BioShock Infinite’s viral Bread Boy, explained by its creator
BioShock Infinite has a stand-out, iconic NPC: the Bread Boy.
The Bread Boy appears in BioShock Infinite’s Burial at Sea DLC episodes, in an over-the-top Parisian dream sequence. He was the subject of a recent viral tweet that poked a bit of fun at what the tweeter saw as a hamfisted way to tell players, hey! You’re in Paris!
But the reasons the Bread Boy exists, why he dances, why he holds the baguette — tell a broader story about how games are made, and the very specific, very strange challenges that developers face.
That’s why I reached out to Gwen Frey, founder of indie studio Chump Squad and maker of the Bread Boy, to get the inside story.
Frey is currently hard at work on a puzzle game called Lab Rat for Chump Squad. But back in 2011 she was at Irrational Games, working as an animator on BioShock Infinite and its downloadable content.
The Bread Boy scene of Burial at Sea takes place in a fantasy Paris, where everything is a just a little too perfect. Of course, once this dream vanishes the player will be back in Rapture, the underwater city where most of Burial at Sea takes place. One of Frey’s many tasks was placing background characters in this scene: the painters capturing the Seine, the woman chatting on the street, and the couples enjoying aperitifs, for example.
“I thought it looked really good. But I thought it was pretty static,” Frey said. “I talked to some level builders, and they agreed, like there just wasn’t enough motion in the scene.”
But giving the scene motion wasn’t as easy as picking an NPC and blessing it with the powers of ambulation. These NPCs… were chumps.
“A chump is just [...] like a skeletal mesh that just plays a looping animation,” said Frey. Chump is the nickname that developers at
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