Bioshock Infinite is an odd game. At the time of its release, it was praised for stunning visuals, engaging combat, and a story that makes you think. Unfortunately, as time has gone on it has not aged particularly well. It’s still considered a very well made game, but there are noticeable flaws in it — likely from a crunch filled development — that have made its flaws stand out more.
One moment, that some saw as a flaw but is in reality just hysterically funny, is during the Burial At Sea DLC when the player is in Paris. As the player walks around town they see a child dancing in the streets in a circular motion, holding a baguette, as French children do.
https://twitter.com/instant_grat/status/1489695026783342599
This moment is bizarre, extremely funny, and ultimately harmless to the overall experience of Bioshock Infinite. It also went viral and became a bit of a meme. Every once in a while we see it pop back up again and people wonder to themselves why it is this child has decided to dance around a pole with bread. We all love bread, but do any of us love it so much we dance? Turns out, the reason for why this child has chosen to dance is a result of a common challenge for many developers. Technical limitations.
Turns out the person who put dancing baguette boy in the game was a developer named Gwen Frey. Frey is now a founder for the development studio, Chump Squad, but at the time they were responsible for placing all of the background characters in Bioshock. This meant placing nameless characters throughout the world so it wouldn’t feel oddly empty in places like Paris.
Hahaha, yeah, this was me. I placed all the background characters in Bioshock Infinite & the dlcs. It was a large part of my job. Here's why there is a bread boy:
🧵— Gwen Frey (@direGoldfish) February 7, 2022
One challenge of Frey’s job is making characters appear natural. If they were all just standing around doing nothing that would seem eerie and weird. So they need animations such as walking, talking, and yes dancing. However, since Frey was working on the DLC there wasn’t a huge budget to create new animations for random background NPCs. So Frey did what anyone would do in this situation and that’s re-use older animations.
For perf reasons we couldn't afford to have proper AI pathfinding around, so most of the background characters were "chumps". And we didn't have a ton of resources for dlc so I was mostly reusing animations from the base game.
— Gwen Frey (@direGoldfish) February 7, 2022
I thought the Paris scene was too static & needed more motion, I but couldn't afford another AI walking around. I figured a chump running in a circle around that cylinder could work since I could just expand the collision of it to prevent the player from running through them.
— Gwen Frey (@direGoldfish) February 7, 2022
The animation that Frey happened to choose was a moment from the base game of Bioshock Infinite when one of the main characters, Elizabeth, danced alongside some NPCs. The problem that Frey came across was that the animation needed some tweaking. Adults randomly dancing around a pole in Paris seemed strange, so they opted for children, but the children came with a whole new set of technical problems.
I decided to reuse that. But a couple randomly dancing seemed dumb.
I figured I'd make 2 dancing kids instead.
However, the kids had different proportions than the adults, so the kids' feet were clipping through the ground and their hands were going through each other.
— Gwen Frey (@direGoldfish) February 7, 2022
As Frey banged their head against a wall trying to find the perfect solution to create a non-boring background for Paris, inspiration struck them. Ditch the second child and replace them with…a baguette! With that decision, Frey was creating what they thought was going to be a largely unnoticed background character. Instead, they created a meme that lives on to this day. So what was their plan if anyone ever asked about the dancing baguette boy?
So I deleted the boy's dancing partner and attached a baguette to his hands. Bam! Boy dances with baguette! Ship it!
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 🤣
— Gwen Frey (@direGoldfish) February 7, 2022
Bread is great indeed Frey.