In the Code

I used to hack into Super Nintendo and Game Boy cartridges with these weird devices, poking around inside to find what the developers left buried. Unreachable chests, broken enemies, passages through solid walls. The thrill wasn’t breaking the game—it was seeing what existed in the code that nobody was supposed to find.

The Cutting Room Floor is what that impulse becomes. It’s thousands of people doing exactly what I did as a kid, except methodically, with games spanning decades. Someone found a secret quiz in Terranigma. In Super Mario 64, there’s an unreachable mine. Secret of Evermore charges different boatmen prices based on your character’s name, a detail buried so deep almost nobody ever discovers it.

What gets me is that none of it needed to exist. The developers knew players would never find those things. They coded them anyway—jokes for themselves, experiments, mistakes too small to matter. It’s the opposite of designed experience. The games we actually play are the finished product. Everything else is the workshop, the thinking left behind.

That’s what I was really chasing as a kid. Not a way to break the game, but a way to see what was underneath the performance. The seams where the actual work lives. The Cutting Room Floor is just that impulse scaled up—proof that I wasn’t the only one hungry for what was hidden.