Neocities.org

guymontag page is legitimately mind blowing. why would that be such a common code?

Wait, "temperature required for a book to catch on fire". Wouldn't that depend on the book? The size and material? Surely a magazine would catch fire faster than a hardcover textbook

@Justin I'm glad you like it! It's always a blast going through games and seeing if they use it! I’m going to messily explain this within Neocities’ 420 character limit. Apologies for the formatting in advance. - [1] I think the consensus is that the code was an actual code to the offices of Looking Glass Studios; it appears in their game, System Shock and likely became an in-joke from there. -

[2] Devs from Looking Glass such as Warren Spector went on to develop Deus Ex, an Ion Storm title and Ken Levine who formed Irrational Games which created the Bioshock series. These games continued the tradition and due to the success of both cemented the code into popular culture. It only grows from there with the recent emergence of the “immersive sim genre” which often emulates the design philosophy of these games

[3] The code is starting to break out of the genre and will become something universal much like the Konami Code was. I remember distinctly that if you used the K Code in the Xbox version of Half-life 2 a medkit would spawn! I think the Konami Code was forgotten because cheat codes have long since been removed as a feature of the modern day video game. But a safe or door code? That seems to be always relevant.

@Steak According to Wikipedia, Ray meant the temperature at which paper would spontaneously combust without the aid of a pre-existing flame. Granted the book was published in the 1950's so I would take it's accuracy with a grain of salt.