Skyrim and Fallout devs talk about some fun secrets in their games
Severed legs, Blackreef and headless horse riders
I’m a sucker for well-hidden video game easter eggs, from Psychonauts 2’s strange mpreg cutscene to the ability to play as a baby in Mount & Blade 2, they're all great they’re great. But it’s all too easy to walk past easter eggs without knowing they were even there. I’ve probably waved off multiple fun secrets, mistaking them for lore I didn’t understand or a questline I haven’t gotten to. So, my pea-sized brain enjoyed this video of game designer Steve Lee interviewing the devs behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout as they reveal some dev secrets behind those games - including a cool egg.
The group point to the jellyfish-filled Blackreach that was added to Skyrim in “very little time,” and the headless horse-riding ghost that treks through Skyrim to reach its grave. Lee mentions a fun bug from Dishonoured 2’s development that involved a group of severed legs that would chase after the player, but wouldn’t speak, as if the game thought “they can’t talk because they don’t have heads.”
But easily my favourite anecdote was the Easter egg that level designer Joel Burgess squeezed into Fallout 3. Burgess says that he created the game’s McClellan House as an homage to one of his favourite short stories in The Martian Chronicles - recreating an automated house after the homeowners have died. There are a ton of small, personal details in the house and the full video is definitely worth a watch.
Lee’s other YouTube uploads mostly consist of game dev tutorials, but there’s also a full 1-hour long talk between the four devs where they delve into more details on the development process. To celebrate Christ’s resurrection, devs from across the internet revealed their favourite hidden easter eggs back in 2021 - games within games, heavy foreshadowing, and random noises galore.