It kind of failed if you had a fancy CD player (or CD-ROM drive) that could show the lengths of tracks, if every other song on an album is 3 minutes long, then the last one probably isn’t 30 minutes long.
I don’t know what the point of this post is, other than that it sucks when a modern release removes the hidden track 
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have any examples?
311’s Transistor was the one I remembered. Here are some others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap
Interesting, thanks for the info. I didn’t realize that was possible on a CD.
Damn, these two albums had hidden tracks and I had no idea?