Easter Eggs: The ninja game artists WOC

adam · May 2007

(Weapon of Choice!)

I swear if one of you post in here saying this isn't good for a forum I'm doing a "<Your name> supports JT" as my next in-game graffiti piece!

So far I've...

-named a water treatment facility after the town I grew up in
-Put the LOST numbers on a hatch lid
-Numerous name drops of employee's on magazine covers

You?

Joshua Stubbles · May 2007

When I was working on Daredevil, I put "#models" and "polycount" and "Vassago" into some tag/graffiti textures. That was back in 2002 or so.

Steve Schulze · May 2007

Lets see.
My cat is in Pony Friends.
I've put my Dad's ceramic art in a couple of games.
I've added a friends graffiti art to buildings in Topgear

I know I'm forgetting some. I'll update as they come to me.

danr · May 2007

Oh, I'm the Egg King. I had the fan community in a tizzy searching for the ten numbered eggs in VCS, I've even had eggs mentioned in reviews. Not only are they a giggle to do and find, they can also be a good way of vagueing away bugs you thought you'd fixed 6 times already (no, you are really NOT supposed to be able to get here). Oh, did I say that out loud?

One thing I'd never do though is internal name-dropping or in-jokes, it seems pointless. To be proper easter eggs, they should have at least some frame of reference to an uknown percentage of the paying public

Steve Schulze · May 2007

Mine are entirely for the amusement of myself and the one or two other people they may involve.

Daz · May 2007

Hah funny, when I was at EA they totally banned easter eggs, and made it clear that putting anything you weren't meant to in the game would mean dismissal. *Before* that, when I worked on the abysmal 'Agent Under Fire', we were putting all sorts of crap in. One of the level designers sreengrabbed his website and textured a monitor in game with it, hah. I also know someone who put his phone number on the side of a Taxi in 'Dead To Rights', doh.
Never really did much myself though

there aint too much scope for sneaking character content in.

danr · May 2007

Daz - that wacky EA. It sounded like a *riot

I've been lucky with all the games I've done really - as I say, in jokes are traditionally frowned upon (good thing too imo) but over the years artists have been positively encouraged to add content at their own discretion, as long as it enriches the atmosphere of the game and doesn't cause problems elsewhere ...

Ever sat alone in an office at 6 in the morning after 22 hours straight, redoing an entire game level to hit alpha the very next day? The perfect brew for a particularly psychotic brand of easter eggs to drop in ... Oh yes. Those little plastic fuckers. I showed them alright

hawken · May 2007

When I used to make games for use on SKY, we put all sort of shit in there.

My friend Tom was the king though. I was merely a sideshow. He often put pictures of staff there into websites and games.

not a game but a website for a game (stuntman) he put a picture of his girlfriend in the cars ashtray. unfortunately that website is not with us any more.

doc rob · May 2007

I snuck a Dopefish into a couple of games - in one we had a giant sea monster and if he opened his mouth to eat you, you could kind of see a Dopefish stuck in his gullet.

Whargoul · May 2007

I don't knwo what you're talking about Daz - I always put tons of crap in the stuff I do. Most of the time they ask you to tell them everything you put in, so there's no surprises, but I usually don't bother

Let's see.

In SSX (1 or 2 I forget) there's a city track, and in one of the back alleys I made a bowling pin-layout of garbage cans. If you smash into them, a sign down the street lights up to show which you knocked down, and says "strike" if you get them all.

Also, there's mailboxes that, when hit, explodes out random mail. At one time, one of the things was a postcard of two antelope mating. QA spotted it, so I changed it to a midget in a tuxedo smoking a cigar with very faint text "QA sucks".

An alien head frozen in the ice in another level (under water, you need to use the manual replay camera to spin under to see it).

The random teleporting telephone booth. We stuck a few of these off to the side in some alleys, and they would usually drop you ahead a little bit. One in awhile, it drops you much further ahead (out of a hovering UFO).

If you took a shortcut through the office building, it was our cubicals. I can't remember if the pictures on the walls had significance though.

In almost every character I've done, I write my name in the tread pattern on their shoe's. There's lots of those ones.

Churchill was kind of a giant easter egg. Not hidden, but cool, eh Gauss?!

In one of the silly items in SSX3 (a large bobble head thing) - inside the head is a plane textured with a chicken, holding a sign saying "Hi Ian!" (which is what the bobble head is meant to resemble). The only way to see it is to have a secnond player wear it, get near each other and manually rotate the camera into the head in replay. Fun stuff!

I had several for SSX3 (or 4?) that I cut because I couldn't get the secret unlock method working %100 (without any SE intervention). One was an actual giant easter egg with chicken legs sticking out the bottom.

On one shirt, I put an AC/DC looking logo with my initals and my girlfriends.

When there's newspapers and such, it's usally some funny photo of me or the team with a crazy headline.

Hmmm that's all I can remember off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten than I remember.

swampbug · May 2007

Harliquin put a row of picture frames including his portrait, mine and a few others in punisher. Near the end in the prison offices.

I made myself a jogger in Saints Row. Im the one with the hat on. Steve-O is the white verison of the mailman. Muckywetnoodle is the white hustler (guy with fur hood)
and another guy at work chris is the hotdog man.

tpe · May 2007

In various hitman games...

Rats eating pizza and playing cards
Loads of odd number plates IL0V3M0NY BIG1 1FART etc on cars, pictures of friends, names of friends, spoof coke signs. In one game I put a complete character of the father in-law in. Loads of pics of half naked chicks etc, I used to make sure everything i did had some kind of easter egg in, but now the stuff i am doing is so off beat it is kind of difficult to know what to put in. What do you do when the concept is farther out than the easter eggs?

tim

danr · May 2007

swampbug - did Harl put an egg reading "TNSLB" in anywhere?

i had to rip one of those out once (sorry). It had so many fucking bugs attached to it ...

Daz · May 2007

[ QUOTE ]
I don't knwo what you're talking about Daz

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, should have specified. EA *Redwood Shores*

I think the reason 'easter-egging' became such a serious 'crime' at that studio was because of the infamous case of a version of Tiger Woods golf having to get recalled cos someone put a Southpark movie on the disc, haha.

swampbug · May 2007

Danr, hahah yeah I remember him making a licence plate (not 100% certain, maybe he did that on punisher) and he wrote in graffiti on a bench something like Harl "heart" tins.

James can correct me if I'm wrong, but it went something like that.

Jay Evans · May 2007

astrozombie.. was it you? or someone else who left the biggest tag ever on one of the BFV levels. I mean you had to pull the camera way out into the sky to see the giant tag etched into the earth:P

Ryno · May 2007

In Forza I did a hell of a lot of them. Gas Station on the Pacific Seaboard track says "We've got Gas" on the sign. Dropkick Murphys graffiti references. EZO Metal building after an early 90s Japanese metal band. Small text on tollbooth/gatehouse saying lots of funny stuff. Farrell Electric building after a friend of mine. Tons of other stuff I can't even remember. Those tracks were just so damn huge that there was lots of space to sneak stuff in.

On Flight Simulator I did the Easter Island head monoliths. One random crop circle terrain texture. A co-worker put chickens in some of the barn, and if you barnstorm the building, they fly around like mad.

In Crackdown I did some funny license plates on a bunch of the vehicles, but I'm not sure if they snuck through or got replaced.

moose · May 2007

whar: lol thats awesome... i always smashed through those trash cans, but never knew of the billboard. and i used that UFO teleport thing alll the freakin time.

there is a moose head hieroglyph in UC2, in the techy env set.
put a smiley face on the tip of the Boomshot projectiles in Gears, homage to flak cannon in UT

Emil Mujanovic · May 2007

We've been trying to do that for the project I'm on here at work, though its proven to be rather difficult. We were supposed to get most of our names/nicknames in as randomly generated enemy names, but that kinda died in the ass.
I'll definitely be throwing in some random shit in the next title though. Will try and get greentooth in there somewhere.

-caseyjones

Malekyth · May 2007

The generic NPC characters in Unreal 2 are mostly Legend artists, as well as a member of the cleaning staff. He seemed amused to have wound up in the game as doomed cannon fodder.

Um ... the first-person pistols in Unreal Championship 2 had bones prefixed 'gubka' and 'mila', Russian for 'soap' and 'sponge'. Um ... and in Anachronox, the little girl that Paco rescues is playing with her dolly in a way strongly reminiscent of how an old girlfriend couldn't resist making pairs of anything -- salt and pepper shakers, Arby's and Horsie Sauce dispensers, etc. -- dance.

My Easter Eggery is lame indeed!

Penzer · May 2007

Just saw this posted on Joystiq, its freeze frames at 2 and 12 seconds into the sc2 trailer. Obviously not mine, but still funny. I'm having a lot of fun reading your guys easter eggs though, wish I had something of my own to add.

http://hardwired.hu/forum/forum.phtml?area=comment&id=21137

Easter Eggs: The ninja game artists WOC

Replies