A hidden (and broken) stage has been revealed in Fighters Megamix after 28 years.

Can anyone believe it’s been 30 years since the Sega Saturn launched in Japan? To celebrate the occasion, Yutaka Ito, who works today as a director at RGG Studio, revealed a well hidden secret about Fighters Megamix (1997), the acclaimed crossover fighter on Saturn that he worked on during his early years working for Sega as a programmer at AM2. There was a secret stage hidden away in the game, only accessible through a secret code that he had originally intended to reveal to players through magazines. The reason he didn’t? The stage contained a bug that softlocks the game, which he didn’t find out about until the game already shipped to retail. He really seems to take that mistake personally too.

Want to see what this mysterious(-ly destructive) stage looks like? Check it out after the break.

Here is Ito-san’s tweet, showing the hidden “Ohshima Stage” in action and explaining the reason why it’s never been shown until now.

#セガサターン30周年 ということで、ここで初めて公開します。
ファイターズメガミックスの最後の隠し要素、通称「大島ステージ」。ある条件を満たすと出現します。
ただし、壁を破壊するとフリーズします。バックアップや本体がどうなるかわかりません。
すみません。
一生反省します🙇🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/aJocGjMmYO

— 伊東 豊（セガ・龍が如くスタジオ技術責任者） (@YutakaIto_RGG) November 22, 2024

And here’s Ito-san’s explanation for what went wrong, taken from his thread and translated to English

When I was a newcomer, I worked on a title called “Fighters Megamix.” The schedule was extremely tight, but we packed in a lot of elements to please the users. I was in charge of stage control, and my seniors and I added a “hidden stage” just before the deadline. After its release, Megamix received a great response and was featured in every issue of gaming magazines. Just as information on the hidden stage was about to be released, it was discovered that breaking the walls of the stage (by defeating an enemy with a big move) would cause the game to freeze. The release of the information was abruptly halted and the article was replaced.

The cause was completely my mistake. When I added the data for the hidden stages, I forgot to add a table for the “wall debris object,” resulting in an array over-access. There was no way to recover the hundreds of thousands of ROMs that had already been released, so the hidden stage was treated like it “never existed”! It may be that we were on a really tight schedule and did not get around to checking for hidden elements. The senior members of the team were kind enough to say, “Don’t worry about it,” but I felt the most depressed in my life, partly because I had inconvenienced so many people and partly because it was so elementary a mistake!

So here is the first time we are revealing it to the public.
The last hidden element of Fighters Megamix, known as the “Oshima Stage.” It appears when certain conditions are met.
However, if you destroy the wall, it will freeze. I don’t know what happened to the backup or the main unit.
Sorry.
I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.

If I can speak personally for just a moment, I have made many stupid mistakes like the one Ito-san described here and felt horrible about inconveniencing others, so I know just how he’s feeling. We’ve all probably experienced that a few times. Game development is a rough job, oftentimes with merciless deadlines. With all that pressure, it’s easy to make the occasional dumb oversight, which stings a lot more in the days before downloadable patches were possible. I hope he at least takes solace in the fact that the rest of the game still works perfectly and we can all still appreciate his hard work and the fact he finally revealed this long-lost stage. If Ito-san or anyone close to him just so happens to read this, I hope he knows he did a great job regardless and the important thing is Fighters Megamix as a whole earned its high mark in Sega’s long history, in part due to the efforts of Ito-san and his colleagues. It’s a crying shame we’ll never find out how to access that stage, though.

So the very next day, we found out how to access that stage, thanks to our own champion of unlocking unknown hidden content in Saturn games: Bo Bayles. It turns out that a hint on how to access it was hidden in plain sight, described in a text file found in the disc for the Japanese version. With that clue in mind, they cracked the code and showed everyone how to do it in a video. Always bet on Bo.

OK, I found it! Here’s how to get the secret stage background in Fighters Megamix.

There’s a text file with messages from the developers on the Japanese version of the game. The note from Yutaka Ito actually gives a big clue!

Here’s a video of how to do it. pic.twitter.com/QHHXg30Mif

— Bo (Low Context Burning Rangers) (@memory_fallen) November 24, 2024

The note describes how you can use controller 2’s X button on the Team Battle screen to prevent the CPU from choosing certain characters.

Do this for all but Deku, and… that’s it!

A full explanation with technical details is linked here: https://t.co/KS6C8HLFDL pic.twitter.com/UgfyI1s4ds

— Bo (Low Context Burning Rangers) (@memory_fallen) November 24, 2024

If you do that trick, the hidden stage will randomly be inserted into the sequence of Team Battle stages. pic.twitter.com/TqHDdTglYN

— Bo (Low Context Burning Rangers) (@memory_fallen) November 24, 2024

The hidden stage can only be accessed in Team Battle mode after you’ve unlocked Deku. Here’s how to do it.

1. In Team Battle mode, start a Player vs. CPU battle with two controllers plugged in.
2. Select every character except for Deku with the X button on the second controller, then pick Deku as yours and the CPU opponent’s character.
3. Select “random” when selecting between walled or open stages.

Do all that and you’ll fight a Deku vs. Deku battle on the Ohshima stage, named because the kanji making up the walls say “Ohshima”, unlike the regular, non-hidden version of the stage, which is assigned to Kids Sarah and says “MEGAMIX” in English. Bo says he’ll see if he can prepare a patch for the game to fix the game crashing bug, but until then, try not to break the walls on this stage. He explains on his blog in greater detail how he found this code and why it works the way it does.

What do you think of this nearly lost secret code? Are you itching to try it out for yourself? Do you wanna give Ito-san a big hug and assure him he did his best? Let us know in the comments below?

And if you’re wondering why I’m suddenly president of Bo Bayles’s fan club, check out some of the other lost material he’s discovered in Saturn games like Golden Axe: The Duel, Burning Rangers, and Kingdom Grand Prix.

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