Mythbusters: Wing Commander I Edition
wcnews.com
wcnews.com
If you physically wiggle or hit the game cartridge enough while the the console is powered on with the game inserted in it, a "secret level select" screen pops up where you can select a level.
It was long considered to be an easter egg, but actually, it was a custom crash handler that the devs created that trapped all of the main CPU's error interrupts and redirected to a level select screen. They did this to avoid having their game build rejected by Sega's QA team and delaying the game's release. (Sega's QA testing was a multi-week process, and a crash would mean the build getting rejected and having to start the process over again.) When people were wiggling the game cart, they were inadvertently unplugging the cart enough for the processor to throw an error.
Source (3-minute YouTube video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA
The linked "Coding Secrets" YouTube channels has other videos details similar hacks, if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole. It was wild the things these devs had to do to get games to work within the hardware and business constraints of the time.
On the other hand, how much does it cost to run an update on a Steam game? There's certainly a cost, and some of the cost is reputation, which is hard to earn back, but the tradeoff of being able to get patches is the reduction in quality control because problems can be patched.
Never trust a device with a reset button.
Citation needed; frequently the list of QA testers at the developer, publisher and console manufacturer are larger than the list of developers in the credits of a modern day game. There's tons of QA testing happening, but also the complexity and size of games are 1000x what they were back then.
That said, you can definitely tell a difference in quality between publishers; big titles like God of War, Horizon, even some of the biggest of them all, RDR 2, barely have any major issues at launch.
But you're probably thinking of Cyberpunk, an overambitious title released too soon, or maybe Starfield, by the company that refused to fix known issues that the community fixed over a decade ago but kept republishing the same title with the same bugs for years.
In non-games QA, if development takes too long, you typically get an extra sprint to test the changes.
In the games industry QA is considered an entry level job with little respect from other departments.
In non-games testing, QA is a career that pays double and is usually a respected part of the development process.
Basically, I would support the claim that QA could be improved generally across the board in the games industry.
Pays double relative to developers, or pays double relative to their counterparts in the gaming industry?
How much “a respected part of the development process” holds true varies a lot in my experience, and depends on your PoV. A lot of places consider QA to be much less skilled work, a step (maybe two) above shelf-stacking, but still consider it vital to project success and needing enough thinking & understanding that it is far from all automatable.
> QA is a career that
In terms of career, I get the impression that QA management is much more respected and paid, but that there is comparatively less demand for people of those higher positions so upwards movement can be slow/difficult. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people who start in QA move sideways into development: there is greater opportunity for moving up.
Also, I have never seen any place where they get double of a developer's salary. They usually get a bit less than a developer of the same seniority, with enough variance for some places to pay a bit more.
I have no idea why games have those fucked-up development practices where dropping features or extending deadlines are prohibited (ok, I have some ideas, but little confidence on them). But it's not only QA that is degraded by them. Every single aspect of the development suffers.
Testing any other software tends to pay atleast double minimum wage. But less than a developer salary.
Obviously this is a very general statement but that has been my experience.
I'd heard deadlines couldn't be extended due to console certification timelines. But I think a bigger problem is poor project management and waterfall development methodology... add the fixed deadline and you've got a recipe for a buggy under tested game.
I realize that all of these games probably had large QA teams work on them for a long time, but that's why I said "seems" - maybe the caught the bugs but they certainly didn't slip the launch or hire more people to fix them.
he finally bent the unhardened knife at the sixteen minute mark. I wish I was kidding.
A 45 minute video of majority filler content/entertainment is just as bad as a 10 minute video of majority filler content/entertainment.
It's also fun how "impossible" it can seem sometimes, especially (for me) if there's an age and/or geographic distance.
For instance I grew up in the 80s in Sweden, and was really into computers (!) back then, too. I had a Commodore 128 (followed by Amigas). There was a lot of gaming going on in C64 mode, and of course "Uridium" [1] and "Paradroid" [2] were more or less staples that everyone knew about.
It's still weirding me out that I have their author (Andrew Braybrook) in my Xitter feed [3], and that he is still doing game devlopment after all these years. Back then he felt like some kind of distant (he's from the UK, and more than a decade older than me) magician; now he's kinda/sorta my peer, at least professionally speaking. So weird.
I realize things like this happened all the time before the Internet too, but it must have been harder and/or more rare.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uridium
Any OOM issues was handled by doubling the expected memory usage during the missiles flight.
> I remember playing Wing Commander I, for hours the first time I ran it... upon exiting after a marathon, I read that text and thought "Awe, how nice".
Now knowing the truth, I wonder if they're lying or just misremembering.
So the memory is… primed, so to speak.
I took a screenshot. I had it for years. I may have lost it, or maybe it’s sitting on some old computer at my parents, but I swear it’s true.
Sure enough, the error message popped up, and the program was installed correctly.
I told the story once on Twitter, and someone responded that this was known problem. It had something to do with Windows 97’s registry updates if I remember correctly.
I think I've isolated the problem
Then what? You wrote a stern letter and posted it?
It inspired a very early Penny-Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/06/myth-ii-uninst...
Feels like I played a lot of DOS games though, looking back, so perhaps I got mixed up. Printing stuff on exit was not that unusual.
> Thank you for using the Wing Commander character converter
> Thank you for using the Secret Missions II character converter
Inside the zip, as well as loose files, there's what looks to be a CD image, containing this message. Perhaps part of the installer? Not sure why it refers to Wing Commander II either. It's next to a bunch of text about how you should upgrade to MS-DOS 5.00. This isn't part of any of the files.
> THANK YOU FOR BUYING WING COMMANDER II!
>
> Nearly ten man-years of work went into this product. Without the support of customers like yourself, we would be unable to continue to create games of this quality and scale. Please, do not distribute illegal copies of this software
Which confirms that I was playing Wing Commander 2.
> There is nothing inherently wrong with the Kama Sutra itself - it's merely an ancient instructional text on ways one might find fulfillment through emotional and physical love - but the play on words involved in the Gamasutra website title does admittedly cling "to a late-90s "LOL SEX" connotation," in the words of Game Developer publisher Kris Graft.