I notice that PCG have reprinted a flirty little featurette which I wrote for them a couple of months back. Inspired by the Kill General British Tabula Rasa event, they asked me to run through a history of the popular sport of Killing Richard Garriott (in games). In it I say things like…
Ultima V: Time Kills
An easy one. The game is all about rescuing Lord British. Spend too long messing around, and eventually you’ll be told of the great man’s demise. What… I was meant to save you? Sorry, man: I was too busy baking this lovely bread.
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Must be great to have your own character headline in 10+ games. How many examples of game-devs implementing personal avatars in games are there anyway? I actually can’t think of others than Richard Garriot at the moment.
The Id team turned up in a Quake 3 patch, I think. Then of course there’s this.
Oh, and Sid Meyer of course. In Civilization. Hmm.
There wasn’t a Lord British in Serpent Isle as well. ;-)
just don’t take his fork.
In Doom2 you had to kill John Romero.
I think Sid Meyer also acted as the model for the bartender in the Pirates remake.
You break Ford Schick (aka Warren Spector) out of an underground lab in Deus Ex, of course.
Shame you couldn’t break him out of Ion Storm before IW happened.
There were also the bizarre big headed developers in the Serious Sam games. There were scary, especially the ones in the graveyard in SS:TSE.
If you allow unrealistic representations, there’s the hidden room with a bunch of developer NPCs in Final Fantasy IV (it was FFII in the US, mind you). The little conversations with them were odd. IIRC, they were in that dwarf castle somewhere. But that game has so many castles it’s hard to keep them all straight.
Oh, and weren’t there developer appearances in the original Pokemon games?
Of course there were Devs in a special ending in Chrono Trigger as well but we all know that. That Magnus chanting music still haunts my nightmare and the Frog Theme song still makes me cry every time my phone rings. I need to see a shrink . . .