Carrie Patel: "I worked on a secret ending to The Outer Worlds with Dan McPhee who was another narrative designer on the project. Fairly late in development I was writing the flavor terminal stuff for
Chairman Rockwell's office, which you can encounter midway, maybe ⅔ of the way through the game. For all of the terminals we'd have some flavor entries that would say something about the character, the world, just kind of fill things out.
"We'd been working on this game for awhile at that point, and you know, everything is about capitalism and brands. I remember thinking: 'Man, all these corporate guys love their brands so much, what if they were
literally horny for it.' So I wrote this entry on Chairman Rockwell's terminal that was locked behind a skill check or two, so you had to work for it. But it was a transcript of his weekly dom session with a
Moon Man impersonator. It was very fun to write, because it was all this wordplay, with all of this business speak like
'maximizing growth vectors' and
'end-to-end optimization.
'
"There was even a bark for one of the guards where you enter that office. You pass through a security checkpoint, and if you walked by him with a Moon Man helmet on—I don't know that it ever got recorded, but there was a [written] bark at one point where he's like 'I guess it must be a Thursday.'
"I remember talking to Dan, because Dan was writing the showdown at the very end of the game. He was writing the Tartarus prison sequence. And I was like, hey, can we do a callback to this? [Because] at the time it was still in there. So we looked at it together and came up with the idea that if you faced Charirman Rockwell at the end of the game, and you were wearing a Moon Man helmet, he would get a little weak in the knees. And if you'd read that terminal, you could really take control of the situation: 'Moon Man doesn't ask, Charles. Moonman
tells.'
"You could basically talk him into getting into one of the cryopods—'
assume the position, Charles'—and that was how you'd defeat him through dialogue and get him out of the way for the ending you wanted to choose."
