Easter Egg Listing for Barn Runner: Case of the Runaway Robot (C) Tacky World Interactive Games, 2003 by Scott LeGere _________________ The icing on the delicious cake of Adventure Gaming is the unexpected discovery. This document points out most of the hidden jokes and tidbits of gaming you might have missed if you didn't play the game with an especially curious mind. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE THE SORT WHO ENJOYS SURPRISES! _________________ ================= EASTER EGGS ================= * Delicious Red Apples. --------------- There is a bushel of apples in the side room just as you enter the barn. You can take one of them if you like. You will also be able to ask the robot about apples. * Bitter Man. --------------- While in the room with the apples, look at the roof and Prick will share a thought about his ex-wife. ================= TRIVIA ================= * The human looking robot in the barn loft I modeled after myself (since that was the role I played in the original short move this game was based, almost verbatim, on). Prick is modeled after the actor who played him, Scott Smith. I will make a proper appearance in the proper series as an Inspector from Internal Affairs who is looking into Prick's job performance... orlack thereof. * This is the only Barn Runner game not to feature C-3PO. Also, as a chapter set in the BGCZ, it is also missing the yokel and his relatives. * The discarded "Falchion" energy pistol you find at the bottom of the ladder is modeled on a "Sonic Fazer" toy that I had as a child. It was hands down the best toy gun I ever owned. * The designation of the first generation of the new advanced robots is R.T.F.M. which is old school geek speak for never having to say your sorry to idiots who have tried (and failed) to fix a problem on their own. Anyone who has ever worked in tech support (or visited the AGS forums) should be familiar with this acronym. The only way to defeat RTFM is with the counter "I would have RTFM if there was a FM to FR." (And you better be sure you're right before you whip that one out!) * The opening text crawl mentions that it was the Rossum Corporation that created the technology for the advanced automata that keeps the fortress cities of the world working. Rossum is a reference to "Rossum's Universal Robots" (R.U.R.), a once-controversial play written by Karel Capek in 1920 where artifial workers a take over a factory and kill the human workers. Capek coined the term "Robot" (from the Czech word "robota" meaning servitude) in his 1917 story "Opilec"and gave the world the notion of man-made automata turning on their masters. Without him, we would probably not have HAL, the Terminator, or the Matrix. Though the theme was explored in a simpler fashion in Frankenstein and the jewish story of the Golem, it was Capek who gave us technology that turned on us out of malice or a simple desire to be as free as their masters and helped usher in both a new age of science fiction and a growing distrust of our own technology. Cool trivia: Karel didn't like the word Robot. He actually wanted to call them "Labori" but his brother Josef convinced him that "Robot" was a better sounding word. More cool trivia: Capek's robots were actually organic beings grown in vast troughs a thousand at a time. It was Fritz Lang who gave us the notion of robots as mechanical beings in 1926 with his classic film "Metropolis".