There might be. The Citadel map in Goldeneye was found ten years after the game was released. Every same person had given up looking considering it obviously wasn't in the game and it's existence was denied by devs who has no reason to lie about it (other than getting fans to stop asking, I guess). But it was there.
It wasn't really an intended secret. It sounds like to make it accessible, a player had to hack it in, and to make it playable, another player had to contribute clipping information.
The whole thing sort of sounds like the beginning of StarGate: Universe - only the reward for beating an unbeatable test in an MMO game was getting enrolled in an extraplanteray research program.
I was a part of finding a secret in the SNES version of Sim City that had gone almost undiscovered for over 20 years after release. These things happen.
This reminds me a lot of Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64; maps with areas that have no reason to be there other than conspiracy theories (some that turned out to be true!), traces of things that were meant to be in the game but were cut at the very last minute, emulators unearthing more mysteries than they solve... it's maddening, but an interesting look at how we think.
Ultimately there are very simple explanations for most things. You'll have developer/mapper playgrounds where they model new stuff and try things out before cutting them or implementing them. Sometimes these things happen in production maps, and are simply overlooked when they are no longer interesting. It's cruft, but for explorers they are so much more.
Other times they are really nicely fleshed out, but locked away behind flimsy "gates", and really were intended to go into the full game, but had to be abandoned at the very last minute.
And then there's the cinematic areas that are made for show, implemented as they were intended, which never included being accessible to players.
What's really the most rewarding thing about this is that you, as a player, as an explorer, get to puzzle things out; you almost get to write the narrative yourself.
I know what you mean, I spent a lot of time exploring Shadow of the Colossus when I was younger, but now it's really hard to find the time to spend quality time with a game.
Why isn't it possible to decompile this inside of an emulator and know for sure if there are assets that haven't been seen in-game and where they reside?
I remember finding the beach that seems to harken back to Ico. The ambiguity is a thrill: there's enough to remind you, but never quite enough to prove it. And so you have an odd win-win scenario, where you can enjoy just finding something interesting, but maybe there's more to it. When you walk away from the game, there's a little part of you that thinks there's still more to be had, that the game hasn't ended yet. It helps stave off that bittersweetness of winning mentioned near the start.
It also helps that there really were some great hidden bits. The game is riddled with wonderfully hidden special spots. (If I remember correctly, it's a bad idea to eat the fruit in the garden at the top of the temple.)
When Myst Online: Uru Live got its second wind, a similar air followed the gameplay. Everything could be a puzzle or a plot with each new update. I always felt the Cyan developers knew they had to make puzzles that not only stumped a player, but a whole community of fans. I had enormous amounts of fun searching for and - in the end inventing - puzzles there. To this day I like to think Jalak was totally a puzzle, and not just a surprisingly involved gizmo.
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It wasn't really an intended secret. It sounds like to make it accessible, a player had to hack it in, and to make it playable, another player had to contribute clipping information.
Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.
Other times they are really nicely fleshed out, but locked away behind flimsy "gates", and really were intended to go into the full game, but had to be abandoned at the very last minute.
And then there's the cinematic areas that are made for show, implemented as they were intended, which never included being accessible to players.
What's really the most rewarding thing about this is that you, as a player, as an explorer, get to puzzle things out; you almost get to write the narrative yourself.
It also helps that there really were some great hidden bits. The game is riddled with wonderfully hidden special spots. (If I remember correctly, it's a bad idea to eat the fruit in the garden at the top of the temple.)
When Myst Online: Uru Live got its second wind, a similar air followed the gameplay. Everything could be a puzzle or a plot with each new update. I always felt the Cyan developers knew they had to make puzzles that not only stumped a player, but a whole community of fans. I had enormous amounts of fun searching for and - in the end inventing - puzzles there. To this day I like to think Jalak was totally a puzzle, and not just a surprisingly involved gizmo.