“Even when I take a dump, my worshippers offer to buy the toilet bowl for extortionate prices.” –Daddy Swank

If You Thought AI Art Was Taking the Piss…

Daddy Swank is a non-playable character who owns the Swank Gallery; a crucial location in Cyberia where players can try to earn extra candy by buying and selling incredibly shit digital artwork.

We think Fergus came up with the Daddy Swank idea after George Khan had handed him blueprints which impressively outlined how a high-tech black marketplace might operate in the Cyberia Universe.

As with all early concepts, the Give Me Head team held many meetings where Swank and his gallery underwent numerous plastic surgery operations, eventually becoming an unrecognisable monster compared to the original idea (which means it was a good job that Fergus kept hold of the original draft).

Swank was to be an eccentric, obnoxious cult of personality figure who everyone pretended to like because he could make or break a Swanker’s career. After the team moved away from George’s ingenious economic model (because they didn’t understand it), Swank was going to be the sole arbiter of how artworks fluctuated in price every week which was all down to his own preferences. One week an artwork might be loved; the next week it was no more valuable than a dead chicken nailed to a wall by duct tape which, coincidentally, could be worth a fortune the following week if Daddy Swank says so. You get the picture.

The other detail to note is that Swank isn’t connected to any playable characters in the Cyberia Universe. He’s like a shopkeeper in Zelda; you can enter, but it’s all business. That said, during one meeting held by the team, there was talk of a future development whereby players could organise an extremely dangerous heist for a bucketful of candy.

Who Played Daddy?

The actor who successfully auditioned for the part of Daddy Swank was a French actor named Hervé Noiret. Referring to him as an actor is a bit of a stretch. Noiret was a mime artist who spent his entire career pushing the same drunkard mime act seven nights a week for thirty years. He had won a number of awards including the highly sought after My, Oh, Mime! industry award.

Noiret would come on stage and the audience would cheer him on as he marched around, bumped into invisible objects, pointed at seemingly nothing, puked everywhere, got angry at the audience for laughing at his silliness, all while slurping from wine bottles.

Nobody knows the night when Noiret stopped miming and started to go on stage blind drunk, but it must’ve been many years ago. Or perhaps he’d always been at it. Either way he could get away with it because he never mingled with his fellow performers before or after a gig. He’d slink off to his camper van, park somewhere out of sight, shut the curtains and drank himself to sleep.

Noiret’s career tanked during a recent performance in Las Vegas. A digitalised news report we’ve found outlines how a man came down to the front of the stage and began to heckle Noiret, making predictable fat jokes. Noiret told him to fuck off which was met with boos and hisses. He then told the entire audience to fuck off and die while jumping off the stage to fight the heckler but failing spectacularly. He ended up lying sprawled out on his back with two bust ankles, sobbing like a hungry hippo.

After a trip to the hospital, where he refused treatment because he didn’t take out insurance, Noiret quit his act forever. On makeshift crutches, he hobbled to his camper van and decided to drink drive around the West Coast until he either ran out of money or got arrested and deported

Early one morning, Noiret was parked up a short distance from Give Me Head HQ. He was hobbling around looking for a liquor store when somebody approached him. We don’t know who this somebody is but they told Noiret to try auditioning for a TV series around the corner on account of having fantastic hair.

Sure enough Noiret was curious enough to rock up at Give Me Head HQ and, after queueing for a couple of hours, eventually found himself in a small audition room where Cassidy and Ryba were sitting before him. Their jaws had dropped and their eyes were fixed on this strange fella’s massive hairdo.

“What the fuck is that?” Cassidy said.

‘It’s hair,” Ryba said.

“Is it real?”

“It might be cotton candy.”

“Say, buddy, is your hair real?”

“It’s real,” Noiret told them.

“On account of having the most bizarre hair I’ve ever seen, you’ve got the part. Congratulations.”

And just like that, Noiret became Daddy Swank.

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