i love them when people put them in. i'm not very creative when it comes to making my own though. 

still looking for DopeFish.
I must make a model for it. 

They're a sadly lost art it seems. :( HL2's the most recent FPS I can remember having them and they weren't really very secret tbh! 

yeah, things like secrets tend to be left out as games move more towards efficiency. :(
when a game does have them, they seem even more special. :) 

Are you rustling a big bag of numfuck threads to start? But I'm a hopeless games nerd so.

Secrets are alive and well, they now fall under the umbrella of 'achievements' - because those are worth $$$.

Q1 secrets don't exist anymore, really. Valve is the last company to do those in HL2 and Portal2. Longer play time per level has taken that side out of modern games design I think.

Now secrets are justified before a committee. The best one I ever heard was 'but how will the player know they're there?' 

i liked the secret rooms in rage. no way i would have found them on my own, but wicked stuff. and all the little things in the game, its like they had a lot of fun adding them.

http://rage.wikia.com/wiki/Easter_Eggs

sadly no secret levels though. :( 

I'm not very good at finding them though :/

It's great when a map has a nice balance of secrets of different difficulty levels. Kind of pisses me off when I can see some secret item but can't figure out how to get it at all.

Also, in Quake, if you are going to put in a quad secret, make sure there is a nice quad run directly after it because nothing sucks more than finding the quad after already killing everything. It's also annoying when there is a route choice after a quad and one direction has no enemies along it.

ijed: Do modern games really have longer playtime per level? I don't think I finished many levels in Quake 1 *that* quickly the first time I played them. I suspect even E1M1 took 10 minutes, and some of the more complex levels took closer to 30 or 1hr (probably the first time I played the dismal oubliette).

The main reason for lack of secrets is because it costs money to put them in, and since only some people will find them the developers put the money into other things instead. Making even a nice secret in Quake 1 doesn't ever really take more than an hour for one developer - which is obviously not a substantial cost in development time or money. I think many devs are still quite passionate about slipping in little secrets in the last few months of dev time if they can, but now games cost 10s of millions of dollars to make they can't be so cavalier about it must ask permission.

Also, with Quake 1 you don't have lame "realistic" player movement, so it's easier to have secrets that require jumping around, whilst games like CoD focus more on aiming, shooting and guiding the player through linear levels or between waypoints in more open levels and usually so scripted that having some area the player might wander off to in order to hunt secrets would totally break the immersion.

Achievements seem to have replaced the traditional secret, and are more like little challenges. When I was trying to make a Q2 level I wanted to have achievement like challenges in the level where there would be a bunch of stimpacks or armour plates that you would have to collect, but which involved performing a trick jump to get them all. Never got further than an idea though.