Freddi Fish and the Case of the Curious Cutscene

WARNING: You are about to read an article about a 23-year-old computer game aimed at small children that was written by a grown man in full-time employment.

Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, released in 1994, is one of the earliest games released by Humongous Entertainment, which across the nineties and a bit of the early noughties cornered the market in ‘edutainment’ point-and-click games for young children. I still have my childhood copy of the original 1994 version, it rather surprisingly still plays on my computer, and there’s something rather interesting hidden in the game’s coding that I was compelled to write a blog post about when I found out about it recently.

Here’s how to access the Hidden Bit in a step-by-step guide:

1.       Open up the game’s files in your computer.

2.       Open ‘hegames.ini’.

3.       Add the line ‘EddieEatsLuther=1’ to it and save.

Then play the game. When you meet Eddie the Electric Eel and have to try to get past him, this line of code gives you a new option by clicking on Freddi’s sidekick Luther, which has been uploaded to YouTube by someone other than me:

Supposedly this scene was created by an animator blowing off steam (it seems Luther wasn’t too popular around the Humongous production offices), although the fact that dialogue was recorded for the scene suggests there’s more to it than that. (I did consider the possibility that the dialogue was originally intended for somewhere else in the game and co-opted for this scene, but I can’t find anywhere else it might have gone to support that.) Further research shows there are a few similar mildly child-unfriendly scenes hidden in other Humongous games for a programmers’ joke, but this is by far the most elaborate and the only one with dialogue specially recorded for it. Even more strangely, as you’ll see below (in a video that was also nothing to do with me), the dialogue was translated for international releases!

I suppose that last bit might have a simple explanation – I don’t know much about how dialogue’s recorded for video games, but I imagine the Eddie Eats Luther lines could easily have ended up in the scripts for the various overseas versions’ voice actors even if not intended if they just took every line recorded for the original US version. The alternative is that everyone at Humongous knew about the scene, they hated Luther just as much as the animator responsible did and wanted to make sure everyone was able to see it and make sense of it.

(It’s worth noting that Luther does have a fairly different, and considerably less annoying, personality in all the later games… but then writing any more about that is probably a bit sad.)