if that's why everything goes wrong like in this ghost story - it spawns on top or behind you. Looking up setuppete.c on the decompilation project is a good way to get started.
This gave me such a nostalgia kick. I used to love reading about the rumours of ghosts and bigfoots in GTA:SA, and hunting for them myself. This video took me back to a simpler time in my life. Thank you.
I remember all the GTA San Andreas bigfoot malarkey on gamefaqs. I myself even spent some time riding around the countryside at night. Damn I miss being a kid.
All games have some form of bugs or glitches somewhere - it is practically impossible to completely avoid them, no matter how many bug searches you do - so there is really no reason to doubt these kinds of situations. The game could have simply loaded a guard in the wrong position, or something.
Has anyone else experienced a bug in Perfect Dark that would cause guards to be active during the cutscenes? I saw this *once* (had a witness), and never again, in hundreds of hours of play. I failed crash site agent (attempting to unlock the cheat) because I watched the cutscene as a celebration and some guard popped up over the ridge and shot the president (causing mission failed to pop up mid cutscene). I didn't know 1.0 was so buggy though, maybe it was related to that?
I have seen this happen but not during the crash sit mission and instead on the preceding level in the Plane. I had an enemy come into the presidents room during the cutscene where you are talking to the president. But he didn't fire during the cutscene and just ran around the room like he was already aggroed then shot the president once the cutscene ended and normal game play resumed.
This is the first time I'm hearing about this, however I experienced something very similar, in Goldeneye actually, which I never thought anyone would believe. Specific year is tough to say, but a friend and I were playing GE multiplayer for several hours, and one particular match in Bunker (I want to say we were using the guns setting "Automatics") we were on opposite ends of the map, and suddenly I saw a darker than usual character zip by(faster than a player is capable) my screen, I turned to shoot, and died instantly. I was about to make a frustrated comment toward my friend about killing me, however just before opening my mouth he said "how did you die?" I then glanced at his screen and noticed he was nowhere near where I had died. We had the "what do you mean, that wasn't you?" sort of conversation, but shrugged it off and kept playing. A few minutes later, we both see the Trevelyan(for some reason much darker texture than usual) run by our screens. At this point we've made eye contact and have agreed what we were seeing was strange. A second later, my friend dies, then I die. We spent hours after this attempting to find this "Dark Trevelyan", but were unable to find him again. We tried many times after this to replicate what had happened that night, but never had anything even similar happen again. After years of Perfect Dark gameplay, I always wondered if this was some sort of early version of the DarkSim that hadn't been in the final production version of Goldeneye, since both games are based on the same engine, but have never found an answer. This "Chicago Ghost" gives me hope that someday something might be proven that confirms me and my friend didn't have some sort of a shared hallucination.
While not anywhere near as exciting or creepy, I remember being a kid and playing on Bunker with a friend, and we encountered a strange glitch where thrown remote mines wouldn't actually be thrown, and instead of appear floating in mid-air at the center of the player's position, so we ended up making a giant floating cluster of mines and them detonating them. I think the devs are aware of this glitch though since I remember telling David Doak about it on Twitter and he seemed aware of it.
Software Engineer here: The easiest thing I can think of to explain this would be if the enemy data for a level were somehow corrupted, resulting in a replicant spawning with a crossbow. Taking it farther, it's possible that enemy could have ramped up accuracy/damage depending if those settings are enemy specific or not (I suspect they might be given how the Perfect Dark difficulty setting works, but that's just a guess). In theory, if someone who understands how Perfect Dark's memory is allocated, you could possible modify the memory data in an emulator and force-spawn such an enemy somewhere in the level. All you'd really need to know is where the enemy data for the level is stored, and what you need to overwrite to get the necessary combination. For real consoles, a better test might be to try and account for *every* spawned character (NPC or enemy) on the stage and try and find one with incorrect behavior; it's just as likely an enemy gets overridden by an NPC, for instance. All I can say if there is a memory leak as the lead programmer says, the observed behavior is *theoretically possible*.
When you said "I know what you're thinking." my response was "Ask a TASer!" and then it didn't happen. While Perfect Dark probably isn't popular enough to be one of those super meticulously understood games, it _is_ similar to Goldeneye, which is, and some of that knowledge might transfer. Perhaps the suggestion of ACE might entice some knowledgeable person to look into exactly what kind of memory bug that developer was talking about. If we can figure out the moment where things can go off the rails (even if it's not immediately obvious), we can explore how it might snowball. I really feel like there's no reason for these old urban legends to be urban legends anymore, given the tools we have today. Unintended behavior is much harder to track down than hidden (but at some point intended) stuff, but it's a problem that can be solved! I'm also interested in the answer to this mystery, but I suspect memory analysis is where we'll find it, rather than futzing around for hours in front of the TV like when we were kids.
Perfect dark always had a sad and somewhat scary vibe to it to me. Also in a51 infiltration, you showed a comment stating that it could be Jonathan shooting the crate guards... there’s a glitch to access that part of the level, using the combat boost, go through the exit and you should be on the other side of the door without triggering the ending cutscene. You will be painfully slow, but as long as you keep applying combat boost the cutscene won’t trigger, and you can find Jonathan near the elevators that are in the next mission. He’s standing completely still and is invulnerable. You can see when you first open the exit door, a guard will be holding Jonathan’s magnum for some reason. I just find it hard to believe that ghost shot was Jonathan especially since he doesn’t have any actions assigned to him at that point in the level, he’s stored specifically for the cutscene.
@@lordkrythic6246 If we do end up discovering it as a bug, try A+Start (What the Glitch). Oddheader is more interested in easter eggs and I can see why he rejected this one.
@@Gold753 I know. I understand, too. It's hard to make a video about something like this. This is more of "we find evidence then make a video", sort of thing.
I know this is a couple of years old, but I wanted to give my thoughts and theory on this. I never encountered the PD ghost, although I have heard about it extensively. I tried to find the ghost many times on the original N64 version AND the Xbox 360 Arcade version when it came out. I never found anything. However, I have a theory, although it's more of a fun thought. In the second level of the Chicago mission (the G5 building) in the first room, the second guard with the cloaking device, if you knock him unconscious instead of kill him, he will drop a crossbow. We also know from later in the game that there is the Psychosis Gun which causes someone to shoot members of one's side (for example: shoot an enemy guard, they will start shooting other guards). My theory is that this same guard with the crossbow, he was fooling around with a Psychosis Gun, and shot himself, so then he shot those 2 guards and then by then the effects wore off so then he uncloaks himself and shoots you. Either that, or that guard is a psycho and when he's not doing his job guarding the G5 building, he's out killing people like a serial killer. But he has to use a different weapon, one that's silent (like the Crossbow) to do it to avoid getting caught. But when you knock him out, he drops that crossbow. Just a fun idea, but who knows really...
I never knew about this "ghost" thing. However you definitely triggered a memory for me when I was young. Yes, I 100% have encountered the door opened and guards already dead. I don't recall how I was killed but probably never occurred to me that it was an extra person or rare thing to happen. Just thought it was weird the door was already opened. Also the scene where the guy isn't there definitely happened on my game. He used to be there. Then one day he was just invisible and I remember laughing about it and then showing friends. I didn't realize it was a thing that happened to others. If it helps. I used to do the challenges like crazy too. I had all 30 of them complete. In the Xbox 360 game, I have only 29 of them complete. I suck at them now. I barely got 29 and 30 just pissed me off too much to complete it. I think you guys are definitely on to something. I still have my n64 cartridge. It's in storage. Sucks that it's winter, but first opportunity I get I will go see and confirm it's a V1.0 copy.
That's an awesome story! I love hearing more and more of these encounters as they continue to add to the lore of the Chicago Ghost. Maybe one day we'll finally catch it on video!
Goose you inspired me to start doing UA-cam and now 2 years later this shit is my full time job. Love your content man, you're a natural narrator, much love from a fellow Canadian!!
ahh the best story telling voice to listen to on a high end sound system. good vid, made me remember of a couple times on the mission Air Base: Espionage when retrieving the outfit at the start the guards were already dead.
Challenge 22 is a capture the briefcase challenge with both Crossbows and one hit kills. I think it is the only challenge with crossbows. And one more thing... there is a glitch where the PresSim gets stuck on the catwalk on that challenge, according to Marshmallow’s guide it happens 99% of the time, maybe that triggers something. Someone should try playing that challenge and leaving when the Sim is stuck on the catwalk or something then enter Chicago?
I have not thought about this in YEARS but as a kid I had a cartridge of perfect dark me and my friends only played it for combat simulator really and my cousin gave me a copy of his cartridge save data which had completed save files so we could have all the unlocks. I remember vividly messing with settings in Combat simulator as a kid and leaving the game running with no hostiles, just to explore around and do stuff. I left to do something maybe eat and came back upstairs to my room and I some how died, (I feel like I remember hearing the death sound too but its been so long I dont even know.) I remember this VIVIDLY though and wondering what the hell happened and it scared the heck out of me. I remember telling my friend about it so we both were extremely curious about this and so we tried to reproduce the issue by just starting a combat sim with unlimited time (since thats what we usually had set) and just waiting and giving up. Later on my cousin moved to the next new consoles so they gave me all their n64 games and controllers so I have both cartridges now; me and my friends only played using my cousins cartridge from then on out though because it had all the cool unlocks and play time. Now I did look this up at one point and found out about the "ghost" but there was such little information and it was all just talk I moved on. I didnt know one of the Dev's actually chimed in on this so seeing this video reminded me of all of this. The fact that certain actions could overwrite code of certain situations into various parts of the games ram actually makes a ton of sense. We would play for HOURS leaving the console running for many more hours while we left the house or ate or w/e. I just checked both my copies and my Cartridge is a 1.0V shockingly (something I actually never knew) and my cousins cartridge was a later version copy with the bug fixes. WHO actually knows what is triggering these code overflow events but I do remember playing the challenge modes as a kid and we would do lots of bizarre modes with maxed stimulants and saving profiles of that with equally stupid lazy names. Saving and trading save files too. I wonder if that even has any affect on triggering this data overwriting bug more so. This was not something I made up either its very bizarre and I want to say it actually happened one other time too but I could actually see a stimulant shooting my character and her dieing because I remember being absolutely terrified and turning the cartridge off at one point. Just thinking about that gives me shivers to this day.
Haha, you used my clip! This has been a rumor for ever and it's so funny to see videos still being made on this. What other secrets lie within that little cartridge? oo;
I remember going down to 'punk pond' once and the doors were already opened which was really confusing. On this occassion there was no ghost, guards or dead bodies in the area. Prehaps I arrived to late to the scene. I bought the game on its first day of release so it must have been version 1.0.
"I want to believe" with the UFO was a great touch. This is my favorite vid of yours I've seen. So good, and it makes me want to keep my N64 on overnight.
One of your best videos to date! Rare to see these gaming mysteries that still aren't understood to this day... but I hope you find some more to share with us through this video, and maybe an update on your findings (definitely more to explore, and maybe some help from Your Eliteness? :). Agree with other comments, the only thing lacking in the video is that you weren't narrating to us by the fireplace. Would've been truly chilling with that added ambiance. Absolutely fascinating nonetheless. Stay true.
@@M4XD4B0ZZ Yeah, it's kind of a let-down even if accurate. A much more impressive series of glitches in a Zelda game is the "glitch world" in the original Link's Awakening. It's well-known these days, but I remembered stumbling upon it back in the dark times before the internet and was always mystified by it and how it worked - it was really my first exposure to seeing how game data could be used in ways the game never intended. I'd spend hours trying to explore it...hard to do without save states, because it was easy to get stuck in walls and potentially softlock the file. I'm always fascinated with seeing this kind of thing happen with more complex games like Perfect Dark, though.
This is wild. I specifically remember running into the “Chicago ghost” NUMEROUS times in the bar. Heading down the stairs I would hear the commotion and would be happy about it bc all I had to do was wait for the locked door to open, an npc would run out (apparently fleeing) and I could then go in and access the extra handgun. Yes, I would go in and get dropped sometimes and I would scream that the game was “cheating.” But most all games “cheated” back then so I never really thought anything of it. Anyhoo, other times I”d access the bar in the same manner, hear the cloaking squawk once and then nothing. I remember searching the room thoroughly, but what ever was in there was nowhere to be found. I also remember rationalizing at the time that the next level was the G5 building, which is loaded with cloaked guards from the getgo, so maybe the game had a map overlap glitch that drug in a guard from the opening of the next level. Once I got far enough into the room the map gets fully loaded and negates the phantom foe. (Pretty sure that’s not how that works, but I remember it making sense in my 19 year old brain at the time:). Hope this input helps!
An addendum: I practically NEVER played any challenges or multiplayer. I was more into finding the most flawless way to complete the main campaign levels- eking out cheats and short cuts. The Chicago level had many different things that you could do to be clever and get more meat off the bone, so I grinded that stage endlessly until I could find the most seamless way of beating it with no damage. I have vivid memories of the “ghost” in the bar- would never have thought people would be studying it all these years later!
When I was a kid, Punk Pond was a frequent place I'd make my rounds to when I was playing with cheats codes active. Sometimes I would get into the club, and sometimes I wouldn't. Sometimes the door is already open, and I'd attribute that to me going on a rampage with All Weapons enabled before going down there-- maybe some guard pathed down there during my rampage and opened it. It seemed arbitrary to child me whether it'd be open or not, and the place's irrelevant nature always fascinated me. Sometimes the door was already open, and guards were dead, and I'd ask myself if I already visited that evening. I'd stop myself and go, "but wait, if I was already here, and these guys are already dead, how come the door was open? I shouldn't have been able to get inside." In retrospect, it's kinda funny that the door always opens during these "ghost encounters" for some reason. There was at least one occasion in which I went down there without invincibility on and died for no explainable reason. I remember this well because, as a kid, stuff like this scared me a little, so I'd make sure to come back the next few visits with invincibility on. I also swear there was at least one instance where an entity that shouldn't have been down there, was down there-- like one of Easton's weird punk guards with the black and white rock star getup who normally wield K7 Avengers. I've also experienced my character dying after I've left an empty multiplayer map open for hours. Could never get it to happen again. It was Skedar. I opened it and never moved, literally stood there the whole time. Was just vibing to the music. I also left the N64 on while we went on a car ride to some supermarket once, and when I came back, my character had died and the infinite time match had ended without my say-so. Of course, I was a kid, so maybe I just didn't make it infinite after all. So, maybe it did happen again, but even at the time I hardly retained the memories of that stuff very well, so... shrug. I have a theory-- perhaps one of the guards normally possessed by player two during counter-operative mode can be possessed by a simulant during any mode, and one of the more commonly pooled areas at the beginning of the map is Punk Pond. Being a non-linear map, I distinctly remember realizing that they probably rationalized that the player shouldn't be one of the guards who can immediately encounter Joanna so as to give Joanna some time to position herself before her assassin arrives, so as to not alert all the other guards. As such, I'd think player 2 would often spawn in Punk Pond, and might even spawn there the vast majority of the time-- including as a "extra" guard spawned with no weapon normally due to the absence of other guards to spawn. This could happen in regular levels when Joanna either killed or had loaded in every other possessable entity, whom were usually 'inactive guards' further ahead in the level than where Joanna was. As for why the AI's getting a crossbow, though? Beats me. However-- consider that the rockstar outfit guy I mentioned might actually be a DarkSim, since I feel like I remember that being the stock outfit for that simulant type. Concerning the Area 51 footage, it's possible the counter-operative simulant AI was being interfered with by whatever code was supposed to be used for Johnathan in that section. This would explain why they're still using the crossbow, but seem to be missing shots, are using the sedative bolt instead of the instant kill bolts, and aren't displaying as many effects when shooting. Bolts aren't visibly sticking into the walls in the footage. If they were a DarkSim as normal, they'd be landing consistent headshots at an alarming rate at the least. Being a DarkSim would explain why they just instantly kill you in single player otherwise-- they were likely using the insta-kill bolts. This might only happen in Chicago 99% of the time it does occur, because Chicago might be one of few maps where from the very beginning the second player is given the "extra" spawn. Therefore, AI settings might apply. I remember someone saying DarkSims cheat and obtain weapons or spawn with them without needing to walk and pick them up, as well as teleport if the radar is off. I'm not sure how much all of these things are true, but I have confidence that they just give themselves weapons. Why the crossbow, then? It might be part of some leaked settings, sure. It might also be some esoteric default value. You'd think that would be something like the Falcon 2 or some other strange gun that would make sense to be "the first gun" in an array or table. Why a DarkSim? Either it was also some kind of leaked settings glitch, or the game had some reason to default to that whenever the conditions for the "ghost" were met. I haven't played Counter-Operative mode in years, so I could be wrong about the spawning rules in Chicago, and I still don't know how the DarkSim would make it into G5, unless one of the guards was vulnerable to that injection somehow. I theorize we don't see the ghost in more levels because, since the game is not in counter-operative mode officially, non-extra guards fail to be overwritten because their actual rules either overwrite the simulant, or the simulant is never queue'd to spawn since an "extra guard" wouldn't be allowed. It'd go something like: Counter-operative spawning check: is there a suitable non-active guard alive? If yes, put player in guard. If no, make a new guard to put the player into. If this check returns yes, the DarkSim never actualizes. It's either placed into a pre-existing guard-- and then overwritten, or it never gets injected in the first place due to the difference between the DarkSim AI handling code and the counter-operative code for converting a guard who may normally have some nominal amount of area-specific scripting and turning them into a player-esque entity. I think the DarkSim probably needs a fresh guard created for them on map load-- and this is something which sometimes does just happen on map load, I think, and your only solution to get closer to the player if you were impatient was to commit suicide rather than to walk through the entire level. My best guess is that there's a model or loadout handling part of the DarkSim code which breaks when trying to access living guards because their model and weapons are different and the spawning method becomes non-traditional. When you possess entities in counter-operative, you inherit everything they had. Under this jurisdiction, the ghost should be a blue-shirted guy running around with a CMP150 pretty consistently. I could see a DarkSim successfully spawning with a crossbow if they got the "extra guard" slot. They could inject their preferred weapon, usually a map pickup-- which I guess in the case of Chicago is a crossbow for some reason. When I phrase it like that, it might be because a random memory address to do with Chicago's data is interpreted as the value for a crossbow. This guard being a DarkSim rather than any other type might also be produced by reading garbage data as well. I can even answer why guards would be out of position. Assuming the DarkSim inherited player-like code or counter-operative player 2 code, they'd be considered "friendly" to the other guards up until getting a few kills. Thus, a couple guards might be out of position or strangely aggro'd once they realized their player 2 was a traitor-- likely prompting them to open the door. As for why the DarkSim was just popping off on them, I dunno. I guess either the sim or the player 2 code doesn't make for the same kind of "team" flag that you'd expect to see in the multiplayer mode. Being a guard itself, the DarkSim could open the door as well if it wanted to. It doesn't seem to venture outside the club, but the door itself and the landing slightly outside it seems to be part of the same zone based on how the guards move. The sim just can't handle something about transitioning onto the stairs, and I'm not sure what since some other guards (like the extras when you sound the alarm) do it just fine. Worst case scenario? You either need to play a specific challenge or specific combat simulator game, play bouts of counter-operative, play with cheats, and then play Chicago until your theoretical injected DarkSim gets the correct spawning slot and spawns as an extra and proceeds to go on a rampage. Dunno why dying sporadically for unexplained reasons would freak me out as a kid, when it wasn't like death was an uncommon thing in Perfect Dark.
I gotta say I had never heard of the ghost before watching this and I never knew you could get into the club however immediately when it was said that he could hear gun fire from under the map I had that holy crap deja Vu moment where I remembered playing this a long time ago and hearing shots and the screams of ai being killed on that level in that spot but never being able to explain it.
What makes this plausible is that invisibility, crossbows and infighting all exist somewhere in the game's code. It would be very easy for a fake story to claim to see something that would require art assets that just don't exist or would require specific complex programming.
Very strange, my cary says 19 on the back. The last I played this game, I recall that Trent did appear in the cutscene. However what I do recall is that in Area 51 Escape, some dialogue became missing after some months or years? Of playing the game. The first bits of dialogue from the doctors was missing, and you could only hear from "I don't care much for procedures" onwards. I also had this anomaly on air force one, where some of the president's speech became missing. I am certain that when the cart was new all the dialogue was spoken. Anybody encounter this before? Is this part of the buggy 1.0 cart?
@@GamerFolklore I've got it in my room, I will capture the recordings and send them to you. Hope I can find my av cables, can't recall any other anomalies but I will be in touch.
Just tested..and the glitches didn't happen. Speech played as normal. I'm wondering if my memory is foggy or if somehow my cart fixed itself through lack of use? My apologies.
There's an option to censor swear words, and I recall that cuts off a huge chunk of the president's speech during the air force one mission. You might be thinking of that.
I have my own personal urban legend: that being accidentally activating an invincibility cheat in Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2. Went on an hour long rampage until I was knocked over by a vehicle and Busted by a nearby cop or national guard. Never saw any Ghost in Perfect Dark, though the myth is vaguely familiar to me... could be a false memory though.
A rogue NPC with a cloaking device and a crossbow... Now that's some really cool urban legend, and it's wonderful how well it fits Perfect Dark. I'm sure the setup will be figured out eventually.
I will say I remember SOMETHING in Chicago Street's level. One day, when I was REALLY young, I was playing that level. I went into the streets, and I hard someone shooting. I didn't know where the shots were coming from so I just moved on. I also didn't know of the Gentleman's Club area because I wasn't too knowledgeable about the game at the time so I never really looked into that area.
Ah perfect dark... Way ahead of its time, definitely the best n64 game for me. Concerning the ghost, I have never encounter it, I think... This is the first time I have even heard of sich a thing.... I was more about challenges and multiplayer aspect of the game... That being said, every time I left the game on for the night, I would wake up to a frozen screen. I did it several times, always waking up to the same unsatisfying result... i eventually quit doing that, thinking the console overheating was the reason it froze. For anyone wondering why would anyone leave the game unattended for the whole night; Perfect Dark had a multiplayer ranking system going from "#20: Beginner" all the way down to "#1:Perfect"... To reach the last rank you had to do some rather time consuming stunts such as having a playtime of 9 days (easy), using 9000 bullets (harder than it sounds) and walking 9000 kilometers (Ridiculously insane)... One would leave the game on while leaving the controller leaning against something so that your character would be left walking in circles for hours... Additionally, you could use a rubber band to have the "z" button pressed and fire your gun while doing circles, killing two or three birds with one stone (assuming you still needed to meet the time milestone)... Anyway, despite all my efforts, I could only reach rank "3: Invincible"... :( Thanks goose, your videos bring joy to all of us. I believe video proof of this ghost will be posted soon.
I genuinely love these types of mythical scenarios. My own favorite is the "Ghosts of Halo". The original encounter, supposedly, was in Halo 2's Lockout multiplayer level, where a dude and his friend, only those two, were shooting each other, tossing grenades, the usual, when a sudden unknown third player appeared and began moving without animations, gliding around, shooting, and throwing sticky grenades with disturbing accuracy. This myth has persisted all the way into Halo MCC on PC, and remains a speculation, with very little genuine video of these encounters. There are allegations that is has mostly happened in Halo 3, but I've heard of allegations of it happening within Halo: Reach too, on the Forgeworld map. I myself have put probably several thousand hours into forging in Halo 3 and Halo Reach specifically, and have never encountered these entities. I wish I could though. They'd make some building sessions a bit more interesting. Important edit: These encounters mostly seemed to happen during online games, but there have been stories of it happening while wandering maps or building maps solo as well.
Can't we use an emulator speed up ( and multiple instances of it) and a TAS, to just run millions of simulations? I'm sure this could be done. If anyone has an understanding if TAS, I can write the data science code to set thus up.
TAS would be the most time effective way to prove the ghost but here is the issue, what is the damn set up to get the ghost to happen? Solving that is like trying to solve God's existence with just math.
I've also encountered it. I think you can trigger it by running through Area 51: Infiltration while aggro'ing all the guards without killing anyone. Near the exit, the game will be so overloaded that the ghost could appear. The game will try to drop the framerate/stop it from crashing by starting to kill off the guards.
I don't think that's the reason. Any sort of guard unloading would be done by culling, or disabled by the engine, not by guards killing each other. Based on my experience doing a pacifist run of GoldenEye, the engine can handle lots of guards existing, and only really chugs framerate in rendering all them.
I encountered a similar glitch on Pelagic II when playing coop with the AI Velvet where a gaurd turned to our team and killed some of the other gaurds. Maybe the Chicago ghost is related to the "Janus Gaurd" Phenomenon. I think it may have something to do with Friendly AI or the psychosis guns programming. Perhaps the overflow error overwrites the guards "team" and flips it to yours. But this glitch happens most often on coop with perfect buddies and constantly spawning enemies.
I mean, while it does sound very much like a poor attempt at a creepy-pasta sort of rumor, it also sounds very much in the realm of memory leak/corruption effects. I never got into the game due to being a little too hardcore into Goldeneye, so I can't speak of the community or lore- but it's not exactly uncommon knowledge that programming for a lot of games from the N64 era and the times before are very much in the realm of what Bethesda aspires to match, so it's not really unreasonable to assume that you could easily find unintended "events" like what's described here. I'm not one to take urban legends as even being likely, not as someone that grew up listening to unlocking blood on the SNES Mortal Kombat, saving General Leo- Shen Long. This doesn't sound like those, it's not something that would be game changing- not in that fashion at least- it's just something weird that apparently happened that people couldn't really explain. If it's real and people figure out how to force the memory change, it could potentially be huge, depending on how it develops- but I don't know how likely that really is given the structure of the game, at least as I understand it.
This game is one of my favorite game of all time and I nevered encountered such a thing, but I'm willing to stream a bit of it casually to try to get that GHOST captures on TAPES ;) I'm no fancy speedrunner but I did every level on perfect agent once and it was a good milestone for me. I play from time to time but I can try another full playtrough streamed for that purpose :) Edit : I have for sure the v1.0
An interesting thing was just brought to my attention. Someone mentioned something about cooperative which reminded me of the counter operative game mode. Counter operatives spawn randomly in the level, but what if the game is glitched into thinking it's a counter operative game mode, but there is no counter operative? Clearly, it would be addressing bad memory, and very well that memory could cause the ghost to spawn in. It was just some stroke of dumb luck that the ghost has a crossbow and cloaking device, and that it spawned in the pond punk bar. Just a suggestion if you're going to be diving into this.
@@lordkrythic6246 thanks for the informations that's really a great idea. I just did a new game file and I've recoreded everything (i played casually for my first test, hyper casually) here's what I did: I did the 4 first challenge by myself (solo not 3 people). I then did a sim deathmatch. Then I've started the campaign till chigago, go to the punk bar thingy and nothing happened. I triggered the guards and i've killed them casually. I'll try some stuff with count op. Thanks for the idea.
@@glitchydust4015 Do you know about the easy challenge bug? It lets you overwrite any challenge with your own settings. You can essentially fight meat sims, and the game thinks you beat the challenge when you're done. You can beat every challenge like this. I stressed in the beginning that bugs like this might have something to do with triggering the ghost.
@@lordkrythic6246 i only knew about the weapon trainning stuff. I will check this out! I beat like 38 out of 40 challenges back in the day solo. I have 4 controllers too so I can mess with so much stuff here ;) Thanks for the info :)
@@glitchydust4015 Ok. Good luck. You need two controllers to do the easy challenge bug, i think i talk about how to perform it on the reddit post. You basically have one controller try to start the challenge, while the other loads a custom game type that's been saved. The game thinks you're doing the challenge, when you're actually playing the custom game mode.
I will say this, it has been a very very long time since I played this game, but back in the day I did play this game for a very very long time. This game consumed part of my childhood, and playing alone, doing the story, early speed running, playing multiplayer with friends or just Sims, it was something I did all of the time. For hours. So I do not have any specific encounter; if I ever ran into the ghost, I definitely don't remember it and I feel like I would. But I used to love playing on Chicago, for the vibes, the atmosphere, and especially the music--a favorite of mine that I actually listen to recently several times, probably why this video was recommended to me. So this is sketchy information at the back of my memory, from 20 years ago or more, but... I do remember some strange things happening on Chicago. Nothing necessarily for me to make an internet post about or remember for all this time, but when you mentioned the gunshots--not necessarily the screams where the dead guards, and definitely not an invisible one shotting crossbow ghost--but the gunshots, that rang a bell for me. I do remember a couple of instances where strange gunfire that I didn't prompt, would ruin or impact me sneaking through the stage and I do remember specifically showing my friend, or trying to, and telling him about it which is why I remember this at all. But I don't think I ever went down to the club to investigate.
A different thing happened to me while playing the Pelagic 2 mission. While running through the stage, aggro'ing as many guards as I could without killing anyone. I encountered a guard that had turned friendly. My crosshair was blue over it, and it attack other guards that got close.
Now that u mention it, i remember daying in front of that brown door when i was trying to figure out how to open it. Didnt hear the crossbow by i died by a single silent shot, and at the time ,i was expending a lot of time trying to open that door and i got pissed when i died. And after that i didnt try anymore, in fact, everytime i played PD i never went down there ever .
I'm just another anecdotal piece of text on the internet (and also could definitely be a Mandela effect!!) however I'm going to join in: this definitely happened to me and a friend playing when we were..... 14? It's one of those weird creepy memories that always sticks. We were just dicking around after school, on a 1v1 game, and there absolutely was an invisible third player with only a crossbow on the map.We had no simulants on. It was creepy as shit - I'd stayed over late and we were playing in a dark room, so we ended up turning it off and just freaking out completely. I can't believe this is an urban myth that is still unsolved, I thought nobody else had seen this happen. Bizarre.
Simulants in Solo Missions have an AIVSAI flag with an appropriate number from 1-10 to assign teams. It's more likely that this value itself is changing which explains things like Janus guards.
I don’t know if these are actually true ghost experiences, but I’ve had several weird glitches over the last 3 years that make me remember the ghost, even though I only play 1.1, I’ve never had one exactly like the ghost incident but I remember once finding the Punk Pond doors open with no guards, (although I could put that down to having lead the guards out of the pond to be killed on the surface), along with one incident of hearing a cloaking device sound with no source in the level. I’ve also had some other weird occurrences such as guards appearing with weird weapons in Crash Site, Chicago, and Area 51 Infiltration and Rescue. Most of my experiences involve guards spawning with grenades instead of their usual guns, I’ve seen that in every mission I listed, I’ve also experienced one of the guards falling through the roof of a tunnel in Crash Site, then killing me instantly with a sniper rifle, even though it was one of the guards that usually carries a machine gun. I reloaded my quicksave from a few seconds before, and it didn’t happen again even when I recreated the exact same movements. The most recent and most bizarre glitch happened in one session, I loaded the game up and ran Chicago, Air Base, Air Force One, Crash Site, then all 3 Area 51 missions, all in Special Agent. I didn’t encounter anything weird in anything before Crash Site, where a guard spawned with a grenade instead of his usual gun, and dropped it when I killed him, but the rest of the level went normally. Then I loaded up Area 51 Infiltration, and it was really weird, there were several more guards than I usually experience, and the one at the start by the turret who usually drops a grenade didn’t have one. Later in the level, after I’d dealt with all 3 turrets and the Comms rider bug, I took out the drone with regular gunfire as I hadn’t got across the minefield yet/through the gate then suddenly killed a guy that had a rocket launcher, which I’ve never seen before or since. I didn’t have a grenade as I didn’t get any from the guy that usually drops them, so I didn’t cross the minefield, instead I went around the front gate and took out the turrets with a combination of the rocket launcher and gunfire, then got swarmed by more guards than I was used to, one of which was completely unarmed but in usual Area 51 uniform, and another which threw a grenade. I placed the bomb and started running out, then tried to open the lift and realised I didn’t have the keycard, so I ran over to the place where he repairs the drone and found the key laying on the floor with no body. I then collected the shield, and went down into the lift, where the rest of the level was normal. I was really confused, but I finished the mission anyway. During Area 51 Rescue, things got weird, once again the guards didn’t seem right, some of them were in different positions to usual and in some areas there were more of them than usual, and two of them had grenades. I’ve never ever seen grenades in Area 51 Rescue, before or since. I was able to get the Phoenix by making noise in front of the door and causing the engineer that vanished in the previous level to run through the door, and beat the level using that, and I don’t think anything else weird happened other than one of the guards in the same uniform as the storeroom guards jumpscaring me of nowhere in the middle of the labs. I don’t know if what I’ve experienced is normal or not, but they were very strange occurrences, and I’ve had a few of them like this, these are just the ones I remember, but I think I’ve had one or two others. I feel like this might well be tied to the ghost legend somehow, especially since some rumours mentioned a ghost in Area 51.
![Why Does No One Speedrun This Game? or, The Odyssey of the Lost VHS Tapes [a Fireside Story]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JZhKEBwCfTs/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why Does No One Speedrun This Game? or, The Odyssey of the Lost VHS Tapes [a Fireside Story]](/img/tr.png)
Hey Goose, just wanted to say thank you for covering my reddit post. A few things you forgot to mention, however. I also gathered and looked through all the scripts for the Chicago level, which clearly showed that there is no logic that supports the ghost, which means it is certainly a bug. Also, you recreated the situation pretty well, although I was facing the pillar slightly different, and a few cross bow bolts whizzed past me, before one finally made contact and killed me. Thanks again! I'm certain someone will figure this out one day! And when that happens, I get to have a really good "I told you so" moment. Lol.
I wholeheartedly believe you. After watching this video, I had to go look at my childhood copy of perfect dark, and sure enough, it's version 1.0. I might play around with it and see what I can do
@@lofiurbex2511
Thank you! Good luck! Whoever finds it first is going to get mad respect, at least from me, anyway. Lol.
No offence but this is sus as fuck and doesn’t make sense from a programming perspective.
Is this entire conversation with the dev public, or only his responses? Because I have a hard time believing that you told a developer this exact story and his response was “hmm... it’s possible”. Bugs don’t create NPCs with unique grouping so that they are hostile to both the guards and to the player, let alone one that specifically targets the guards before seeking out the player.
If this exists in any version of the game, it was put there intentionally and would be possible to trigger in some way.
@@ShivaOO7
There are pictures of our conversation on the second reddit post. I also just sent Mark Edmonds a link to this video, as well.
Man, I wish I had this game or console so I could do some glitch hunting myself. Kind of in the mood for it. It sounds interesting, and I wish everyone luck in catching it on camera and figuring out what it is.
When I was in design school a teacher put a secret zombie in a level design assignment we were doing that would spawn between 2-6am to kill players testing out their creations as a way of telling them to go to sleep and stop working.
Thats really creative haha
That's infinitely creepier than some horror games (Like that "VHS" one from a year ago). Imagine being the first person that happened to and not knowing what the fuck just happened.
thats so evil i love it
Thats awesome. However, it should be noted that the N64 has no time keeping capabilities. I looked into this during my time looking for the ghost. There is a very specific setup that must be performed, just don't know what it is!
I...don't think your teacher got the results he was hoping for.
I know I sure as hell wouldn't be able to sleep after that.
I was one of the designers on this game, my main focus was multiplayer, ai navigation, background hits etc.
I never heard of this during testing and I never heard of anyone on the small dev team adding this to mess with you.
A few of us did add our own little things in, I added the question marks, and crates on the sewers level, I also added the keyhole on Area 51 as a hats off to super mario world.
I will put my 2 cents in though which might add fuel to the fire :)
Every polygon in the game had attributes assigned to it to determine if you or the AI could do certain things.
I'll give you an example, the railings in these games back then were an alpha channel texture, but behind the scenes, it would have been a single or double sided polygon, obviously this would be something the AI would need to be able to see and shoot through, vs a regular wall so the engine/game/editor give me the ability to define that over a normal wall where the AI cannot see or shoot through otherwise the AI would do silly things that would make it look silly.
Its possible an AI at a certain point in time could have fallen into the level.
Its also possible the AI there was being used as a pawn for something else to happen (maybe the drone), new stuff would not be coded for everything, often the initial bit of code would copied and pasted in other parts of the game and modded slightly to create a similar outcome to its original design but appear a more unique function.
The punk pond, was originally called the pink pony, however the name was copyrighted. I think it was the name of the strip club or drinking bar the original dev team went to in LA around the time of E3 99 or 2000.
I can't even recall if it (punk pond) was used in the main game, I know it was going to be, but it possible one of the other designers were testing possibilities and simply give up or run out of time and locked it off and still left some junk there.
The next level is G5 building right where the cloaking stuff becomes prominent, maybe it was going to be an ALT entrance or something.
Unless someone put it in on purpose which is unlikely, my money its either a glitch which happens from time to time based on other variables in the level which might only happen under certain conditions or its being used to achieve some other function thinking you would never see it.
A bit like the flight recorder on Statue Park in Golden Eye. It starts off at one location and then teleport to like one of 9 or something when another state is reached.
My best guess guess is this was not intentional, and you're witnessing a bug, or the "ghost" is some kind of place holder that was performing some other function. Possibly the drone that patrols the level.
Maybe some junk that got left over from another difficulty level or bonus level setup.
If someone had a screen grab of the ghost, I could tell you whose face it was on the teams.
P.S.
The screen grab you used for this video, the guard with the hat on was Karl Hilton, he was the one who by large designed and build this level before he left Rare to form FRD. So IF
Can you explain the purpose behind the secret cheeses found in nearly every level?
Cool!
You and the team who created this game are forever legends and I thank you for making bright part of my dark child hood thank -fan
@@GamerFolklore Just to add a tiny morsel of extra backstory: The original 'Pink Pony' name of the club was visible in at least one preview screenshot back in the day (in magazines and/or online), before the final version of Perfect Dark came out. I remember being puzzled that the name had changed once I actually bought the game. I figured Nintendo had censored it for sounding too obviously strip-club-esque. Interesting to hear that it was actually a copyright problem instead.
I know the answer to the Chicago ghost It's very simple and if you worked on it I'm surprised you don't know this. I'm playing perfect dark for the first time and about 20 years just so that I can screen record what the ghost is and how to see it every single time you play this level if you so choose to It's very possible to see this every time you play the Chicago level without failure.
Trent was supposed to be in that cutscene but just didn't render? That makes so much more sense now! I checked my old cartridge and it is indeed 1.0, that cutscene used to confuse me so much!
I remember that cutscene because it NEVER made sense! Too bad I don’t have the cart anymore. 😢
I know the idea of a sim with no enemies struck you as wrong for something to overflow into a glitch npc elsewhere in the game, but I think discounting the no npc sim because it didn't feel right was a mistake.
Let's look at a different game with a famous memory bug as an example of unrelated data causing weird things: Missingno in Gen1 pokemon. Missingno is caused by your name being stored into the wild pokemon region of memory, and then the one strip of cinnabar island doesn't overwrite the wild pokemon region of memory, allowing you to load "pokemon" that are interpreted from your name.
In the same way, you don't need an npc in a sim to overflow into another level, you need the right random garbage data to overflow into a place in memory that affects NPC spawning in the next level you play.
All this said, it's likely going to take people studying the memory overflow bug in 1.0 to actually derive whether the ghost is caused by the bug and how to trigger it.
Very well said!
Yeah. The NPC don't "walk" between the levels. Actually 0 sims is likely to cause a bug because it would have been tested less. For example what if there is a piece of code that is programmed to always access the "first" bot in the level? When there are none it will do weird stuff.
Not only that, he did the Combat Sim setup wrong. The idea isn't that you play in a CS game by yourself and a ghost appears in Story overnight, but rather that the ghost appears in that match of CS overnight.
LIKE SO GOOSE SEES, possible method of testing the myth detailed below (after my mini rant)
Oh God, people are misunderstanding what the developer said and jumping to conclusions without evidence. Look, if the ghost is real, and what the developer said about the 1.0 version being a buggy piece of crap and potentially causing memory overwrite errors in the game is correct, he did NOT mean that you specifically have to play the challenge levels in order to get it to occur. What he said was that the same glitch that is responsible for overwriting a section of memory within ONE SPECIFIC challenge level, COULD potentially be causing other overwrite glitches in other parts of the game, and that he had NO IDEA what those errors might cause to happen or even how to get them to trigger. He did NOT say, "oh, to trigger the ghost you need to play the challenge stages and trigger some unknown glitch that then causes the simulants from the challenge stages to leak out and escape into other parts of the game." That's stupid. Why the hell is everybody jumping to this same conclusion as if it's fact, when that's not at all what's being said? Seriously, is everybody just so desperate to trigger the glitch that you're all just clutching at whatever straws present themselves and playing Telephone with the rumour? You won't find anything that way.
Also, a few nights of playing the game and leaving the N64 running all night are NOT in any way a useful sample size. If encountering the ghost is so rare as to be a virtual non-event which the vast majority of PD players don't believe even exists, then you'd need to run hundreds, even thousands of attempts before you could conclusively state that the ghost isn't showing up.
Look, go back to the roots of the myth and start again without preconceptions. Everyone's gotten too caught up in the speculation and have forgotten the only accounts with any consistency to them, those being the original rumours. From the ORIGINAL story of the Chicago Ghost, we can determine the following information:
1) The ghost is theorised to to appear in the Chicago Stealth level, or the G5 building itself
2) The ghost is cloaked and wields a crossbow
3) The ghost is most commonly encountered in the Pond Punk club, and will engage the enemy soldiers in the club before you arrive, which seems to result in the door being open without the player needing to aggro any of the guards inside first, though this is not 100% confirmed and may not always be the case
4) The ghost will decloak behind you and then kill you instantly with highly accurate crossbow fire. Since nobody has ever claimed to visually confirm exactly what the ghost looks like, we can infer that it always decloaks out of your line of sight, or at least it always has in any of the stories of encounters with it.
5) The ghost can apparently also appear in the G5 building itself, where its spawn location and behaviour are unknown, save for the fact that it seems to target the player specifically like in the Pond Punk club
6) Encountering the ghost is supposedly so rare as to be a virtual non-event
Now, I would be inclined to disbelieve a story like this on the basis that there are so far no confirmed, recorded encounters with the ghost, and the whole story is based purely on hearsay from players who claim they were killed by it. However, an experience with the old action adventure game Primal on the PS2, which I also only ever saw once and was unable to replicate despite multiple hours of attempts, allows me to accept the possibility that there could be a occurrence within a game that is so unlikely to happen that basically nobody has ever seen it. That possibility, at least for now, leads me to believe that there could potentially be some truth to the rumour based on the consistent early reports of encounters with it.
So, to go back to Krythic's account, he stated that he encountered the ghost when he and his friend were playing a marathon of Perfect Agent difficulty. This means that, from the information provided, we know they played the game from the start, up to at least the Chicago Stealth level, on Perfect Agent Difficulty, and that they died multiple times in the lead up. That's where people should be focusing their testing for now. The posts from the developer have been misunderstood and are muddying the waters, and we can also not forget the possibility that some of the information from people who say things like "if you start a combat sim map with no simulants, and leave the game running all night, sometimes you wake up to find your player dead" may be misinformation, or indeed, intentional disinformation. Start from the beginning and work from there.
I propose that you get 50 players, all with N64s and version 1 copies of Perfect Dark, each making 20 runs of the game on Perfect Agent, up to at least the end of the G5 building, and record their runs. That would provide a sample size of 1000 runs, which is a large enough sample size as to provide some meaningful results. Remember, this thing is so rare that most people don't think it's real, if it exists then the probability of encountering it is extremely low. If nobody finds it, we can assume the chances of it happening are greater than 1 in 1000 and go from there. Also I'm serious that you should do this. Find 50 people in the comments right here who both own a physical N64 and a version 1 copy of Perfect Dark, and have the ability to capture footage and send it to youtube. That means I'm out of the running, as my N64 doesn't have a RAM expansion and I don't own Perfect Dark. But this video has over 2000 likes so far. Finding 50 people out of them who meet the criteria I've outlined shouldn't be difficult.
Like so Goose sees. If enough people actively participate in a search for this thing, they should be able to find it. Also, anyone claiming to have encountered the ghost MUST provide footage of them doing so for their submission to count, and said footage must be verified to rule out video editing. Because there is actually a reason why somebody might make a false claim that they've encountered the ghost, and you all know what it is: attention. A person might do it simply because they want to be a part of the urban legend and add new things to the story, and get people talking about it again. So you probably will get some false submissions from people who want their 5 minutes of fame.
So, anyone want to be part of the experiment?
Beautifully put. You think like a software engineer. Perhaps you are one?
The only thing I would add: don't limit to version 1.0. That's yet more speculation from the dev. Games can have more than one bug, and even more than one memory bug. (not a slight at the lead dev. The team did a very good job on PD... loved that game!) Until we know otherwise by confirming the Ghost's existence and consistently being able to reproduce it, or at least until all the previous reports come back to us and confirm they had v1.0 carts. And that seems unlikely to happen, now. Even Krythic was apparently playing on his friend's cart. So who knows if he could even say?
Out of curiosity, what WAS the weird glitch you encountered in Primal on the PS2 and were never able to replicate?
It'd be a fun story either way, but there's no reason why this definitively could not have happened and the story feels consistent. I'd like to believe it's true, good luck on finding proof.
this is the most inspiring comment I have ever seen on youtube.
@@bastardferret869 Why not have 20 players from each version of the game run tests? If it's not for sure limited to the version 1.0 of the game, it could potentially be in the 360 version as well.
I've gotta say, gaming mysteries of this kind always creep me out. Something about something hidden being in the code of the game, international or not, gives me chills. I love it!
Imagine actually encountering it when you were a 13 year old.
I sometimes ran into glitches when I played "Mega Man 2" as a kid, and some of those glitches seemed to actually create new environments.
That was really cool, kind of like an unknown parallel dimension in the game's world.
Memory leak/bug isn’t something hidden in the code really
@@Xatuso best reply
I think it being unintentional makes it even more creepy. Like, the game has sort of evolved its own code but is still limited to the only objective of killing the player.
The bug that Mark was talking about actually involves playing any match with 3 players on the Warehouse level. Trust me, I know. I had two brothers and that bug drove me insane. Mark is misremembering. All that matters is having 3 players on the warehouse level. That alone will crash the game.
It's very important to note that it has nothing to do with challenges. Try it yourself if you don't believe me.
I remember the crash site cutscene bug too.
@@GamerFolklore Just be careful - I've heard that triggering the bug can lead to corrupted saves.
@@j_c_93 Every copy of Perfect Dark is personalised
@@GamerFolklore And it allegedly corrupts all saves, which will brick your cart, be careful with that.
I think the findings being on chicago means way more than it we think. The second level of chicago DOES contain a crossbow you can get by knocking out the first guards in the room you spawn in. Guards that DO cloak invisible. Not only that but chicago 1 and 2 are linked weirdly since i remember the bombable wall you destroy in stealth affects how you escape in the infiltration mission. Maybe the guards are in different factions from the cia guys or the bar ones? If one spawns on the previous levels it may go rogue for his not so teammates. Maybe some marathoning between clearing chicago g5 on a previous diffi ulty and then stealth on the next may cause some glitchiness...
Addendum: the area 51 guy who screams and opens the phoenix warehouse operates similar. His existence depends om your actions on a previous lelvel.
I know the secret. It's very cool. You are all wrong. 100%. I can't believe that I have the answer to the secret I posted it before and I deleted it because I think maybe I should just make a video showing it I can recreate it every time I start that level.
@@jtheexistentialist1221 You're full of crap
@@jtheexistentialist1221 no you don't
@@jtheexistentialist1221 you’re just attention seeking.
@@JimBobJoeB0b I think that I used to play this game a lot more in middle school and you know that I always used the best into this room and steal some dudes guns and it just doesn't make any sense to me how this room is a secret to people like it's not really a secret.
We need more talk of gaming urban legends
I strongly agree
Yes.
So it will keep happening
@@M4XD4B0ZZ I remember as a kid hearing about tmnt for the nes that shredder would appear on the train tracks at midnight . Ah life before the internet
@@kevincrittenden7567 it were magic times my friend
One time while playing Grid in multiplayer, the elevator that's usually locked in that one narrow area was open, lead to black room that you just fall and die in. Video game memory I'll never forget for sure.
I've had that one happen too before!
His has happened to me, just a bit different.
I would never play on anything above Agent because I was too scared of losing. One day while exploring Chicago I wondered into the club where the doors were open and guards were dead. I'd never been down there before so that's why it stuck in my head.
I never saw the ghost and I never got killed by anything, but I saw the dead npcs and wandered through the hitherto locked club for the first time.
Yes same thing happend to me I only played agent
I think this is why some people said that the ghost "helped" them. The ghost probably left that place before you got there so they didnt get to kill you giving you the illusion that he helped you.
This one can most likely be explained. It's been well-documented that the game can activate a "Janus guard" which makes an enemy an ally. I've seen it way too many times in the level Pelagic II.
Why it happens, we don't know but in your case, this is what most likely happened. Type in "Janus Guard Perfect Dark" in yt and you'll find them.
Here's two instances:
ua-cam.com/video/IXPtObezAQU/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/pG8mSiaSlMs/v-deo.html
Same here. Likely on agent, I went down to the punk pond and the doors were open so I could walk in and look around the place, but when I tried again the doors were shut, and that's why I remember it. I can't confirm presence of guards though, alive or otherwise, and I never got killed.
The thing that confuses me is that I have the pal 1.1v
Is there another way to draw all the guards out, like say a taxi crash?
You should ask for a ghost % category to be added to Chicago so you can lure speedrunners into the hunt lol
It should be there on halloween at least!
I have very little to no interest in speed running and yet I am subscribed to you and Karl Jobst because you both have the gift of being excellent story tellers. This video, obviously, is proof positive of this.
Yeah both are good at spinning tales and profiting off seizing other people's attention.
I highly recommend checking out summoning salt! Absolutely amazing content about the history of speed running different games
@@Iliek Lol by that logic, is Sportscenter just "profiting off of seizing the athletes attention"?
@@i1a2159 Thanks! I’ll check it out.
@@ASAPShitPost people just like to hate. Not like he's shining the spot lights on them anyway... (sarcasm on)
I'm a software engineer. I'm not convinced that it can only happen on Version 1.0. It is very much possible that there were other unknown bugs in version 1.0 that were never patched. It is also possible that when they patched version 1.0 that they introduced new bugs and that the ghost might only appear in version 1.1 because of a new bug. It would be helpful to find out which version of the game that the ghost encountered people have and if there is some consistency there.
I have the PAL version so not sure if that makes a difference, all I know is that Trent appears in that cut scene in my copy. And I (and my cousin) have encountered something that killed pretty much a whole floor of enemies on DataDyne and I could hear it and I know how certain simulates fire so it was either a dark or perfect sim. Either way I don’t think it’s locked to V1.0 either.
@@Vereid I'm playing with the game to see if I can encounter these things. Do you have more details about what happened? Such as which floor in Data Dyne, what you were doing leading up to it, what guns you heard, etc.
@@ZAV1010 sorry man I can’t remember what gun or noise it made and I’m afraid if I try to guess I’ll just be talking nonsense. All I remember is that it was a rate of fire that a dark or perfect sim shoot, but honestly even that I’m worried I’m misremembering. I’ve seen another theory that says it might be a glitch with the simulants you get on your side (Velvet) in co-op without playing with another human maybe leaking in. It’s so weird as I KNOW I did not touch (let alone even enter) the floors with the dead guards. Also it was the very first level in the game, and the floor where most of the guards were dead was the floor below Cassandra’s office. I also had another
strange incident where all the Mr Blondes on Carrington Institute (when the bomb is deployed) were just missing. None of them showed up, the craft was there but no Mr Blondes neither was there any dropped Maluers which are the weapons they come equipped with on that level. I’ve had some weird things happen on Perfect Dark but I used to play it everyday after school lol. I also specifically remember being killed 3 times very quickly in succession on the Area 52 combat simulator map - but I only had meat sims with pistols on and anybody that has played PD enough knows that Meat Sims take a long time to kill you with anything that isn’t an explosive or 1 shot weapon (and even then they are inaccurate as hell). I know I did glitch the game into having blank simulants show up in combat simulator a couple of times by just rapidly selecting settings via the simulant/bot settings. I need to see if I can recreate that on video because to my knowledge I doubt anyone else has seen that (I also really doubt this is at all related to the ghost, just something I’d point out).
@@Vereid Thanks for all that information. Some of those sound like separate things happening in the game, but it is good knowing about them. Do you know where I can find information on doing the glitch with the blank simulants?
I was going to say: I always remember Trent being in that cutscene (because of his funny upsidedown smile at the end) and I've encountered the ghost multiple times.
No fucking way. This blows my mind and creeps me out a little. I never knew this was supposed to a rare encounter or accepted as fake by the community, i remember clearly having this happen to me and going nuts trying to recreate it. Same thing, went down, guards are dead and suddenly i am too. I never knew about the other things like the crossbow and the cloak. But i remember it so clearly because by that time i had a PS2 and prefered to play Perfect Dark, but after that i thought it might be an indicator that the game and the console might have had too much use and that it was simply a glitch, so i played a lot less on my N64 after it happened.
I feel like can't express clearly how mind blowing it is to find out its some kind of underground gaming legend.
The fact that you didn't tell this infront of the fire was a huge missed opportunity
As someone who has a working fireplace, it’s not something one does for a video or for ambience of a story. It’s a practical kind of thing that is only used in very few scenarios. If done right the FP will be special is sparingly used. if u notice the fireplace is burning, then it’s Xmas or a super cold ass day!
@@SaltyChip "Has a fireplace" I see what you did there... Humble brag.
Just having a bit of fun by the way
15:39 - I think the developer was mistaken. From The Cutting Room Floor:
A 1.1 release was made in North America, mainly to fix a devastating memory overflow bug which was triggered by simulants entering the ducts in the Warehouse arena. This would overwrite the cartridge's EEPROM save with random garbage, even if a Controller Pak was being used for saving, and could render the game unable to pass the title screen. The version number of the start up screen has not been changed from NTSC version 8.7.
Who knows more about the game? the dev or a weeb?
I used to hang out in Pond Punk quite a bit. (Although, I didn't know what a gentlemen's club was back then, so I thought it was a business meeting room for the mafia. :P ) I don't remember if I've ever been killed by the ghost, but I've definitely found stray crossbow bolts in Pond Punk. I've also definitely been locked out of Pond Punk because all the guards inside were already dead - you could see a dead guard through the ticket window.
As for challenges to look at, I personally would start with Challenge 15 or Challenge 16. Challenge 16 is the first challenge that introduces the PerfectSim (the second hardest sim in the game) and has no radar on Facility with the K7 and proxy mines, among other things. I remember this one vividly because while I was first playing it, the bot would not reset his inventory when he died. I spawned in the room with proxy mines (it was in the area with the REALLY slowly opening doors) and just kept putting them on the door so the bot would blow himself up when he entered. There were no other guns in the room. But, when the bot eventually spawned in the room, he pulled out a K7 and killed me - a gun which was not in the room. I then exited out of the challenges, started up a normal bot match with one MeatSim (the easiest bot in the game) and farsights, so I could see what was in his inventory at spawn. Sure enough, each time he respawned, he had all the weapons collected up to that point. Since this state persists between games, it also might be related to challenge 15 (Grid with 2 normal sims and grenade launchers - another one I remember being mind-numbingly difficult), but I have nothing specific in 15 that I can point to as evidence.
One more thing to note, and this may be different because this bug is still in the XBLA version, but you can also look at the patrolling guard bug in Area 51 Infiltration. Sometimes when you start the level, the guard patrolling the tunnel on the way to the comms objective will be immediately alerted to something suspicious and investigate. He runs from his spawn directly to the PC's spawn, then runs to the PC's current location. Once he sees the player, he'll run back and alert the guards by the comms objective, who then investigate the area where the PC spawn is. As far as I'm aware, this is only triggered by repeatedly playing the level and can happen as often as 1 in 5 tries. Try it with permanent cloaking (RCP120 and infinite ammo) - it's really weird.
One thing I think might be related is the "Janus Guard" phenomenon, something people reported happening occasionally back in the day. Supposedly on Crash Site or Pelagic II a guard would randomly kill the others and join your side as if they were a co-op simulant, and when you would hover your crosshairs over them they would turn blue to indicate they were an ally. I'm not sure if this has ever been proven, but it didn't seem to be met with the same skepticism as the ghost and people generally accepted that it was a real thing that happens.
Edit: I found this video showing a Janus Guard ua-cam.com/video/IXPtObezAQU/v-deo.html
I had my own ghost experience in either dataDyne Defection or Escape back in the day, but it was too long ago for me to remember anything about what happened at all. I just remember making a thread on GameFAQs about it and getting mocked for it (I believe Your Eliteness in particular was someone who made what seemed to be some mocking joke, so it's amusing to me to see he's someone who believes it's possible all these years later haha). Out of curiosity I went and found my old cartridge to see which version it was but it's a 1.1, so who really knows. More than likely it was just me being a idiot 12-13 year-old.
It's good to bring up another very strange, possibly related glitch. Does the Janus Guard glitch work on both versions? Maybe the bug that can cause the ghost, if it is real, has nothing to do with it being version 1.0 or version 1.1.
I literally posted a comment looking for this exact same scenario i had happen to me when i was a kid.
Hahah, I remember getting my own Janus guard! Happened once on Pelagic II, came across a massacre and then a guard charged me and just stopped right there! He was prone to running off and it eventually got him killed. PD really gave you chances to screw around with cutscenes, so I was disappointed I couldn't get him to one.
I’ve only had it happen a couple times in the last 20 years on both my childhood 1.0 copy and friends 1.1 copy on dataDyne Defection. I actually asked Dr. Doak about it on Twitter, he tagged Duncan Botwood, Mr. Botwood had said...the most likely explanation though is ‘it’s a bug’ . Glad I’m not the only one that’s it’s happened to all these years later.
Reminds me of an experience I had in halo 2 with heretic elites swapping teams
This actually did happen me once i got killed totally randomly.
I told my friend over and over about something killed me in an empty room but he never believed me.
I believe anyone who says this, only because i know it's factual!
I'll be uploading video tomorrow showing how this happens.
@@ZAV1010 You actually figured it out?
Everytime someone's say that we feel like "ok stop joke" 😢 , but after random people tell me that i belive but never see before just remember this now because i was cleaning my N64 and remember this .
If someone ever catches it on video please make a second video dedicated to that and not just a clips of the month type of deal.
As a side note: The Pond Punk gentlemen's bar is fairly easy to gain access into. Quickly disarm all three guards, and one will run over and open the door promptly.
Is this consistent, they always do that? Aggro with guns isn't consistent at all, so you may have found the "proper" way to enter.
@@moonhowler667 I remember I used to do it the same way back in 2000. Not sure if I adapted it from playing combat simulator against perfect sims, and easily disarming them, or reading it from a gaming magazine then. Either way, it works on getting inside the bar fairly fast and easy, basically all the time.
@@moonhowler667 Not guaranteed
But as a kid, thats how i always gainned enterance
You disarm and injure all the guards near and one is bound to run inside
I don't remember the ghost and never heard the story until now. However, I DO remember: late nights, I'm trying to wind down before bed so I start a match with no sims just to explore an unfamiliar level or just to vibe in general until I feel sleepy, often falling asleep with the game running, sometimes I'd wake up and be dead. I always just assumed my brother was messing with me. Most of my memories of chicago are of trying to speedrun it to unlock the psychosis gun and never going back because that floaty robot boi was terrifying to my little child mind. I hated that level.
Stop where u r! Lol I hated that thing as a kid also.
The broken challenge was Challenge 8 with three players. The colors got all weird after a few seconds, and then the game would simply freeze.
I’ve finally gotten a copy of the 1.0 cart. So far the game has really behaved exactly the same. Although there was 2 things that happened to me during my campaign play through.
1:Chasing ghosts:
After playing in combat simulator for awhile (complete in several challenges, creating my own one as well)
I then went into single player and started up Chicago level. On perfect agent everything was going fine/nothing unusual.
But then I did go into pond punk. Inside there were the usual couple guards at the bottom of the stairs/in lobby room.
Then things got a little strange. I noticed a spray of cmp150 buckets actually go through the door, the guard on the other side immediately came to the door (usually a lot slower) killed him to allow the door to open all the way. Went inside and nothing.
Walked into the bathroom, nothing.
Then I came back out into the main room, and an unarmed guard spawned and I’ll be honest it startled me. The guard wasn’t reacting to me being in front of him, so then I went around the guard to verify that there was no weapon in its hand. There wasn’t. Just a plain old g5 guard with no weapon. But then I got up to the guards face and it threw it’s hands up in the air as if he was surrendering. Left him alone, came back and the guard de spawned. Strange stuff, no ghost but still odd
I used to love reading that mysteries of perfect dark page back in the day.
Same! Thanks for bringing back those memories. That's when I first learned about the 🧀
Congratulations, you are probably closer to 30 than you are to 20.
@@Robeebert closer to 40 actually.
The strangest thing about this mystery is that a cloaking device + crossbow set to the "instant kill" secondary setting would be the perfect "stealth/assassin" setup as far as Perfect Dark is concerned. This makes the whole thing feel deliberate as opposed to a random glitch. Furthermore no enemy in story mode uses the crossbow.
Now something that should be noted is according to the Perfect Dark wiki the only other instance of the crossbow appearing in story mode besides Air Base: Espionage is in actuality the G5 building where it apparently can be dropped by a guard at the beginning if you knock out at least two of them with fists. Now this isn't the Chicago mission where the ghost is most commonly reported, but this adds credence to darkmaian23's account in the sense that the G5 Building does load cloaks and the crossbows albeit no enemy uses the crossbow.
I had heard of this ghost encounter many years ago. I always chalked it up to one of the alert guards (those guys appearing when the alarm is raised), spawning as a Janus Guard (a known phenomenon) in the lobby of the Pond Punk. Still, that wouldn't account for other details outlined in this video, such as the Crossbow weapon.
If you want to trigger the memory glitch via combat simulator, you should do so with Challenge 7 & with 3 or 4 players, as this is the challenge which is bugged in the 1.0 version of the game. There is a risk, however, of the game becoming totally corrupted and unusable, so proceed with caution, or use an EverDrive.
The Mongillo ghost is almost certainly the friendly revolver guard (not Jonathan) shooting at the guards.
I can’t tell you how many hours I put into trying to find the golden warthog in halo 1 & 2 when I was a kid. I read every single gamefaq and cheat form back in the day. All just a farce but I truly believed it was possible
Goose -- always enjoy your stuff, but I think this is your best (non-Speedlore) video in a while -- totally fascinating. Well done. One of these days, do the iceberg meme video!
I'm surprised we didn't get the "rogue gamma ray" theory this time.
That theory is copyrighted by The King of Video Games Todd Rogers
@@Iliek Also applies to upwarping in Tick Tock Clock.
I still hope for the day when someone repeats that through non-extraterrestrial-energy means.
@@stormbornapostle5188 I hear (this is only a rumor) that the TTC upwarp is actually caused by cartridge tilting. The speedrunner apparently slightly tilted his cartridge to get faster load times, but this may have caused an occasional glitch as well.
@@samuelthecamel tilting your cartridge will not speed up load times.
@@arlobubble3748
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean he didn't do it with that intention. Kids still hold various button combos after throwing a ball to "increase catch rate" in pokemon to this day.
I didn't expect to make it into a goose video someday haha what an excellent surprise. This turned out to be even more fascinating than I originally imagined!
I appreciate you digging into this one and its very clear how much you put into it.
The way these videos come out are just top tier! I cant imagine anyone else being able to cover these stories and make them as interesting as you do.
Thankyou Always
Honestly, the dev saying how there was a bug in 1.0 dealing with challenge modes... that leads me to believe its possible theres a code leak for solo missions. There just needs to be the proper setup figured out.
I watched this before bed and it genuinely creeped me out to the point of keeping me up a couple hours.
If I were a designer of a game similar to "Perfect Dark", then I might have actually thrown in some spooky thing like this at some part in the game, which triggered maybe about 0.01% of the time in a very specific out-of-the-way area, and also only triggered if you had already failed the mission anyway, so that people who decided to just mess around wouldn't lose anything.
I feel like this would be a cool detail that would be highly intriguing to players, and add some fun mystery and controversy to everything.
All i want to say is i 100% remember seeing at least 2 guards dead in the bar in the Chicago level when going downstairs. It was actually the first time I had ever saw the door open, that's why I remember it. I wondered why there was dead guards behind a normally locked door. I don't remember entering the room, or if I did i dont remember being killed, but i do remeber the dead guards.
Whenever something is spawned by the game, in most games, unless the designers set specific coordinates for the entity's spawn point, the entity will default to spawn at map coordinate 0, 0, 0. This makes me very curious to know where 0, 0, 0 is in Chicago.
Imagine if 0, 0, 0 is not only around the secret club, but in such a spot where any AI that would spawn at the 0,0,0 location, would be inclined to open the locked door! That would be some crazy good evidence in favor of the ghost, and it would only take opening Chicago on a level editor of sorts. I'd most sincerely do it, but I have absolutely 0 knowledge about the game, I haven't even beaten it casually xD.
Seriously though, can any n64 tech savant with free time check this out?
Well there is a level editor for perfect dark (goldeneye setup editor) so I could do it later and see where it is
@@jlewwis1995 If you have the time to check it out, I'd be interested in this finding as well!
@@ScootaReader do you know where one might get a 1.0 rom specifically? It kind of seems like most of the PD roms out there are 1.1
0,0,0 is not in the strip club. It's near a back alley if I remember correctly.
@@jlewwis1995 For the sake of finding the origin (0,0,0) of Chicago, I don't think you'll need to have 1.0. Level geometry coordinates rarely ever change in updates. But yeah, for the sake of trying to reproduce the ghost guard 1.0 will be probably our best bet, and I also couldn't find a 1.0 rom :(
I love the idea of it being James Bond as the ghost, because the club is called "Punk Pond" and there was a game series made by another British developer called James Pond
😱
I did some modding using the GE Setup Editor to test a few things, and found some stuff worth considering.
First of all, I wasn't even sure if the Crossbow was a valid weapon for a guard to use, so I tested that. Solo guards can use the crossbow, but it is not a one hit kill weapon when they use it on the player. Even on Perfect Agent, the Crossbow does a fairly low amount of damage, along with the sedative effect. I discovered also that when a solo guard is using a crossbow, that they are able to hit their allies, which does result in an instant knockout, whereas friendly fire does not occur with most other weapons in the game.
Secondly, I tested how simulant AI reacts with solo guards, by forcing some dataDyne guards into a multiplayer level. Simulants do not appear to acknowledge the existence of solo guards, and vice versa, which makes sense given the two are never supposed to exist in the same space. Simulants will not directly attack solo guards, but can hit them by accident while trying to attack the player.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think solo guards are able to use cloaking devices of their own volition, and it's part of a scripted sequence (eg the Deep Sea shotgun guards)
Chicago Ghost: "You've met with a terrible fate haven't you?"
You should not have done that
He’s just a boy…
There's this "CHR_HIDDENGUY" function that is used to control distance or view for the flying robot on Chicago. A couple of these guards used to perform a function in-game whichever level they're used on. My guess is that it got unset by chance and we have our crossbow killer, but I think other conditions might have to be met too. On A51 Infiltration, there's a similar function but it's used to clone guards and he just runs wild on his own allies. I believe these non-Janus killers are set to unhidden by accident or maybe in A51's case a mistaken function call.
Interesting bits: Moon jump where she's standing in right before she decides she jumps the gate. There's non-collisions all around that floor. I'm basically trying to make the hidden guard fall to its death and see if that's why everything goes wrong like in this ghost story - it spawns on top or behind you. Looking up setuppete.c on the decompilation project is a good way to get started.
This gave me such a nostalgia kick. I used to love reading about the rumours of ghosts and bigfoots in GTA:SA, and hunting for them myself. This video took me back to a simpler time in my life. Thank you.
I remember all the GTA San Andreas bigfoot malarkey on gamefaqs. I myself even spent some time riding around the countryside at night.
Damn I miss being a kid.
All games have some form of bugs or glitches somewhere - it is practically impossible to completely avoid them, no matter how many bug searches you do - so there is really no reason to doubt these kinds of situations.
The game could have simply loaded a guard in the wrong position, or something.
Thank you Ryan for this healthy dose of sweet nostalgia. Please cover more legends from the N64 era, I think everyone will enjoy it! Cheers!
Since we have a full decompilation of this game by now we should definitely start looking into stuff.
Every copy of perfect dark is personalized. Just kidding but yea
Thanks goose your so based. 👍
Unless...
There are 2 versions of the game, a normal one and v1.0 cursed edition, so like every *fifth* copy of Perfect Dark is personalized.
@%101 Real [NOT FAKE !!!] Of course you can't wait, it's already been happening for over a month.
@@napalmkitty6686 stopppp...
Has anyone else experienced a bug in Perfect Dark that would cause guards to be active during the cutscenes? I saw this *once* (had a witness), and never again, in hundreds of hours of play.
I failed crash site agent (attempting to unlock the cheat) because I watched the cutscene as a celebration and some guard popped up over the ridge and shot the president (causing mission failed to pop up mid cutscene). I didn't know 1.0 was so buggy though, maybe it was related to that?
I have seen this happen but not during the crash sit mission and instead on the preceding level in the Plane. I had an enemy come into the presidents room during the cutscene where you are talking to the president. But he didn't fire during the cutscene and just ran around the room like he was already aggroed then shot the president once the cutscene ended and normal game play resumed.
This is the first time I'm hearing about this, however I experienced something very similar, in Goldeneye actually, which I never thought anyone would believe. Specific year is tough to say, but a friend and I were playing GE multiplayer for several hours, and one particular match in Bunker (I want to say we were using the guns setting "Automatics") we were on opposite ends of the map, and suddenly I saw a darker than usual character zip by(faster than a player is capable) my screen, I turned to shoot, and died instantly.
I was about to make a frustrated comment toward my friend about killing me, however just before opening my mouth he said "how did you die?" I then glanced at his screen and noticed he was nowhere near where I had died. We had the "what do you mean, that wasn't you?" sort of conversation, but shrugged it off and kept playing.
A few minutes later, we both see the Trevelyan(for some reason much darker texture than usual) run by our screens. At this point we've made eye contact and have agreed what we were seeing was strange. A second later, my friend dies, then I die.
We spent hours after this attempting to find this "Dark Trevelyan", but were unable to find him again. We tried many times after this to replicate what had happened that night, but never had anything even similar happen again.
After years of Perfect Dark gameplay, I always wondered if this was some sort of early version of the DarkSim that hadn't been in the final production version of Goldeneye, since both games are based on the same engine, but have never found an answer.
This "Chicago Ghost" gives me hope that someday something might be proven that confirms me and my friend didn't have some sort of a shared hallucination.
While not anywhere near as exciting or creepy, I remember being a kid and playing on Bunker with a friend, and we encountered a strange glitch where thrown remote mines wouldn't actually be thrown, and instead of appear floating in mid-air at the center of the player's position, so we ended up making a giant floating cluster of mines and them detonating them.
I think the devs are aware of this glitch though since I remember telling David Doak about it on Twitter and he seemed aware of it.
You’re very obviously lying.
Software Engineer here:
The easiest thing I can think of to explain this would be if the enemy data for a level were somehow corrupted, resulting in a replicant spawning with a crossbow. Taking it farther, it's possible that enemy could have ramped up accuracy/damage depending if those settings are enemy specific or not (I suspect they might be given how the Perfect Dark difficulty setting works, but that's just a guess).
In theory, if someone who understands how Perfect Dark's memory is allocated, you could possible modify the memory data in an emulator and force-spawn such an enemy somewhere in the level. All you'd really need to know is where the enemy data for the level is stored, and what you need to overwrite to get the necessary combination.
For real consoles, a better test might be to try and account for *every* spawned character (NPC or enemy) on the stage and try and find one with incorrect behavior; it's just as likely an enemy gets overridden by an NPC, for instance.
All I can say if there is a memory leak as the lead programmer says, the observed behavior is *theoretically possible*.
More of these would be greatly appreciated goose. Something real creepy about these. Maybe cover the majoras mask stories
When you said "I know what you're thinking." my response was "Ask a TASer!" and then it didn't happen.
While Perfect Dark probably isn't popular enough to be one of those super meticulously understood games, it _is_ similar to Goldeneye, which is, and some of that knowledge might transfer. Perhaps the suggestion of ACE might entice some knowledgeable person to look into exactly what kind of memory bug that developer was talking about. If we can figure out the moment where things can go off the rails (even if it's not immediately obvious), we can explore how it might snowball.
I really feel like there's no reason for these old urban legends to be urban legends anymore, given the tools we have today. Unintended behavior is much harder to track down than hidden (but at some point intended) stuff, but it's a problem that can be solved!
I'm also interested in the answer to this mystery, but I suspect memory analysis is where we'll find it, rather than futzing around for hours in front of the TV like when we were kids.
Perfect dark always had a sad and somewhat scary vibe to it to me.
Also in a51 infiltration, you showed a comment stating that it could be Jonathan shooting the crate guards... there’s a glitch to access that part of the level, using the combat boost, go through the exit and you should be on the other side of the door without triggering the ending cutscene. You will be painfully slow, but as long as you keep applying combat boost the cutscene won’t trigger, and you can find Jonathan near the elevators that are in the next mission. He’s standing completely still and is invulnerable. You can see when you first open the exit door, a guard will be holding Jonathan’s magnum for some reason. I just find it hard to believe that ghost shot was Jonathan especially since he doesn’t have any actions assigned to him at that point in the level, he’s stored specifically for the cutscene.
Who else paused the video to go check their PD cartridge? Mine says "07" so I guess its the bugged version!
Same.
Yup! 19 on mine. Guess it’s time to start playing again!
this needs to be posted in oddheader's discord too
Tried that. He wasn't interested.
@@lordkrythic6246 If we do end up discovering it as a bug, try A+Start (What the Glitch). Oddheader is more interested in easter eggs and I can see why he rejected this one.
@@Gold753
I know. I understand, too. It's hard to make a video about something like this. This is more of "we find evidence then make a video", sort of thing.
I know this is a couple of years old, but I wanted to give my thoughts and theory on this. I never encountered the PD ghost, although I have heard about it extensively. I tried to find the ghost many times on the original N64 version AND the Xbox 360 Arcade version when it came out. I never found anything. However, I have a theory, although it's more of a fun thought. In the second level of the Chicago mission (the G5 building) in the first room, the second guard with the cloaking device, if you knock him unconscious instead of kill him, he will drop a crossbow. We also know from later in the game that there is the Psychosis Gun which causes someone to shoot members of one's side (for example: shoot an enemy guard, they will start shooting other guards). My theory is that this same guard with the crossbow, he was fooling around with a Psychosis Gun, and shot himself, so then he shot those 2 guards and then by then the effects wore off so then he uncloaks himself and shoots you. Either that, or that guard is a psycho and when he's not doing his job guarding the G5 building, he's out killing people like a serial killer. But he has to use a different weapon, one that's silent (like the Crossbow) to do it to avoid getting caught. But when you knock him out, he drops that crossbow.
Just a fun idea, but who knows really...
I never knew about this "ghost" thing. However you definitely triggered a memory for me when I was young. Yes, I 100% have encountered the door opened and guards already dead. I don't recall how I was killed but probably never occurred to me that it was an extra person or rare thing to happen. Just thought it was weird the door was already opened.
Also the scene where the guy isn't there definitely happened on my game. He used to be there. Then one day he was just invisible and I remember laughing about it and then showing friends. I didn't realize it was a thing that happened to others.
If it helps. I used to do the challenges like crazy too. I had all 30 of them complete. In the Xbox 360 game, I have only 29 of them complete. I suck at them now. I barely got 29 and 30 just pissed me off too much to complete it.
I think you guys are definitely on to something.
I still have my n64 cartridge. It's in storage. Sucks that it's winter, but first opportunity I get I will go see and confirm it's a V1.0 copy.
That's an awesome story! I love hearing more and more of these encounters as they continue to add to the lore of the Chicago Ghost. Maybe one day we'll finally catch it on video!
Still one of my favorite videos of you.
@@GamerFolklore Yay! I feel the same. Hope some day something about this ghost is discovered.
Goose you inspired me to start doing UA-cam and now 2 years later this shit is my full time job. Love your content man, you're a natural narrator, much love from a fellow Canadian!!
Always interesting to see people you recognize in YT comments on other people you recognize. Your videos are underrated--keep it up.
ahh the best story telling voice to listen to on a high end sound system. good vid, made me remember of a couple times on the mission Air Base: Espionage when retrieving the outfit at the start the guards were already dead.
Challenge 22 is a capture the briefcase challenge with both Crossbows and one hit kills. I think it is the only challenge with crossbows.
And one more thing... there is a glitch where the PresSim gets stuck on the catwalk on that challenge, according to Marshmallow’s guide it happens 99% of the time, maybe that triggers something. Someone should try playing that challenge and leaving when the Sim is stuck on the catwalk or something then enter Chicago?
I have not thought about this in YEARS but as a kid I had a cartridge of perfect dark me and my friends only played it for combat simulator really and my cousin gave me a copy of his cartridge save data which had completed save files so we could have all the unlocks.
I remember vividly messing with settings in Combat simulator as a kid and leaving the game running with no hostiles, just to explore around and do stuff. I left to do something maybe eat and came back upstairs to my room and I some how died, (I feel like I remember hearing the death sound too but its been so long I dont even know.) I remember this VIVIDLY though and wondering what the hell happened and it scared the heck out of me. I remember telling my friend about it so we both were extremely curious about this and so we tried to reproduce the issue by just starting a combat sim with unlimited time (since thats what we usually had set) and just waiting and giving up.
Later on my cousin moved to the next new consoles so they gave me all their n64 games and controllers so I have both cartridges now; me and my friends only played using my cousins cartridge from then on out though because it had all the cool unlocks and play time.
Now I did look this up at one point and found out about the "ghost" but there was such little information and it was all just talk I moved on.
I didnt know one of the Dev's actually chimed in on this so seeing this video reminded me of all of this. The fact that certain actions could overwrite code of certain situations into various parts of the games ram actually makes a ton of sense. We would play for HOURS leaving the console running for many more hours while we left the house or ate or w/e.
I just checked both my copies and my Cartridge is a 1.0V shockingly (something I actually never knew) and my cousins cartridge was a later version copy with the bug fixes. WHO actually knows what is triggering these code overflow events but I do remember playing the challenge modes as a kid and we would do lots of bizarre modes with maxed stimulants and saving profiles of that with equally stupid lazy names. Saving and trading save files too. I wonder if that even has any affect on triggering this data overwriting bug more so.
This was not something I made up either its very bizarre and I want to say it actually happened one other time too but I could actually see a stimulant shooting my character and her dieing because I remember being absolutely terrified and turning the cartridge off at one point. Just thinking about that gives me shivers to this day.
Omglol I had totally forgotten about the invisible Trent cut-scene😂
Haha, you used my clip! This has been a rumor for ever and it's so funny to see videos still being made on this. What other secrets lie within that little cartridge? oo;
I remember going down to 'punk pond' once and the doors were already opened which was really confusing. On this occassion there was no ghost, guards or dead bodies in the area. Prehaps I arrived to late to the scene. I bought the game on its first day of release so it must have been version 1.0.
"I want to believe" with the UFO was a great touch. This is my favorite vid of yours I've seen. So good, and it makes me want to keep my N64 on overnight.
When goose uploads, the day gets better.
One of your best videos to date! Rare to see these gaming mysteries that still aren't understood to this day... but I hope you find some more to share with us through this video, and maybe an update on your findings (definitely more to explore, and maybe some help from Your Eliteness? :). Agree with other comments, the only thing lacking in the video is that you weren't narrating to us by the fireplace. Would've been truly chilling with that added ambiance. Absolutely fascinating nonetheless. Stay true.
What about the tentacle headed guard found under a rock in LTTP's Zora's domain?
Can you please elaborate that? I'm very interested in this
@@M4XD4B0ZZ This, I think?
www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/9hvsfn/an_obscure_glitch_in_a_link_to_the_past/
@@stormbornapostle5188 Thx man highly appreciated. Even if it's like nothing at all..
@@M4XD4B0ZZ Yeah, it's kind of a let-down even if accurate. A much more impressive series of glitches in a Zelda game is the "glitch world" in the original Link's Awakening. It's well-known these days, but I remembered stumbling upon it back in the dark times before the internet and was always mystified by it and how it worked - it was really my first exposure to seeing how game data could be used in ways the game never intended. I'd spend hours trying to explore it...hard to do without save states, because it was easy to get stuck in walls and potentially softlock the file.
I'm always fascinated with seeing this kind of thing happen with more complex games like Perfect Dark, though.
@Stormborn Apostle then you might be quite a fan of the new OoT speedruns with Wrong Warps, Memory Manipulation and many many more
This is wild. I specifically remember running into the “Chicago ghost” NUMEROUS times in the bar. Heading down the stairs I would hear the commotion and would be happy about it bc all I had to do was wait for the locked door to open, an npc would run out (apparently fleeing) and I could then go in and access the extra handgun. Yes, I would go in and get dropped sometimes and I would scream that the game was “cheating.” But most all games “cheated” back then so I never really thought anything of it. Anyhoo, other times I”d access the bar in the same manner, hear the cloaking squawk once and then nothing. I remember searching the room thoroughly, but what ever was in there was nowhere to be found. I also remember rationalizing at the time that the next level was the G5 building, which is loaded with cloaked guards from the getgo, so maybe the game had a map overlap glitch that drug in a guard from the opening of the next level. Once I got far enough into the room the map gets fully loaded and negates the phantom foe. (Pretty sure that’s not how that works, but I remember it making sense in my 19 year old brain at the time:). Hope this input helps!
An addendum: I practically NEVER played any challenges or multiplayer. I was more into finding the most flawless way to complete the main campaign levels- eking out cheats and short cuts. The Chicago level had many different things that you could do to be clever and get more meat off the bone, so I grinded that stage endlessly until I could find the most seamless way of beating it with no damage. I have vivid memories of the “ghost” in the bar- would never have thought people would be studying it all these years later!
Please tell me you’re going to do a ghost hunt stream in the next two weeks.
When I was a kid, Punk Pond was a frequent place I'd make my rounds to when I was playing with cheats codes active. Sometimes I would get into the club, and sometimes I wouldn't. Sometimes the door is already open, and I'd attribute that to me going on a rampage with All Weapons enabled before going down there-- maybe some guard pathed down there during my rampage and opened it. It seemed arbitrary to child me whether it'd be open or not, and the place's irrelevant nature always fascinated me.
Sometimes the door was already open, and guards were dead, and I'd ask myself if I already visited that evening. I'd stop myself and go, "but wait, if I was already here, and these guys are already dead, how come the door was open? I shouldn't have been able to get inside." In retrospect, it's kinda funny that the door always opens during these "ghost encounters" for some reason.
There was at least one occasion in which I went down there without invincibility on and died for no explainable reason. I remember this well because, as a kid, stuff like this scared me a little, so I'd make sure to come back the next few visits with invincibility on. I also swear there was at least one instance where an entity that shouldn't have been down there, was down there-- like one of Easton's weird punk guards with the black and white rock star getup who normally wield K7 Avengers.
I've also experienced my character dying after I've left an empty multiplayer map open for hours. Could never get it to happen again. It was Skedar. I opened it and never moved, literally stood there the whole time. Was just vibing to the music. I also left the N64 on while we went on a car ride to some supermarket once, and when I came back, my character had died and the infinite time match had ended without my say-so. Of course, I was a kid, so maybe I just didn't make it infinite after all. So, maybe it did happen again, but even at the time I hardly retained the memories of that stuff very well, so... shrug.
I have a theory-- perhaps one of the guards normally possessed by player two during counter-operative mode can be possessed by a simulant during any mode, and one of the more commonly pooled areas at the beginning of the map is Punk Pond. Being a non-linear map, I distinctly remember realizing that they probably rationalized that the player shouldn't be one of the guards who can immediately encounter Joanna so as to give Joanna some time to position herself before her assassin arrives, so as to not alert all the other guards. As such, I'd think player 2 would often spawn in Punk Pond, and might even spawn there the vast majority of the time-- including as a "extra" guard spawned with no weapon normally due to the absence of other guards to spawn. This could happen in regular levels when Joanna either killed or had loaded in every other possessable entity, whom were usually 'inactive guards' further ahead in the level than where Joanna was.
As for why the AI's getting a crossbow, though? Beats me. However-- consider that the rockstar outfit guy I mentioned might actually be a DarkSim, since I feel like I remember that being the stock outfit for that simulant type.
Concerning the Area 51 footage, it's possible the counter-operative simulant AI was being interfered with by whatever code was supposed to be used for Johnathan in that section. This would explain why they're still using the crossbow, but seem to be missing shots, are using the sedative bolt instead of the instant kill bolts, and aren't displaying as many effects when shooting. Bolts aren't visibly sticking into the walls in the footage. If they were a DarkSim as normal, they'd be landing consistent headshots at an alarming rate at the least.
Being a DarkSim would explain why they just instantly kill you in single player otherwise-- they were likely using the insta-kill bolts.
This might only happen in Chicago 99% of the time it does occur, because Chicago might be one of few maps where from the very beginning the second player is given the "extra" spawn. Therefore, AI settings might apply. I remember someone saying DarkSims cheat and obtain weapons or spawn with them without needing to walk and pick them up, as well as teleport if the radar is off. I'm not sure how much all of these things are true, but I have confidence that they just give themselves weapons.
Why the crossbow, then? It might be part of some leaked settings, sure. It might also be some esoteric default value. You'd think that would be something like the Falcon 2 or some other strange gun that would make sense to be "the first gun" in an array or table.
Why a DarkSim? Either it was also some kind of leaked settings glitch, or the game had some reason to default to that whenever the conditions for the "ghost" were met.
I haven't played Counter-Operative mode in years, so I could be wrong about the spawning rules in Chicago, and I still don't know how the DarkSim would make it into G5, unless one of the guards was vulnerable to that injection somehow. I theorize we don't see the ghost in more levels because, since the game is not in counter-operative mode officially, non-extra guards fail to be overwritten because their actual rules either overwrite the simulant, or the simulant is never queue'd to spawn since an "extra guard" wouldn't be allowed. It'd go something like:
Counter-operative spawning check: is there a suitable non-active guard alive? If yes, put player in guard. If no, make a new guard to put the player into.
If this check returns yes, the DarkSim never actualizes. It's either placed into a pre-existing guard-- and then overwritten, or it never gets injected in the first place due to the difference between the DarkSim AI handling code and the counter-operative code for converting a guard who may normally have some nominal amount of area-specific scripting and turning them into a player-esque entity. I think the DarkSim probably needs a fresh guard created for them on map load-- and this is something which sometimes does just happen on map load, I think, and your only solution to get closer to the player if you were impatient was to commit suicide rather than to walk through the entire level.
My best guess is that there's a model or loadout handling part of the DarkSim code which breaks when trying to access living guards because their model and weapons are different and the spawning method becomes non-traditional. When you possess entities in counter-operative, you inherit everything they had. Under this jurisdiction, the ghost should be a blue-shirted guy running around with a CMP150 pretty consistently. I could see a DarkSim successfully spawning with a crossbow if they got the "extra guard" slot. They could inject their preferred weapon, usually a map pickup-- which I guess in the case of Chicago is a crossbow for some reason. When I phrase it like that, it might be because a random memory address to do with Chicago's data is interpreted as the value for a crossbow. This guard being a DarkSim rather than any other type might also be produced by reading garbage data as well.
I can even answer why guards would be out of position. Assuming the DarkSim inherited player-like code or counter-operative player 2 code, they'd be considered "friendly" to the other guards up until getting a few kills. Thus, a couple guards might be out of position or strangely aggro'd once they realized their player 2 was a traitor-- likely prompting them to open the door. As for why the DarkSim was just popping off on them, I dunno. I guess either the sim or the player 2 code doesn't make for the same kind of "team" flag that you'd expect to see in the multiplayer mode.
Being a guard itself, the DarkSim could open the door as well if it wanted to. It doesn't seem to venture outside the club, but the door itself and the landing slightly outside it seems to be part of the same zone based on how the guards move. The sim just can't handle something about transitioning onto the stairs, and I'm not sure what since some other guards (like the extras when you sound the alarm) do it just fine.
Worst case scenario? You either need to play a specific challenge or specific combat simulator game, play bouts of counter-operative, play with cheats, and then play Chicago until your theoretical injected DarkSim gets the correct spawning slot and spawns as an extra and proceeds to go on a rampage.
Dunno why dying sporadically for unexplained reasons would freak me out as a kid, when it wasn't like death was an uncommon thing in Perfect Dark.
I gotta say I had never heard of the ghost before watching this and I never knew you could get into the club however immediately when it was said that he could hear gun fire from under the map I had that holy crap deja Vu moment where I remembered playing this a long time ago and hearing shots and the screams of ai being killed on that level in that spot but never being able to explain it.
That exact same deja vu moment happened to me watching this video as well.
This is still a frigging masterpiece
Graslu00 recently had a ghost guard. It is about 54 minutes into his PC run through of perfect dark. Of course, it is not original hardware though.
doesn't matter though, it's not a given that this is a hardware problem
What makes this plausible is that invisibility, crossbows and infighting all exist somewhere in the game's code. It would be very easy for a fake story to claim to see something that would require art assets that just don't exist or would require specific complex programming.
Very strange, my cary says 19 on the back. The last I played this game, I recall that Trent did appear in the cutscene. However what I do recall is that in Area 51 Escape, some dialogue became missing after some months or years? Of playing the game.
The first bits of dialogue from the doctors was missing, and you could only hear from "I don't care much for procedures" onwards.
I also had this anomaly on air force one, where some of the president's speech became missing. I am certain that when the cart was new all the dialogue was spoken. Anybody encounter this before?
Is this part of the buggy 1.0 cart?
@@GamerFolklore I've got it in my room, I will capture the recordings and send them to you. Hope I can find my av cables, can't recall any other anomalies but I will be in touch.
Just tested..and the glitches didn't happen. Speech played as normal. I'm wondering if my memory is foggy or if somehow my cart fixed itself through lack of use? My apologies.
There's an option to censor swear words, and I recall that cuts off a huge chunk of the president's speech during the air force one mission. You might be thinking of that.
@@edk540 yes you're probably right, it's been so long now since I've played the N64 version of the game. Mystery solved :)
Well damn, I didn't even know there was a club environment in that level! Still, at least I learnt that I own a 1.0 cartridge though.
I have my own personal urban legend: that being accidentally activating an invincibility cheat in Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2. Went on an hour long rampage until I was knocked over by a vehicle and Busted by a nearby cop or national guard. Never saw any Ghost in Perfect Dark, though the myth is vaguely familiar to me... could be a false memory though.
A rogue NPC with a cloaking device and a crossbow... Now that's some really cool urban legend, and it's wonderful how well it fits Perfect Dark. I'm sure the setup will be figured out eventually.
Well, I know what I'll be doing for the next few days
I will say I remember SOMETHING in Chicago Street's level. One day, when I was REALLY young, I was playing that level. I went into the streets, and I hard someone shooting. I didn't know where the shots were coming from so I just moved on. I also didn't know of the Gentleman's Club area because I wasn't too knowledgeable about the game at the time so I never really looked into that area.
Ah perfect dark... Way ahead of its time, definitely the best n64 game for me.
Concerning the ghost, I have never encounter it, I think... This is the first time I have even heard of sich a thing.... I was more about challenges and multiplayer aspect of the game... That being said, every time I left the game on for the night, I would wake up to a frozen screen. I did it several times, always waking up to the same unsatisfying result... i eventually quit doing that, thinking the console overheating was the reason it froze.
For anyone wondering why would anyone leave the game unattended for the whole night; Perfect Dark had a multiplayer ranking system going from "#20: Beginner" all the way down to "#1:Perfect"... To reach the last rank you had to do some rather time consuming stunts such as having a playtime of 9 days (easy), using 9000 bullets (harder than it sounds) and walking 9000 kilometers (Ridiculously insane)... One would leave the game on while leaving the controller leaning against something so that your character would be left walking in circles for hours... Additionally, you could use a rubber band to have the "z" button pressed and fire your gun while doing circles, killing two or three birds with one stone (assuming you still needed to meet the time milestone)...
Anyway, despite all my efforts, I could only reach rank "3: Invincible"... :(
Thanks goose, your videos bring joy to all of us. I believe video proof of this ghost will be posted soon.
that would explain why the glitch is becoming hard to replicate, because no one is trying to increase their multiplayer rank anymore
I genuinely love these types of mythical scenarios. My own favorite is the "Ghosts of Halo". The original encounter, supposedly, was in Halo 2's Lockout multiplayer level, where a dude and his friend, only those two, were shooting each other, tossing grenades, the usual, when a sudden unknown third player appeared and began moving without animations, gliding around, shooting, and throwing sticky grenades with disturbing accuracy. This myth has persisted all the way into Halo MCC on PC, and remains a speculation, with very little genuine video of these encounters.
There are allegations that is has mostly happened in Halo 3, but I've heard of allegations of it happening within Halo: Reach too, on the Forgeworld map.
I myself have put probably several thousand hours into forging in Halo 3 and Halo Reach specifically, and have never encountered these entities. I wish I could though. They'd make some building sessions a bit more interesting.
Important edit: These encounters mostly seemed to happen during online games, but there have been stories of it happening while wandering maps or building maps solo as well.
Can't we use an emulator speed up ( and multiple instances of it) and a TAS, to just run millions of simulations? I'm sure this could be done. If anyone has an understanding if TAS, I can write the data science code to set thus up.
TAS would be the most time effective way to prove the ghost but here is the issue, what is the damn set up to get the ghost to happen? Solving that is like trying to solve God's existence with just math.
*overlays "I want to believe" with Elvis's escape from Area 51*
Okay you win UA-cam
Ooo Goose. I see youve been on Gfaqs since 1999-2001.
I've also encountered it. I think you can trigger it by running through Area 51: Infiltration while aggro'ing all the guards without killing anyone. Near the exit, the game will be so overloaded that the ghost could appear. The game will try to drop the framerate/stop it from crashing by starting to kill off the guards.
I don't think that's the reason. Any sort of guard unloading would be done by culling, or disabled by the engine, not by guards killing each other. Based on my experience doing a pacifist run of GoldenEye, the engine can handle lots of guards existing, and only really chugs framerate in rendering all them.
Happy Halloween everyone 🎃
I encountered a similar glitch on Pelagic II when playing coop with the AI Velvet where a gaurd turned to our team and killed some of the other gaurds. Maybe the Chicago ghost is related to the "Janus Gaurd" Phenomenon. I think it may have something to do with Friendly AI or the psychosis guns programming. Perhaps the overflow error overwrites the guards "team" and flips it to yours. But this glitch happens most often on coop with perfect buddies and constantly spawning enemies.
I mean, while it does sound very much like a poor attempt at a creepy-pasta sort of rumor, it also sounds very much in the realm of memory leak/corruption effects.
I never got into the game due to being a little too hardcore into Goldeneye, so I can't speak of the community or lore- but it's not exactly uncommon knowledge that programming for a lot of games from the N64 era and the times before are very much in the realm of what Bethesda aspires to match, so it's not really unreasonable to assume that you could easily find unintended "events" like what's described here.
I'm not one to take urban legends as even being likely, not as someone that grew up listening to unlocking blood on the SNES Mortal Kombat, saving General Leo- Shen Long. This doesn't sound like those, it's not something that would be game changing- not in that fashion at least- it's just something weird that apparently happened that people couldn't really explain.
If it's real and people figure out how to force the memory change, it could potentially be huge, depending on how it develops- but I don't know how likely that really is given the structure of the game, at least as I understand it.
these videos are so damn entertaining, glad you still keep up here and there on goldeneye and perfect dark mystery videos!
This game is one of my favorite game of all time and I nevered encountered such a thing, but I'm willing to stream a bit of it casually to try to get that GHOST captures on TAPES ;)
I'm no fancy speedrunner but I did every level on perfect agent once and it was a good milestone for me. I play from time to time but I can try another full playtrough streamed for that purpose :)
Edit : I have for sure the v1.0
An interesting thing was just brought to my attention. Someone mentioned something about cooperative which reminded me of the counter operative game mode. Counter operatives spawn randomly in the level, but what if the game is glitched into thinking it's a counter operative game mode, but there is no counter operative? Clearly, it would be addressing bad memory, and very well that memory could cause the ghost to spawn in. It was just some stroke of dumb luck that the ghost has a crossbow and cloaking device, and that it spawned in the pond punk bar. Just a suggestion if you're going to be diving into this.
@@lordkrythic6246 thanks for the informations that's really a great idea. I just did a new game file and I've recoreded everything (i played casually for my first test, hyper casually) here's what I did:
I did the 4 first challenge by myself (solo not 3 people). I then did a sim deathmatch. Then I've started the campaign till chigago, go to the punk bar thingy and nothing happened. I triggered the guards and i've killed them casually.
I'll try some stuff with count op. Thanks for the idea.
@@glitchydust4015
Do you know about the easy challenge bug? It lets you overwrite any challenge with your own settings. You can essentially fight meat sims, and the game thinks you beat the challenge when you're done. You can beat every challenge like this. I stressed in the beginning that bugs like this might have something to do with triggering the ghost.
@@lordkrythic6246 i only knew about the weapon trainning stuff. I will check this out! I beat like 38 out of 40 challenges back in the day solo. I have 4 controllers too so I can mess with so much stuff here ;)
Thanks for the info :)
@@glitchydust4015
Ok. Good luck. You need two controllers to do the easy challenge bug, i think i talk about how to perform it on the reddit post. You basically have one controller try to start the challenge, while the other loads a custom game type that's been saved. The game thinks you're doing the challenge, when you're actually playing the custom game mode.
I will say this, it has been a very very long time since I played this game, but back in the day I did play this game for a very very long time. This game consumed part of my childhood, and playing alone, doing the story, early speed running, playing multiplayer with friends or just Sims, it was something I did all of the time. For hours.
So I do not have any specific encounter; if I ever ran into the ghost, I definitely don't remember it and I feel like I would. But I used to love playing on Chicago, for the vibes, the atmosphere, and especially the music--a favorite of mine that I actually listen to recently several times, probably why this video was recommended to me.
So this is sketchy information at the back of my memory, from 20 years ago or more, but... I do remember some strange things happening on Chicago. Nothing necessarily for me to make an internet post about or remember for all this time, but when you mentioned the gunshots--not necessarily the screams where the dead guards, and definitely not an invisible one shotting crossbow ghost--but the gunshots, that rang a bell for me. I do remember a couple of instances where strange gunfire that I didn't prompt, would ruin or impact me sneaking through the stage and I do remember specifically showing my friend, or trying to, and telling him about it which is why I remember this at all. But I don't think I ever went down to the club to investigate.
A different thing happened to me while playing the Pelagic 2 mission. While running through the stage, aggro'ing as many guards as I could without killing anyone. I encountered a guard that had turned friendly. My crosshair was blue over it, and it attack other guards that got close.
Wiered
I remember encountering a dead guard in that level or the next that had the blue crosshair if aime at
Now that u mention it, i remember daying in front of that brown door when i was trying to figure out how to open it. Didnt hear the crossbow by i died by a single silent shot, and at the time ,i was expending a lot of time trying to open that door and i got pissed when i died. And after that i didnt try anymore, in fact, everytime i played PD i never went down there ever .
I'm just another anecdotal piece of text on the internet (and also could definitely be a Mandela effect!!) however I'm going to join in: this definitely happened to me and a friend playing when we were..... 14?
It's one of those weird creepy memories that always sticks.
We were just dicking around after school, on a 1v1 game, and there absolutely was an invisible third player with only a crossbow on the map.We had no simulants on. It was creepy as shit - I'd stayed over late and we were playing in a dark room, so we ended up turning it off and just freaking out completely.
I can't believe this is an urban myth that is still unsolved, I thought nobody else had seen this happen. Bizarre.
Simulants in Solo Missions have an AIVSAI flag with an appropriate number from 1-10 to assign teams. It's more likely that this value itself is changing which explains things like Janus guards.
My friends it just keeps NOT happening :'(
I don’t know if these are actually true ghost experiences, but I’ve had several weird glitches over the last 3 years that make me remember the ghost, even though I only play 1.1, I’ve never had one exactly like the ghost incident but I remember once finding the Punk Pond doors open with no guards, (although I could put that down to having lead the guards out of the pond to be killed on the surface), along with one incident of hearing a cloaking device sound with no source in the level. I’ve also had some other weird occurrences such as guards appearing with weird weapons in Crash Site, Chicago, and Area 51 Infiltration and Rescue. Most of my experiences involve guards spawning with grenades instead of their usual guns, I’ve seen that in every mission I listed, I’ve also experienced one of the guards falling through the roof of a tunnel in Crash Site, then killing me instantly with a sniper rifle, even though it was one of the guards that usually carries a machine gun. I reloaded my quicksave from a few seconds before, and it didn’t happen again even when I recreated the exact same movements.
The most recent and most bizarre glitch happened in one session, I loaded the game up and ran Chicago, Air Base, Air Force One, Crash Site, then all 3 Area 51 missions, all in Special Agent. I didn’t encounter anything weird in anything before Crash Site, where a guard spawned with a grenade instead of his usual gun, and dropped it when I killed him, but the rest of the level went normally. Then I loaded up Area 51 Infiltration, and it was really weird, there were several more guards than I usually experience, and the one at the start by the turret who usually drops a grenade didn’t have one. Later in the level, after I’d dealt with all 3 turrets and the Comms rider bug, I took out the drone with regular gunfire as I hadn’t got across the minefield yet/through the gate then suddenly killed a guy that had a rocket launcher, which I’ve never seen before or since. I didn’t have a grenade as I didn’t get any from the guy that usually drops them, so I didn’t cross the minefield, instead I went around the front gate and took out the turrets with a combination of the rocket launcher and gunfire, then got swarmed by more guards than I was used to, one of which was completely unarmed but in usual Area 51 uniform, and another which threw a grenade. I placed the bomb and started running out, then tried to open the lift and realised I didn’t have the keycard, so I ran over to the place where he repairs the drone and found the key laying on the floor with no body. I then collected the shield, and went down into the lift, where the rest of the level was normal. I was really confused, but I finished the mission anyway. During Area 51 Rescue, things got weird, once again the guards didn’t seem right, some of them were in different positions to usual and in some areas there were more of them than usual, and two of them had grenades. I’ve never ever seen grenades in Area 51 Rescue, before or since. I was able to get the Phoenix by making noise in front of the door and causing the engineer that vanished in the previous level to run through the door, and beat the level using that, and I don’t think anything else weird happened other than one of the guards in the same uniform as the storeroom guards jumpscaring me of nowhere in the middle of the labs.
I don’t know if what I’ve experienced is normal or not, but they were very strange occurrences, and I’ve had a few of them like this, these are just the ones I remember, but I think I’ve had one or two others. I feel like this might well be tied to the ghost legend somehow, especially since some rumours mentioned a ghost in Area 51.