Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders is largely known for its heart-pounding extraction shooter gameplay, but between runs to the Rust Belt there’s one character that makes everyone feel right at home: Scrappy the Chicken.
Between runs, your upgradeable poultry friend is able to scavenge basic resources like metal parts and rubber to help you craft items for your next mission. With millions of players, the feathered friend has collected countless martials. However, Scrappy wasn’t always supposed to be the bird we see in the game today.
In a recent post, Embark revealed that the prickly pear-loving pet was actually an image of a chicken called Hȧkan that interrupted a Zoom call during development. 3D Artist Johan explained that they were living with their parents at the time and a flock of chickens “crashed” their Zoom meeting with the rest of the team.
“I was living with my parents at the time – they happened to keep chickens,” the developer explained. “Mid-zoom meeting, the birds somehow snuck into the house and strutted around behind me, instantly stealing the show and derailing the meeting entirely. Among those birds was Hȧkan, the rooster that would go on to become Scrappy.”
Johan explains that the chicken was initially photo-scanned into the game “as a silly little easter egg” with early builds having a rough version of the chicken “sprinting around the cantina”, presumably when the hub was a proper explorable environment. However, when the team needed a resource gatherer for the player, they came back to the iconic chicken.
“The team needed an in-game asset that would be used as a “resource producer,” something that would provide you with materials after each raid,” the artist said. “We cycled through many ideas: robots, cats… robot-cats! But the art team didn’t have time to build them and the meeting stalled, until someone raised their hand and said, in a moment of brilliance, ‘don’t we have a rooster?’”
With that, Arc Raiders Scrappy was born as the chicken we know them as today, although originally they were a “temporary mesh” the team would “definitely replace later”. Now, after years of development, Johan says the animal is now a “beloved and irreplaceable part of the Arc Raiders universe”.
So, next time you’re muttering under your breath about how this chicken requires a fancy bed and a bunch of hard to find fruits, just remember: they weren’t always supposed to be there. (I’m still not buying cosmetics for him, though.)
