Posted by : Unknown Saturday, July 23, 2011

I often get asked if game developers get to hide special things in the games that they work on.  A lot of Easter Eggs can be found in the games, like Mr. Toots who can be found in Red Faction Armageddon early if you know where to look :)

But, some of us like to take the extra step and find a way to work in more personal items into their games...most of which you'd never know if they didn't point it out.  I can't speak for all games and developers, but this is something I love to do.  The first step is always to get it approved from the project lead to ensure that the content is known about and given a thumbs up :)

The first thing I did in Red Faction: Armageddon was to convince our writer that naming one of the early towns Hazel Fork was a good idea. I often heard people say where did that name come from?
I know it's a strange sounding name...but it's the name of the street that I grew up on :)  So, I wanted to take the opportunity to put something in that all of my family would recognize.

Next on the list was trying to get my son's name in the game somehow.  One of the first times I accomplished this was when I was working on The Godfather.  Since we needed tons of names for the hundreds of NPCs in the world, I was able to get his name in as the Irish bar owner of The Full Moon.

I worked with the Lead Environment Artist to figure out the right spot in the game.  When you exit the Alien caves for the first time there is an area with Graffiti, so we decided to take one of the water towers and change what was written.  

We managed to fit our names as well as the names of all of our children and it's positioned in a way that no one would realize it's anything meaningful if we didn't tell them.  I know this stuff is minor, but it's really nice to be able to put personal touches in a game that I've spent so much time working on.


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2 Responses so far.

  1. Anonymous says:

    Hi! It's interesting to see the pictures of the places and tags you talked about during your interview with The Grey Area Podcast a couple weeks ago!

  2. Unknown says:

    yes indeed...talking about it there is what gave me the idea of posting :)

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