Tiny Jokes in Games
Games are rife with easter eggs, hidden oddities and in-jokes. Longtime readers may recall the dildo I spotted in Max Payne 2.
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Counter Strike: Source. It’s a decent online shooter, and provides a satisfying, blood-spattered 20 minute break from whatever I’m doing. One remarkable aspect of the game is how much of the environment you can react with.
A popular map entitled ‘cs_office’ consists of several offices. In other games, the ‘office’ map is often an accurate rendering of the game developer’s offices, but I’m not sure if that’s the case here. In the broad shot, you can see a satirical version of those motivational posters.
I took a moment to zoom in on one of the monitors (before it was, you know, shot off the desk). If you have a look, you’ll see that someone has a DOS command prompt window open, and is about to run a program called ‘embezzle.exe’. You’ll also note that, in another window, there’s an Excel spreadsheet entitled ‘TPS Reports, Jan, 1998.xls’. That, of course, is a reference to Office Space.
None of that is ha-ha funny, but the level of attention to ironic detail entertains me.
jd 
