Goldeneye 007 Citadel

[Alexandrie Gallup]

CitadelWeaponsin LevelUnknownEquipment in LevelUnknownCharactersUnknownThe Citadel is speculated to be an incomplete and unused stage, that is seemingly resident somewhere in GoldenEye 007's memory. Citadel has been a target of many hoaxes, and kind-of has a reputation of The 4 Bonds Cheat-Code. The level itself remains a mystery. The image seen to the right is an example of the speculated overview map of the citadel. It's location is unknown.

Every time I go hiking it is an adventure of discovery. Nature is never boring for those who explore with a spirit of expectancy. I expect to have moments of awe and astonishment every time I step on a trail. The key is to awaken the slumbering child within and be a kid again. Long buried sensory and emotional connections to nature will reveal beauty and mystery at every turn. A great place to practice these feelings of childlike wonder is on the trail to Crown Lake in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness.

She is probably not alone. Sure enough, two more steps and another grouse erupts out of the bushes. A third one bolts a second later. I have stumbled upon a mother and her nearly grown young. The sooty grouse depends on camouflage for protection. It will freeze on the spot when danger approaches and rely on its cryptic plumage to blend into the surroundings. If a predator or unsuspecting hiker comes too close, the grouse will explode into flight.

These three may have been eating berries or swallowing grit from the trail to help with digestion. The trio will soon disband as the young become independent with the onset of winter. While other mountain creatures hibernate or migrate in winter, the sooty grouse toughs it out by roosting alone on snow-covered branches and eating conifer needles.

The trail climbs gently and brings me to a viewpoint where I stop for a long look. The hulking mass of Mt. Jefferson rises above green ridges like a stone citadel. Crown Lake pools in a flattened bowl among the trees.

Twelve thousand years ago enormous ice caps mantled the Cascades and created the topography below me. The ice in this area was a thousand feet thick. It scraped the landscape down to bedrock, creating a deep amphitheater filled with scoured basins and low ridges. Today, a lush forest softens this glacial cirque and Crown Lake fills one of the shallow depressions. Three other lakes cluster nearby.

I hike down to the north shore of Crown Lake and sit on a rock. The lake is only 2 feet deep at its deepest. The water is bathtub warm. A water skipper dimples the surface with its six tiny feet as it waits for floating prey. Emergent plants crowd the shore of this aging lake. It is undergoing the slow transformation from lake to meadow. In the distant future grasses and wildflowers will fill the former lakebed.

I find the trail again as it curls around the lake. Dapples of autumn light brighten the forest floor. The soft kwee-oh call of a gray jay carries through the trees. Suddenly the aroma of sun-warmed huckleberries fills the air. It smells like a pie in the oven. Huckleberry bushes lean across the path from either side. I wade through, picking as I go. On one side is the thin-leaf huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum). Fall has colored its pointed leaves a fiery red. The tart berries are very dark and stain my fingers deep purple.

A sketchy path leads me away from Crown Lake and over a small ridge to Claggett Lake. Claggett is smaller than its neighbor but much deeper. Its clear waters shimmer in the sunlight as Mt. Jefferson peeks over the wooded valley headwall. A log under a Douglas-fir provides the perfect seat for lunch.

A flash of electric blue catches my eye. It is a bluet damselfly. Smaller cousin to the dragonfly, a damselfly is about the size of a toothpick. This little guy hangs from a slender branch. His elegant wings look like veined cellophane as he holds them above his thin body to rest. The child in me wants to touch this delicate creature, but I resist the urge. He is gone as quickly as he came. His quest for mosquitoes and other airborne prey is constant.

The interview on the "Doom 64 Absolution" page mentions a secret message hidden in Breakdown (in the n64 version). Has anyone found this yet?

Also, while playing Research Lab in the ROM, I accidentally entered a room with a texture that said "I suck at making maps". I don't know how I did it (it was near the end of the level); does anyone know what happened??

I recall that the "I suck at making maps" texture was something added by the developers to show them missing textures that needed correcting. I might be wrong, though, because I only read about it once.

The I suck texture is used to replace missing textures.. mainly to tell the level designers that they suck at mapping :P

As for the secret message in Breakdown, I am still looking for that, and I don't think anyone else besides Tim and Randy found it either..

No, it's a physical secret message. It's apparently in the red key room.

So anyway, now that I have a few minutes, I can't tell more about that secret room with that odd texture. It was in that room near the end with several exits; two of them go down into that sewer, and one goes into that room with the big stairway, the one that has a switch at the top. I was dashing around to finish the level because I had to get to class, and ran into an open corner of that main hub room, without thinking. It was yellow walled, and had a little pit. When I got in the pit, there were several items, plus a wall with that message. There was no way out of the pit, though. At school tomorrow, I'll wireframe the game in Project 64 and see where exactly it was.

EDIT: I'm weighing the possibility that I fell into one of the little cages with the zombie guys somehow, but it seems unlikely; I believe the message room was triangular. As for "Breakdown", I checked the two rooms mentioned in the interview that supposedly had switches, and came up with nothing.... *sigh*, great, another Stop 'N' Swop...

Did Tim and Randy tell us there was a secret message in Breakdown? or was this known before that? Because reaching 100% secrets is easy, so i guess it isnt a normal one. And ive tried it before, there isnt any indication of a switch in those mentioned places. Did anyone ever figure out at least something about it?

If "Doom 64 Absolution" is anything to go by, there's a secret room in the red key area with a sign that says "Curiosity Killed The Marine". I don't know how to access it though, and I don't know if the message is the same in the N64 version.

GIVING PEOPLE WAREZ LINKS IS EVEN SMARTER!

I don't know what happened... I must've hit a major glitch or something. I've tried no clipping in "Absolution", and wireframe graphics in the ROM, and I can NOT find that room.

Well, I guess Midway pulled a Rareware then...

Is there any way to 'no clip' with a GameShark? If it's a separate room, I could just pop through the wall and check it out. But didn't you come across anything when you were making the levels for the PC version?

Embed a secret hopelessly deep in their game that no one ever finds, and then refuses to say anything about it. A good example is the "Citadel" level in GoldenEye. Rareware denied the existence of that thing, and it took seven years for someone to actually find it.

The citadel isn't a real level, it's a remnant of a 3D model of a vague draft of a level. You can only find it through a rather large amount of hacking. You can't play it, because it's just left over junk, it wasn't meant to be played. There's no detailing, it looks like shit, there's glitches all over. It's not a secret, it's a scrap. Of course they wouldn't talk about it because it's doubtful that anybody except the programmer who forgot to delete it actually knew about it!

If you really want to use a legitimate secret in a Rare game as an example, you could mention Goldeneye's button sequence activated cheat codes that Rare didn't reveal until years later. Or the ice key in Banjo-Kazooie.

Rare revealed one button pushing code (the one for more multiplayer characters). The rest were discovered by searching the game's RAM with an action replay, the cheating device. They never intended the rest of the them for release.

No, you can most definitely play Citadel! It's even got its own picture on the level menu!

Go to rarewitchproject.com; there's a download there that contains an IPS patch that you can stick to your ROM, and then play it. It has weapons and everything.

The citadel level data is partially stored on the ROM and is 100% unaccessable without patching the ROM to allow access. If memory serves me right, there was also a ZX Spectrum emulator which was originally intended to be in Goldeneye, but only brief traces remain. Almost like the asteroids minigame in Doom that never saw the light of day. These aren't secrets, they're just abandoned ideas for the game or test stuff.

Rareware do like secrets, though. In Perfect Dark, there were some oddities. A vent with a big ? symbol, some ammo that was unobtainable, cheese on every level, parts of maps that seemingly served no purpose whatsoever, etc. In Goldeneye as well there were totally random things like the glass beakers on the vent in the ceiling in the Facility level, or picking up Ouromov's briefcase on the Silo level and being able to open the roof.

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