McDonalds in medieval Europe?

[Chiyu]

While I was browsing through the BtS mods, I found a very strange GameFont file Charlemagne\Assets\res\Fonts. Take a look, instead of the corporation icons from the normal BtS, it has 7 alternate ones. I can identify Volkswagen, Coca Cola, McDonalds and Dole. Since there are no corporations in Charlemagne's Wars, I find it strange that they are in the mods' assets.
What's up with them? Did Firaxis originally intend to use real life corporations before switching to some abstract, non-existing ones (for political correctness, I bet)? Just curious to see if someone knows more .

 

[Cabay Jet]

My theory is that they were used for testing purposes, but I could be wrong...

 

[Jaffa_lord]

If they were for test purposes, they would've taken them out before selling the game. Then again, they might have over looked it. It would seem to be a waste of time and effort to make more code than you need to...

 

[Quildavyr]

Crusading on VWs,eating lunch by McDonalds.Interesting.

 

[GeneralMatt]

Well there were McDonalds back then, there were also McDonnell's (Relatives) and Cambells, and Mackintoshs

 

[Mylon]

Sweet find. Thanks for the info.

 

[Virulent]

I saw some screenshots from an early build of BtS that had real life corporate logos. I think that they were just meant to be placeholder art and that they were never meant to be used in the final game.

Considering some of the huge negative effects that corps can have in the game, I'm pretty sure that no real life company would agree to allow their name and logo to be used in that manner.

Not sure why those files are in the Charlemagne directory however.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I recognize VW, Coca Cola, General Electric, McDonalds, and Dole. Not sure what the other two are.

 

[BENdage]

2 of the others are GE money and Tommy Hilfiger I think. Would it be relatively simple to get these back in the game?

 

[scooter]

FYI, I read in an interview somewhere that they originally put real-life corporations in before they talked to the legal department, who told them that would be really expensive due to trademark-related legal issues, so they changed them, but the assets are there in case someone wants to mod them back into the game.

 

[Virulent]

And like I said, I don't think McDonalds would be to happy with a game where a viable strategy is destroying another players economy by spamming a McDonalds in every city.

 

[jkp1187]

And like I said, I don't think McDonalds would be to happy with a game where a viable strategy is destroying another players economy by spamming a McDonalds in every city.

You should play using SOlver's "unofficial" patch....

 

[Virulent]

You should play using SOlver's "unofficial" patch....

That is actually one of the reasons why I have been avoiding Solvers patch. While I greatly appreciate his efforts and I do think corps are somewhat unbalanced in the initial BtS release I think Solver went too far and unbalanced them in the opposite direction.