8 Most Spiteful Video Game Easter Eggs Ever

5. ScumSoft Is A Representation Of Sierra's "Evil Side" (Space Quest III: The Pirates Of Pestulon)

Space Quest III ScumSoft
Sierra Entertainment

The highly irreverent 1989 adventure game Space Quest III is famous for its self-referential humour, and one of its best easter eggs is actually a pretty serious jab aimed directly at the game's publisher, Sierra Entertainment.

Space Quest III features a video game company called ScumSoft, which has abducted two game designers and is forcing them to make horrible games against their will. At one point, the player must infiltrate ScumSoft HQ and rescue the two designers, giving us a glimpse at the dire workplace culture the company has fostered: a cramped office area consisting of dozens of identical cubicles, with the hallways being patrolled by whip-cracking executives.

For the longest time, many fans assumed that ScumSoft was a dig at LucasArts (who, at the time, was Sierra's rival in the adventure game genre), a company that just so happened to utilise an engine with the unfortunate acronym "SCUMM".

However, this isn't the case. As confirmed by Space Quest co-creator Scott Murphy, ScumSoft is actually a reference to "the evil side" that Sierra was developing at the time. Murphy notes that he was "burned out" by the time he stopped working for them, and based on ScumSoft's depiction in the game, Murphy clearly believed that Sierra was slowly becoming a rather undesirable studio to work for.

And so, he did one of the only things he could: he used Space Quest III as a platform to call them out. Brilliant.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!