BioShock Infinite's Famous Dancing Baguette Boy Explained by Developer

BioShock Infinite is widely acclaimed as one of the best games of its generation for its profound narrative. The second DLC Burial at Sea Part 2 opened with Elizabeth in Paris and many were puzzled to find a boy dancing with a baguette. Today developer Gwen Frey who made this animation finally revealed how this scene came into being.

In short, the developer Gwen was populating the Paris scene with "Chumps (skeletal meshes of humans with no AI)" that looped. Due to budget, they couldn't make the scene more alive and had to reuse a lot of assets but Gwen wanted to scene to feel alive so she used some creative techniques with the tools at hand. She took the dancing scene when Elizabeth was first with people and used the same animation but with some clever skills replaced the hands of the adult with the bread. 

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

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

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

This is one of those gems of game development that are rarely told. Now we know where this notorious scene came from.

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed