Bulletstorm devs shocked by how much swearing was in their own game

The October issue of Game Developer’s magazine features a postmortem on foul-mouthed shooter Bulletstorm, which includes one of the greatest anecdotes on cross-cultural development ever. If you’ve ever had a foreign friend just learning how to swear in your native tongue, you can totally see how Polish developer People Can Fly fell into a snare of its own creation and made a terrible mistake.

“Do you know any swear word in a foreign language? German, French, Polish? When you say it out loud, no biggie, right? Not a problem to use it during a family dinner, I assume?” Adrian Chmielarz, creative director at People Can Fly told the magazine.

He explains the swearing in Bulletstorm was just “exotic and fun” to them, and publisher Epic let the studio run with it, not realizing that they’d gone beyond their own intentions. The developer didn’t realize the power of the words.

“It was only at the end of the development,” Chmielarz remarks. “When I read the Polish translation of the game, that I realized how dirty we were. I swear a lot. A LOT. And yet still I … kind of blushed.”

Source: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/07/bulletstorm-devs-shocked-by-how-much-swearing-was-in-their-own-g/