8 Most Spiteful Video Game Easter Eggs Ever

3. The Bulls Fail Against The Pistons )Because The Designer Is A Pistons Fan) (NBA Jam)

NBA Jam Chicago Bulls Detroit Pistons
Midway Games

When NBA Jam launched in the mid-1990s, there was a huge real-life rivalry between the Detroit Pistons and the Chicago Bulls. And unfortunately for Bulls fans who picked up the game... the guy who designed it was a Pistons fan.

And so, during the production of the classic sports title, lead programmer/Pistons fanatic Mark Turmell saw an opportunity to get one over on those pesky Bulls, by effectively nerfing them with a special line of code.

As he explained in an interview with Ars Technica (19:40 in the video below), this code would activate whenever the Bulls took a late-game shot - making them miss those shots every single time:

"Making this game in Chicago during the height of the Michael Jordan era, there was a big rivalry - the Pistons and the Bulls. But the one way that I could get back at the Bulls was to affect their skills against the Pistons in NBA Jam. And so I put in special code that if the Bulls were taking last-second shots against the Pistons, they would miss those shots."

A petty move? Sure. But let's be honest: if any of us had the opportunity to make our sporting rivals look like idiots, then we'd absolutely take it.

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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!