California Speed

N64 Version's Creepy Text

In the Nintendo 64 version of the game, two of the billboards on the side of the Mojave Desert track display the following message:

*SoMETIMES

God TaKes MOMMIES

aNd PuPPIES AWAY...

And SoMETIMES

Just SoMETIMES...

I do.*

According to developer Morgan Godat, he inserted the message as a placeholder after the artists were told on short notice to create new billboard textures for the N64 port. Godat assumed the nature of the text would make it obvious that it was a placeholder, but he later forgot about it and nobody else replaced it. Due to the two particular billboards it appears on being easily missed, the message slipped past QA. It then seemingly went unnoticed by players for several years, as the first online documentation of it was a screenshot posted on Reddit in 2014.