It’s amazing how many secrets and Easter eggs are in video game nowadays, isn’t it? The first BioShock, which was released over 10 years ago, seems to have one more secret left that surfaced just today,
Over on the 4chan forums, a poster claiming to be a developer who worked on BioShock 2 mentioned that the dev team took ‘shrooms when developing BioShock 2 to “help the creative juices get flowing.” Big claims, right? To prove his identity, the poster mentioned a hidden message in the first BioShock game that has remain buried until today.
In BioShock 1, go to the second half of Hephaestus where you first encounter Ryan in person. Use Incinerate to get you down to 1 HP, then use it again on the area where the cutscene triggers and walk into it. You’ll die right when the scene starts, but wind up in a Vita Chamber outside the map. Turn on Art Captions and you’ll see a developer message about Paul Hellquist not doing his job. No one has found this bug yet publicly, it’s in all versions. Cheers.
People did try to replicate the steps, and was greeted by the following message:
BioShock 2 developers talked to Kotaku and disputed the claims of the 4chan poster. However, the message shown above is legit, and was written by former Irrational Games Technical Director, Chris Kline. As for the Paul Hellquist mentioned in the message, he’s the Lead Designer of the game, who reportedly clashed with BioShock director Ken Levine during development.
Regardless if the 4chan poster’s claims are real or not, this is a nice Easter egg from a decade-old game. Let’s hope more video game secrets are revealed by devs (or would-be devs), and how they came to be.
