Recently on Twitter, Blizzard senior character artist @Dann_SW asked developers to admit their game dev sins, on account of the social media website's ongoing struggles under its new ownership. And the results were fascinating, with developers revealing never-before-heard insights and pointing out rare easter eggs that they had sneakily slipped into their games.
One story, however, that really caught our attention was related to a Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 mini-game that was apparently completely random, despite users online swearing that they'd found clever ways of mastering it.
Antoine Henry was a game designer who worked at Ubisoft Paris between 2007-2014. During that time, he worked on Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 and recalls a story where the game was lagging behind in production.
On Twitter, he writes:
"On Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 for the Wii, the structure we designed mandated a strict number of mini-games to work. Production was starting to lag behind we needed to find ideas that were very fast to implement. For some we just added a twist to another already implemented...
"But for one, we simply added a random number of point to each player each second. Wrote the game rules as "Concentrate to score points" and nothing else! Some players claimed to find techniques to master that mini-game!"
The game in question was the Chess mini-game, which asked players to hold the Wiimote and Nunchuk up to the side of the head as if they had telekinetic powers. However, as Henry states, point distribution was totally random and there was no skill at all to how this game was played or won. That didn't stop some players from making up strategies like "concentrating" for short periods of time, while others experimented with leaving the remotes alone to try and get to the bottom of its secrets.