These Videos Show You What Your Favorite Games Don't Want You to See

There's been a very, very, very excellent gif making the rounds on Twitter lately, and it's good for a lot more than a laugh and a like. It comes from a video about Sonic Adventure 2 made as part of a series by YouTube creator Shesez. Boundary Break explores games from Earthbound to Dark Souls by untethering the game's camera and looking into all the nooks and crannies normally hidden from view.

Sometimes that reveals absurd and seemingly random things, like Doctor Robotnik's upside-down head just out of the frame of a cutscene, and sometimes it reveals a lot more. It's not just rough edges and jank on display in Boundary Break, and there's as much comedy in the series as there are opportunities to better understand how games are designed.

Hijacking a game's camera away from its intended perspective can reveal a great deal about how a level or a scene was constructed. It lays bare the tricks, quirks, and hacks that make up the finished product—and each episode is filled with these kinds of sleights of hand. It turns out that pre-rendered cutscenes are frequently played on a plane in a 3D space lined up perfectly with the player's fixed view, for example.  So when the camera is freed, Shesez reveals a space sort of like a movie theatre in limbo. Zoom out in an Animal Crossing game, meanwhile, and the series' signature perspective trick is revealed to be the result of building its world on a long tube.

For those less interested in the technical side of things, Boundary Break is also great at isolating interesting details and even bits of trivia that would otherwise be easy to miss. Take for instance the back of the amiibo box in which , or the pieces of the Triforce .

Splatoon,

sports complete and accurate labelling

concealed at the top of the water walls in Wind Waker

But the very best part of the series may simply be its variety. Pixels or polygons, platformers or RPGs, Shesez's targets are chosen from across such a wide spectrum of the hobby that it's hard to imagine there isn't at least one video in the series for everyone.

The complete Boundary Break playlist can be found on YouTube, as well as the archives of Shesez' livestreamed extended episodes for loads more wall-breaking insight.