Games have a knack for being culturally aware. While all games, in one way or another, reflect upon what's happening in the real world at their time of release, some of them don't stop there. When developers choose to poke fun or pay homage to other successful iterations of pop culture, one of gaming's most fascinating and playful elements get added into the coding: Easter eggs. Easter eggs hold a special place in gamers' hearts, and it's not just because they can sometimes take seven years to find. Easter eggs remind us that the developers who crafted the worlds we inhabit are gamers too, and their interests often overlap with ours.
Perhaps no developer is as good at sneaking in as many tongue-in-cheek nods to other gaming and film franchises as Rockstar Studios. Grand Theft Auto 5 is filled to the brim with Easter eggs, ranging from subtle to obscene. For a while now, however, the rumor of an Easter egg has kept the Grand Theft Auto 5 community guessing. Players have remained convinced that, under the correct circumstances, they might be able to play as Big Foot, and now it's been uncovered they were right all along.
Since Grand Theft Auto 5's last update, Big Foot is now accessible as a peyote unlockable. According to a group of Redditors, it's not as simple as sprinting to the nearest patch of peyote in-game and getting your mythological man-beast on. Redditor rkRusty datamined the game's PC version and discovered that a specific peyote plant was set to spawn on a specific day under the right weather conditions.
After some trial and error, rkRusty found out that if gamers play the as Franklin on a Tuesday between 5:30am and 8:30am while the weather is foggy (on the PC, while PS4 or Xbox One users need snowy weather), they can find a special golden peyote plant that turns them into Big Foot. There are some other conditions that have to be fulfilled as well: gamers have to have completed the game, found every peyote location, and completed the mission The Last One without killing the sasquatch first.
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If that sounds like a lot of work, that's because it is. Rumors of a sasquatch in Rockstar's games have been around for a long time, and the studio went to great lengths to make sure this Easter egg, like the beast it features, sounded like an urban legend. Only players dedicated to finding the sasquatch will be able to, and it is highly unlikely someone will stumble into the specific qualifiers unintentionally. It's this kind of dedication to detail that makes the 54 million sales of Grand Theft Auto 5 possible.
Were you one of the Big Foot believers in Grand Theft Auto 5? Where does this rank on your list of all time greatest gaming easter eggs? Let us know in the comments.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is available for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
