Most of us don’t really think much of Race With Ryan, a kart racing game made for children that features the popular YouTuber Ryan’s World. However, one user let his curiosity of the game get the better of him and decided to dig around in the files. Originally discovered back on November 1st by Twitter user Tiniest Turtles, and recently hitting the public eye thanks to a YouTube video by Oddheader, the game contains a rather strange secret. The character models in the game don’t have faces, with faces being added as textures as needed in-game. That isn’t so odd (it’s actually a common game design trick), but one of the textures is of the main character (and real child) Ryan with his mouth and eyes stitched shut while crying bloody tears.
For some reason I can't rip the face so he's just sorta faceless. I do have the textures tho, there's two and the second one has blood and has his face stitched?? It's found in GameDevelopersSimoneResources so maybe the developer was making a joke but still very weird pic.twitter.com/nDLw0HVlmS
— Tiniest Turtles (@TiniestTurtles) November 1, 2019
As far as anyone can tell, there isn’t any way this can actually be triggered in the game itself. The bloody stitched face texture is just hidden away in the files of Race With Ryan for people like Tiniest Turtles to find. As for why the developers created it, that’s a mystery. According to Oddheader’s YouTube channel, the developers refuse to comment on it, which may be for the best. It does, however, leave us with quite a few questions.
There’s a chance this could have been some developer’s way of blowing off steam. It’s not all that uncommon among kids’ games. Popular 1994 point-and-click adventure game Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds contained a rather infamous, fully voiced and animated scene of an eel eating one of the two main characters that can only be accessed by editing the game’s text files. The claim was the scene was made as stress relief. Of course, plenty of other games have hidden secrets too, such as horror game Resident Evil 2, first-person shooter Destiny 2, and open-world mayhem game Just Cause 4. These secrets just might not be as disturbing as a horror-movie version of a kid’s face in a children’s game.