Shooter dev "gaslights" players about fake Space Whales for seven years, then sneaks them into the game

Every few moments in the current build of arcade space shooter Nova Drift there's a chance the game will spawn a Cargo Train. Whenever the game decides to spawn a Cargo Train, there's a 1/7777 chance it will spawn a Space Whale instead. "Nonsense," you bellow. "Space Whales are a myth. Designer Jeffrey Nielson has been telling us they're not real ever since the original Kickstarter in 2017." Ah, you poor, unsuspecting mooncalf. You chirpy little starfish. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide treacherously hidden inside downloadable software packages. Nielson has been telling you porkies.

He did, in fact, surreptitiously add a Space Whale to the game shortly before Nova Drift's 1.0 release back in August 2024, after years of conspiracy theories. This, friends, is the good kind of lie, the kind of lie that makes combing through a million changelogs for potential headlines worthwhile.

Nielson has posted a full account of the running gag on Steam, beginning with the first Discord space whale memes back in 2017. With speculation about possible astral leviathans at fever-pitch, he started baiting the whale-watchers with mock community rules insisting that Space Whales aren't real. Finally, he created a "Miniature Space Whale" companion as an April Fool's joke in 2023.

Said Miniature Space Whale update was heavily positioned as a wind-up with arch allusions to predatory monetisation mechanisms, aka "pay-to-win-dark-patterns-bullshit", but some players took it seriously regardless. The Whale had, by this point, navigated the twisting currents of Ironic Process Theory and coasted into the balmy latitudes of the Streisand Effect. It had to become real. It had to have always already been real.

So Nielson sneakily began breeding a Space Whale. "I started work on this shortly after, but it got sidetracked, so the assets were in the game for a while before I actually made it possible for the whale to spawn in game," he writes in the post.

Having the assets in-game obviously meant that players could discover them. But Nielson foresaw this possibility, and eventually made it part of the fable.

"Knowing that my players love to data mine, I gave the files confusing names as an attempt at plausible deniability, but it was not enough," he goes on. "Players used the Undertale mod tools to rip the sprites and then assemble them into something approximating a whale, but I expected this. I claimed that putting them in the engine was the easiest way for me to spoof that April Fool's day shot. But mostly I tried to stay out of the conversation. I'd muddied the waters enough that, with the help of the other community members, people weren't sure what was true anymore. Perfect."

Good heavens! What a magnificent bastard.

If you encounter the whale in Nova Drift, you'll find it to be non-hostile and "almost indestructible". It's a real boon for early-game players, steadily emitting XP orbs while in motion. If that sounds like it's going to wreck the balance, rest easy in the knowledge that you'll probably only ever encounter a whale every few hundred hours.

"My plan was that it'd be just rare enough that players couldn't be sure whether evidence was doctored," Nielson adds. "After all, the art had existed in the game files quite a while before anyone captured it in a screen shot. This was of course unsustainable as video evidence did eventually appear, but by the time it did, we were way past the truth mattering. I'd just claim the video wasn't playing or that Discord was busted. Or I'd just act really impressed at their forgery skill."

I guess it's possible that there are still no Space Whales in the game and that this Steam blog is a continuation of the conspiracy. Still, fun story! Let's see if we're still laughing as and when Nielson goes into politics. Just think: if he joined some sleazy electoral social engineering firm, I could write about it and deploy the only other Moby Dick joke I can think of here, "call me Phishmael".

I like when developers tell fibs to their players, providing it's stuff like this rather than lying to you about data collection, or deleting half the workforce from the credits. It makes the "live service" thing feel almost playful, rather than a glassy-eyed eternity of intravenous content attrition. Besides which, all of these shenanigans will ultimately operate to the benefit of living, non-digital whales. Nielson is apologising for "gaslighting" his players by donating 20% of the game's sales to the WDC Whale and Dolphin Conservation charity as part of World Ocean Day Festival 2025.

Little update: a belated shoutout to critic and wordyman supremo Nick Capozzoli for passing this on.