BioShock Developer Finally Explains Infinite's Dancing Baguette Boy
He’s become the stuff of legend, and now, someone has explained BioShock Infinite’s dancing baguette boy. This cheerful chappy has been doing his merry jig for the past nine years - becoming a memeable mystery of the game’s Paris-based DLC.
BioShock has added some weird and wonderful NPCs over the years, but away from Andrew Ryan, Sofia Lamb, and Elizabeth, one little fellow has stood out more than most. How can you tell you're in Paris? I know, give a kid a baguette - you might as well have dressed him in a stripey jumper with a string of onions around his neck.
What's The Story With Baguette Boy?
After rounding off Booker DeWitt's main story in BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games continued the tale with the Burial at Sea DLC. The two-part expansion tied together the underwater dystopia of Rapture and the flying nightmare of Columbia. You might remember Part 2 took Elizabeth to Paris, where Baguette Boy became an icon in his own right.
Twitter has become a goldmine of hidden video game details, and when Baguette Boy randomly started doing the rounds again, a Senior Technical Animator on Infinite waded into the conversation. Here, Gwen Frey explained that Baguette Boy was originally supposed to be two dancing kids.
Frey said the Paris scenes felt underpopulated, meaning she had to resort to adding "Chumps". These are "skeletal meshes of humans with no AI." However, she explained, "The kids' feet were clipping through the ground and their hands were going through each other."
One of the boys was removed for ease but with the models being shorter than the adults, their hands were above their heads. Frey added, "So I deleted the boy's dancing partner and attached a baguette to his hands. Bam! Boy dances with baguette! Ship it!" Not knowing the fan-favourite status Baguette Boy was going to earn, she concluded, "I figured if anyone asked I'd just say 'bread is great right?!' I didn't think anything of it at the time, but this boy is the most viral thing I've ever made."
What About BioShock's Freaky Man Babies?
Of course, you'll know Baguette Boy isn't the only viral addition to the game. Infinite had more harrowing scenes - which feature women holding nightmarish babies with giant heads. Is it that children in Columbia have been taking too many plasmids? No, it's another texture problem.
Expanding on giant Man Babies, Frey said the placeholder was supposed to be swapped out with a more baby-inspired model. "But the main game shipped with a normal kid scaled down (placeholder!!!)," she admitted. "And then I was told to use it again in the DLC and... I just... I pick my fights so…"
With Cloud Chamber currently working on the mysterious BioShock 4, we don't know whether it's back to Rapture, Columbia, or somewhere completely new. Either way, it would be one of those typically geeky deep cuts if the developers put in some sort of Easter eggs for giant babies and Baguette Boy... make it happen!
