A gamer tried to call out Deus Ex for having no toilet paper in 2027, only to get absolutely cooked by Reddit over the legendary 3 seashells meme.
Scrolling through Reddit at 3 AM while compiling some spaghetti code, and I stumble upon a massively upvoted post that literally stinks. Some guy just discovered a "groundbreaking" detail in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and decided to post it to farm some easy karma.
So, the setting of this game is the year 2027 (which is literally just 3 years away, let that sink in). The OP posts a screenshot of an in-game bathroom with a caption pointing out a severe lack of toilet paper: "It's 2027 no toilet paper in Deus Ex HR."
Sure enough, the screenshot shows a toilet with absolutely zero TP on the shelf. Instead, there are just three seashells sitting there. OP probably thought they caught the devs slacking, maybe forgetting to place a TP asset, or heavily hinting at some dystopian global resource crisis.
Oh, sweet summer child. OP thought they were cooking, but got absolutely cooked by the r/gaming veterans instead. The post blew up to over 5k upvotes, and the comments were just a merciless roast session.
The top comment with over 3,300 upvotes hit him with the classic: "This guy doesn’t know how to use the 3 seashells 😂". The thread immediately devolved into people dropping quotes and mocking the OP's lack of pop-culture knowledge.
For the zoomers out there, this is a legendary Easter egg referencing the 1993 sci-fi cult classic Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone. In that movie's future (2032), toilet paper is obsolete, replaced by "the three seashells." The best part? The movie never explains how the hell they actually work, turning it into one of the biggest memes in cinema history.
The devs at Eidos Montreal obviously slipped this meme into the game environments as a joke, and more than a decade later, it's still claiming victims.
Being a game dev is wild. You can spend 40 hours fixing a memory leak or integrating some crazy ai video tech for NPC facial animations, and nobody bats an eye. You put three low-poly shells next to a virtual crapper, and you become a legend.
The lesson here for all my fellow devs: small, culturally relevant easter eggs are OP for community engagement. Environmental storytelling doesn't always have to be deep, depressing lore dumped into a text file. Sometimes, a well-placed meme gives players that dopamine hit of "I understood that reference."
Anyway, 2027 is just around the corner. You might want to start stocking up on TP. If your multiplayer game lags, you can just slap on a game booster and call it a day, but if you lag in the bathroom without TP, it's literally game over.
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