Harvester render with the Big Willie logo
Big Willie's School of Harvester Drivers is a company that teaches people how to drive a harvester.
The company is not referenced in any actual games, but it was featured on a web page on the Westwood Studios website.
Behind the scenes[]
This company was part of an insider's joke at Westwood Studios about the harvester's poor pathfinding and AI, which makes them tend to go into dangerous areas when not monitored. The joke pamphlet the image was part of boasted teaching a number of bad skills, including ignoring your radar by using it as beer coaster, and driving your harvester straight into the heat of battle.[1]
A toned-down version of the pamphlet was added to the "jobs" section of the Westwood website as hidden easter egg, at www.westwood.com/infodir/jobs/wwjobdriver.html, but sadly, there is no archived version of it on the Internet Archive. A screenshot of the page survived, however, and can be found in the gallery below.
Trivia[]
- The harvester has the sharp bits at the front removed. It is unknown if this was an error, but such a modification could actually be expected on a training model.
- Tiberian Sun has a billboard for a harvester driver school called "Billy Bob's Harvester School", which is probably a reference to this joke.
Gallery[]
The full version of the Big Willie harvester image.
The much more common cropped version of the Big Willie harvester image, without the text at the bottom
A screenshot of the full page as it appeared on Westwood's old website.
References[]
- ↑ Hewitt, Joseph B. (2014-08-15). A Metric TON of my old Command & Conquer interviews. Funambulism. Retrieved on 2018-10-14.
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