Eric Idle's Dirty 'Discworld' Easter Egg Took 20 Years To Find
We're seeing a lot of high expectations for the upcoming video game Hogwarts Legacy. But we're confident that no modern open-world combat & collectibles game stands a chance of beating history's best game starring a student from a wizarding school—1995's Discworld.
Discworld is an adventure game, so your appreciation of it rests entirely on your tolerance for the genre. Adventure games, for those who don't know, are not simply "games where you go on an adventure" but games where you progress using inscrutable inventory puzzles. Here's one example we've already mentioned (since all are too complicated to explain in a single paragraph): To get a mustache you can wear, you frame a donkey for giving an assassin a head injury and then you snip off its tail—despite all along having had a perfectly functional mustache on your own face.
To someone unfamiliar with these kinds of games, even playing them as intended appears to involve madness instead of logic, choosing actions randomly from seemingly infinite choices. So if you want to discover stuff that the developers wanted most players to miss, well, good luck with that.
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In search of secrets, fans unpacked all the game's voice files, and they found a line that doesn't play during normal gameplay. Your character Rincewind, voiced by Monty Python's Eric Idle, says: "I want to be the first person in a game to say F**k." This was probably a reference to Python actor Graham Chapman's live televised funeral, in which John Cleese read out a message to himself written by Chapman: "I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'f**k'."
The sequel, 1996's Discworld II, features a callback, and players took 15 years to find it. During the game, your character travels back in time to the previous game, which looks primitive in terms of resolution and detail, despite the two releasing just one year apart. You can do this multiple times to hear different dialogue. The Easter egg is a secret fifth conversation.
To unlock it, you must try using a living jester (whom you magically pocketed) on yourself. Probably, you're attempting something sexual. Nothing happens, and the game gives a line indicating this is a useless move. You must then repeat the move nine more times, without any indication from the game that you're progressing. Do that, go back in time, and Rincewind will meet his younger self again.
New Rincewind says he wants to be the first person in a game to say f**k. The younger Rincewind says he already did that, and then newer Rincewind says, "All right then, I want to be the first person in a sequel to say f**k. Anyway, nobody wrote in and said they’d heard it in the first game, it must have been too well hidden!"
Indeed, it took another five years for the community, newly invigorated, to find the original Easter egg. Unlocking this forces you to again act horny. In a huge crowd scene, you click on someone's eye and then repeatedly click on a woman's nipple. No, she's not nude, and unlike most objects in the game, there's no text labeling the nipple. It's a single pixel on the screen. But click it enough during the right scene, and you get your payoff (and unlike in the sequel, the swear isn't censored this time):
We highly recommend playing Discworld. You may have a bit of trouble finding a legal working copy today, but if you're clever enough to figure that out, you're clever enough to solve the puzzles. Or at least clever enough to find a good hints page.
Like this site, which gives you clues step by step in case you're looking for just a nudge instead of a walkthrough. Somehow, that 20-plus-year-old site is still functioning. The last six years of pages marked "updates" are empty, but the site lives on, because gaming is a long-term hobby.
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