linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.
since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!
In the original Bioshock, there is a locked office belonging to an Australian man, where an audio log tells you his door code was set to Australia Day. Luckily for the player, there is a completely unsubtle poster next to the audio log that tells you when Australia Day is.
Except of course. The poster, and subsequently the code, is written MM/DD. Which is not how an Australian would write it. This has bothered me for years and hopefully Ken Levine will someday be brought to justice.
Maybe it's an alternate universe where metric units were universally accepted?
We live in hope!! But not any of the cities called Hope in the US.
I dunno, Americans love to do the opposite so some revenge is fine.
eight numbers in a row isn't very easy to read for humans. are you familiar with iso-8601?
I appreciate the effort to make us Americans look like we are capable of adopting someone else's standard over our own. But let's face it, suspension of disbelief is shot to hell at that point.
the sad thing is that roughly half the team that made Bio1 was in Australia. that sign was made very late in development when too much shit was flyin around for it to be prioritized.
also the anachronistic typeface and design, the lack of any visible frame, and the design going to the very edge of the texture... my entire face crumples in embarrassment that we let that through. well, whatever.
I hope you understand that my accusatory tone was largely tongue in cheek. As silly and contrived as the entire scenario is, I've been making "Australia Day" jokes with my friends for years now, so in that way it's brought me a lot of joy.
I can only imagine the stress of trying to get a game like Bioshock to ship, so the realities of game development non-withstanding, it'd have been pretty funny if you managed to turn it around in-universe. Have Kyburz complain about the gaudy, inauthentic American style of the poster that's supposed to be celebrating his home. "They didn't even write the date correctly..."
right, there are plenty of ways it could have been lampshaded, but all of them just remind me how little agility bad AAA processes have (the different timelines of texture localization, writing and voice recording, etc). and games being so huge and stuffed full of things that each individual thing matters less. i don't miss that part of the industry.
Ken Levine must be brought to justice for this bioshocking behaviour.
okay but if they did all that and then the code was 2601 it would've been genius
