Ever wanted your name to grace something in a video game? Cool, because Irrational Games is planning to give one person the opportunity to have his or her named morphed into "the namesake of a building, a character, a business--whatever our artists come up with" in BioShock Infinite. That does leave an awful lot of room for them to do something kind of nefarious with it, like making your name the exclusive brand of toilets used in the city of Columbia. Provided you want to risk being the name of a polygonal crapper, all you have to do to drop your name in this proverbial hat is hit the studio’s official page and fill out the form. And then who knows? Maybe we’ll all see your name while frequenting the bathrooms of Columbia. Or possibly on other things, unrelated to toilets.

It’s anecdotal, but a lot of developers and game creators drop their names into their respective titles-- Noob Saibot, anyone? One of the most recent and blatant examples of this behavior I can conjure at the moment is from Pokemon Black and White. In Castelia City, you can visit the Pokemon developer  Game Freak’s offices. Much later in the game, you can return to Game Freak and then do battle with longtime designer, Shigeki Morimoto.


A more subtle reference is cited in the Irrational Games post that I linked to earlier: in the original BioShock, game establishments Sinclair Spirits and Robertson’s Tobaccoria were name after actual staff members of Irrational Games, Scott Sinclair and Shawn Robertson. Perk of the job, sure, but hey, maybe you'll name can grace a shop in Infinite! We're still betting on toilets, though.