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Comment by marban | Hacker News Reader

The thing I always wonder is how testing/QA worked back in the days for cartridge/disk games. I mean, there've been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can't even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.

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I remember Quest For Glory IV shipped with a game-breaking bug that required downloading a patch from a BBS and possibly starting with a new save. I never finished the game because of that one.

Much worse when it was ROM media - Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete because of a bug that made it into the release.

Still, this stuff was really rare. Very different QA mindset when recalling the product is impossible or expensive.

>Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete

Well, they were right.

Though there were more overall platforms back then, the hardware for any given platform was a lot more uniform than any modern PC. OSs barely did anything where they existed at all, which also helped. Finally, codebases were a lot smaller and everything was single-threaded so there was generally just less to go wrong.

According to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.

The original Doom code basically broadcast packets to every machine on the network, which on any large network would bring everything to a crawl. It's why network Doom was explicitly banned on many university networks.

The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.

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