It’s a minor miracle Saints Row has returned after a turbulent transfer to a brand new writer, a virtually decade-long hiatus, and a botched spinoff. It’s becoming then that the newest entry’s largest Easter egg celebrates a dormant online game franchise that hasn’t been so fortunate.

The new Saints Row reboots the 15-year-old sequence, buying and selling its coastal metropolis open worlds of the previous for a sunbaked American southwest, a fictional metropolis impressed closely by Las Vegas and the encircling Clark County. To give the setting depth, the sport’s writers and world builders dropped historic placards all through numerous parks, monuments, and landmarks. The indicators, when tapped, dish temporary backstory concerning the space’s tradition and politics via tinny audio system.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver through Polygon

My favourite historic vacation spot is the Red Faction Memorial Park. Located a brief drive from the hero’s first protected home, the park is a not-so-subtle celebration of the Red Faction sequence, additionally created by Saints Row developer Volition.

In Saints Row’s story, the Red Faction is a band of placing employees who, on May 22, 2001, “sought to end inhumane working conditions and unethical human experiments.” The Ultor Corporation squashed the revolt, however the park — a brutalist cement pond staged round a stone spire — honors their resistance. Alongside the park sits the Red Faction Brew Works brewery, its emblem resembling the unique Red Faction emblem with a fist clenched round a pint of beer quite than a pickaxe.

In actual life, Red Faction was a sci-fi franchise that debuted on May 22, 2001, and culminated in 2011 with Red Faction: Armageddon. While its finest entry, Red Faction: Guerrilla, lately obtained a remaster, the sequence has been in any other case uncared for as its rights shuttled between corporations following the company pillaging of THQ.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver through Polygon

Saints Row video games have winked at Red Faction prior to now. Saints Row 2 went as far as to counsel the 2 sequence happen in the identical universe by which the malevolent Ultor Corporation exerts management. The Red Faction Memorial Park’s fiction appears to substantiate the reboot additionally suits into the shared universe, with Saints Row happening many many years earlier than its sci-fi sibling.

But what I discover equally fascinating because the in-fiction lore is the non-obligatory studying of real-world subtext. The Red Faction Memorial Park’s references to the mistreatment of employees replicate, deliberately or not, the creation of contemporary video video games.

The online game trade is infamous for inequitable pay, durations of intense crunch, poisonous workplace cultures, and rampant mismanagement. While particular complaints haven’t been reported about Volition through the growth of the Red Faction and Saints Row sequence, Polygon reported at size in 2014 concerning the missteps that led to the collapse of THQ and with it, the swell of canceled tasks and corresponding layoffs.

Are we studying an excessive amount of into an Easter egg? Maybe. But think about how lengthy it takes sport builders to create a whole digital metropolis block with a customized memorial and brewery devoted to their fallen sport sequence and the labor that went into it. Maybe this can be a cute wink at a sibling franchise on the ice. Or perhaps it’s a nod at simply how exhausting it’s grow to be for employees to make a sport, and the way unimaginable that any sport makes it to the end line.

If you’d prefer to see the Red Faction Memorial Park for your self, right here’s the situation on the map.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver through Polygon