A Big Doom 2 Secret Was Discovered 24 Years After Its Release

Old games were renown for having secrets sprinkled throughout their levels, and content tucked away behind ridiculously hard to solve riddles, oftentimes derived from specialized level design. Well, 24 years after its release there are still secrets being uncovered in id Software's Doom 2. Yes, it only took some people nearly two and a half decades to finally unveil one of the tightest kept secrets behind one of the most popular first-person shooter games of all time.

Polygon is reporting that in Map 15, secret 4, there is an area that you must reach to access the secret to get 100% on level 15. The problem is that if you attempt to reach that area via normal means -- by simply walking into it -- you'll never be able to trigger the teleporter to reach the secret location organically. This means that the only way some people have reached the area was through cheating with the "NoClip" console command.

It turns out that trying to reach the secret in a normal way was prohibited, and a deliberate game design choice from John Romero and the crew at id Software. What happened, however, is that a player going by the handle of Zero Master managed to get pushed into the secret by a Pain Elemental, which is actually the only way to trigger the teleporter. According to Romero, this was a purposeful design in Doom 2, so that the only way to access the teleporter was to be pushed by an enemy NPC.

This is not an easy secret to uncover. You have to basically kite a Pain Elemental from the sewers all the way up a staircase (without dying) and then once you get pushed by the Pain Elemental at the corner of the staircase, it will inform you that a secret has been unveiled.

I have no idea how you would have known to figure out how to access the secret, but Romero and the crew knew about this.

This makes Zero Master the first person to get a legitimate 100% on this particular level. So, for 24 years no one perfectly unlocked all the secrets in the right way until now, which is quite telling, really.

According to Polygon, this specific kind of secret is only accessible in this particular way via the original MS-DOS version of the game. It was later patched out in other versions of Doom 2 when it was considered a glitch.

It was also noted in the article that Zero Master is the first to have a 100% completed save file after 24 years of Doom 2 being on the market, which is insane to think about.

It's amazing how some old retro games still have secrets that people are uncovering to this day. It's rare for newer games to have those specific kinds of Easter eggs given how tight budgets are and how time-constrained developments have become due to deadlines and release date requirements.

Even still, if you've been wondering about whether or not there were still secrets left to uncover in Doom 2... well, now you know.