A bunch of old items are vanishing from Destiny 2 players’ inventories next week when its expansion Beyond Light launches, including an expired ramen coupon handed out years ago. Now players are celebrating the memento before it disappears, and its creator says he had originally hoped to do more with it.
As first spotted by Gamer Rant, Twitter user sonikk71 shared a message this past weekend from former Bungie developer Jonathan Chan about the Spicy Ramen Coupon’s origins and hopes for its future significance. The item went live in the summer of 2018, with a quest marker from Cayde-6 telling players to go pick it up from the ramen shop in the Tower. The coupon is expired though, and can’t be used for anything. Instead, all it contains is a brief message from Destiny’s most charming Guardian singing the praises of his favourite dish.
“At the time I wrote the lore tabe there was a lot of anti-immigrant and anti-Mexico rhetoric in the U.S.,” Chan wrote. “I on purpose added ‘muy caliente,’ at the time, I believe it was the only in-universe character use of Spanish.” Chan also said he intended for the lore associated with the item to read like a Yelp review, while also containing ominous foreshadowing of Cayde’s death. (Despite saying he’s “good for it,” the coupon is already expired.)
While players were originally only supposed to be able to get one Coupon per character, a bug made it possible to keep getting them over and over again. “I was one of those who had exploited the glitch,” wrote one person on Twitter with a screenshot of an inventory screen full of them. “I loved these things, even tho they clogged my vault.”
The “His Last Spicy Ramen” seal is done!
I know many in the Destiny Community are saddened by the removal of the expired ramen coupon, for many it was their last keepsake of Cayde-6.So i made this 3D model to hopefully soften that sting <3#Bungie #ExpiredRamenCoupon pic.twitter.com/bNTRAEtLIE
— Artdeck (@ArtDeckNL) October 31, 2020
One reason players kept collecting and hanging onto them is because they thought the item might one day be part of an important quest or open up access to a more extensive easter egg. It now turns out that they weren’t completely wrong to think that. “I had planned to do more with the Coupon the following season, at the time the players were also asking for the Cayde scavenger hunt items to be added back in, so I wanted to tie them together,” Chan wrote. “I didn’t get a chance to do more designer work after that.”
In the end the Spicy Ramen Coupon’s uselessness instead helped transform them into tributes to the late Cayde-6. As The Gamer points out, players across the Destiny 2 subreddit and on Twitter have been sharing fan designs for Spicy Ramen shaders, emblems, and Seals to try and inspire Bungie to carry on the item’s legacy in some way even after it leaves forever next week. For now, though, players who want to give the Coupon a proper send off themselves can always truck over to the ramen shop, take a seat at one of the stools, and delete it from their inventory in a moment of silence.
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