My favorite teacher of my pre-collegiate schooling. Englert's third grade class." Englert was a teacher I had, not for third grade, but in middle school, who also coached the Odyssey of the Mind program I participated in.
The first audio diary by Nina Carnegie refers to "Mrs.
The airplane tail from BioShock has come to rest on a ridge in the underwater section outside The Adonis.
It's also the stupidest Battleship Potemkin reference you've ever seen. Somebody in Rapture was crazy about their cat! I dunno, I just found this funny. If you look at the bottom of the stairs in the Big Sister fight room, you'll find an overturned baby carriage.
Where's that Little Sister go at the end of the Big Sister introductory cutscene? Does she just disappear?! No! If you look to your right as the fight starts, you'll find her escaping through a vent.
so I had them placed on the opposite side of a glass window, re-reversing it to look like 0451. To keep things fresh, and perhaps to acknowledge the distance covered between the origins of the reference in 1994 to our game in 2010, Jordan had me reverse the order of the digits. System Shock, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, BioShock. In the Looking Glass-derived "immersive sim" lineage of games, the first keycode is always 0451.
I was lucky enough to be the one to put the 0451 into our game.
Rachelle has a husband named "Stephen" who sits around listening to radio serials while she swims laps at the Adonis Rachel goes to the gym, I stay home and play video games.
In the sauna, you can find an audio diary by "Rachelle Jacques." This is a cheeky reference to my wonderful girlfriend of 10-plus years, Rachel Jacks.
I used the description of Gaynor Peaches as an excuse to put words in Julie Langford's mouth (even though she doesn't appear elsewhere in the game,) specifically to make her talk about me. I also got to write a bunch of the in-game guide entries, including all the entries describing food and drink. But I used it as a calling card to 'sign' a few scenes in the Adonis. I didn't make this asset, or request it be made I was surprised one day to find that our artists had included yours truly as one of the food items in the game.
Gaynor Peaches can be found and snacked on throughout Rapture in BioShock 2.
I was the level designer for The Adonis Luxury Resort (the first level,) and Pauper's Drop (the fourth level.) The Drop was handed off to the talented Monte Martinez (level designer on the original Deus Ex, as well as DX2 and Thief 3) late in development so I could concentrate on the Adonis. So anyway, BioShock 2 is now upon us, and it includes a bunch of silly-ass secret crap and references by yours truly! Here they are! I feel incredibly proud of what the teams I've worked with have accomplished, incredibly fortunate to have been given the opportunities I have by the gracious people who have employed and mentored me, and incredibly grateful to all the commenters and fellow bloggers for helping me think differently about game design. I couldn't have imagined things working out this way if I'd tried. In the intervening four years, I've gone from a temp tester at Sony, to a full-time tester at a local game studio (the now-defunct Perpetual Entertainment,) to a rookie level designer on a standalone expansion pack (F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate by TimeGate Studios,) to a designer on one of the biggest game releases of 2010, BioShock 2. If you go back to the beginning, you can still see my F.E.A.R. Between progress updates, I included some light commentary about games and game design. editor- this blog was originally intended as a progress journal, to keep me on track in building my level design portfolio. In my off hours, I was just beginning to build my first amateur level in the F.E.A.R. At the time I was a temporary certification tester at Sony in San Mateo. I'm going to start with a little self-congratulatory bullshit, so brace for that or skip ahead.įour years ago last month, I started this blog.