Speaking to NME at Gamescom 2022 this week, Nosebleed Interactive’s managing director and Arcade Paradise designer, Andreas Firnigl, has touched on including secrets and cheats when developing games, branding those devs that choose not to include cheats as “cowards”.
With a hands-on look at the recently released Arcade Paradise, Firnigl showed NME “the daftest thing that’s in the game that my team hate me for, because obviously I’m the designer and CEO”. Branding it a “stupid, stupid secret thing,” Firnigl showed off five playable arcade machines in-game that “don’t count as part of the 35 plus games” which the game advertises as available.
“There’s Flappy Bird, but it’s called Fly Guy, Snake, a little breakout game called Brick, Toad which is like Frogger, and a racing type thing. They’re 22 by 22 pixels.” Speaking further on his decision to include secrets and cheats in Arcade Paradise, Firnigl said that anything secret has an achievement or trophy so that players deliberately go looking for it.
There’s a particular cheat available for Arcade Paradise – no spoilers! – and Firnigl said this is deliberately made public and obvious for players. “We actually want players to use that just because, you know, people don’t put cheats anymore in games,” he said, before claiming, “Developers are cowards.”
When asked whether anyone had found all of the secrets in Arcade Paradise thus far, Firnigl commented that “the people that do notice always tweet about it because they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this? This is madness’.”
Firnigl also spoke about player agency, and the feeling that they have control over what happens in-game rather than being there as a happy coincidence. Arcade Paradise sees the player taking on the role of running the family laundromat, but quickly being given the option to include more aspects such as arcade machines, jukeboxes, gaming consoles and much more.
“As soon as you get over that initial, ‘oh, I’m being naughty doing this’ and you’re like, ‘actually I’m not being naughty doing this. I’m making more money doing this, what the fuck? Yeah, fuck you, dad.’” Firnigl said.
In other gaming news, Firnigl also commented to NME that The Prodigy’s live drummer produced the majority of the soundtrack for Arcade Paradise.
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