The Dev Team Thinks of Everything/Scribblenauts

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The main hook of Scribblenauts is that you can write ANYTHING, so of course, this page would be compulsory. Just to give you an idea, you can write any kid-friendly, non-proper noun (even some proper ones like God, Cthulhu, Albert Einstein, and Longcat) on the touch screen, and the object written is spawned. The game's dictionary is its greatest asset, and the dev team has repeatedly assured gaming websites that they are thinking of everything. It's become standard form in interviews with them to ask them a random collection of nouns to find out if they're in, or being put in, the game. They've been hit with things like "dialysis machine" and a specific kind of cooking pot. With the exception of vulgar things, trademarked characters (for obvious reasons), and abstract or really, really, really obscure nouns, they haven't been caught off-guard yet. (One reporter apparently stumped it with "pillory," but he notes, "That tends to get used more as a verb anyway.")

  • Check out this story (somewhat NSFW). In short, "I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES."
    • The Devs got wind of that famous post, and "Feep", "Post Two One Seven" and "NeoGAF" were all plugged into the game before its final release.
  • When someone actually stumped the dictionary at E3 with "Plumbob" [1], the dev watching the playtest got on his cellphone, chatted with someone else on the dev team, closed his phone, and told the playtester that the word would be in the final release.
  • And yes, you can summon a Starite, but you can't actually clear the level with the phony Starite. Sorry. Except in one level, where it's the only way to beat it.
  • The game has a lot of pop culture references. For example, summon a shark. Now, summon a ray gun. You can attach the ray gun to the shark's head, and it will fire Frickin' Laser Beams at anything that comes near.
  • If you time travel while holding milk, the milk will become cheese.
  • Animals and other creatures all have certain foods they will and will not eat. Goats eat clothing, zombies eat most body parts, cats eat fish, etc. Cows will eat beef... and contract mad cow disease and become aggressive.
  • Some people and animals are afraid or angry at other things. Cats will fight rats. Cats and dogs will fight each other. And Rabbis will run from bacon.
  • Two rabbits in close proximity will, well, breed like rabbits. In a demo version, the rabbits wouldn't stop making more rabbits, which led to them crashing the game by making too many for it to handle. This was fixed, though.
  • "Game of the year," "Innovation," and "Game of the century" all make a copy of scribblenauts.
  • If you try to recreate what Maxwell is riding in the boxart of Super Scribblenauts (Winged Polkadotted Bathtub), the game will give the wings a purple tint like in the art, because you can't change the color of the wings.
    • But you can trash those wings and replace them with striped wings.
  • If you spawn a kappa, he will attack you. If you give him a cucumber, however, he will become friendly -- just like in the original legends.
  • One level spoofs The Wizard of Oz; you can give the characters what they want (a heart, a brain, "the nerve", and a home), but they will also accept what the Wizard literally gave them in the movie -- a diploma, a watch, a badge, and a hot air balloon. Also, ruby slipper and silver slipper works for the girl. (The silver slipper is from the book.)
    • And of course, you can make witches. Guess how you kill them.
  • In Super Scribblenauts, if you summon a badger and then summon a mushroom, the badger will walk up to the mushroom and start dancing. Also, badgers are afraid of snakes.
  • God will instantly keel over and die in the presence of an agnostic.
    • In the first game, athiests and agnostics run from God... unless you get them a weapon.
  • In the sequel, in level 3-1, among the ingredients you need for a witch's love potion is something sweet. It doesn't matter what, so long as it's sweet. So yes, antifreeze works just fine.
  • Summon a baby. Then summon a dingo. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
  • Bigfoot is terrified of cameras. This explains a lot...
  • A "Criminal Mastermind" uses the same model as a professor.
  • Unfortunately, at least in the first game, some items such as "Hwacha" are not included, things like "paladins" are the exact same as more generic objects, and some items don't do anything.
  • Type in Virgin...
  1. ↑ it may have been misspelled anyway
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