Comment by theevilsharpie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theevilsharpie | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a hack that Traveller's Tales implemented for Sonic 3D Blast on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive.

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.

I think it's telling when games were much (much) simpler mechanically that QA was a multi-week process. Recent AAA games seem to forgo even a multi-minute QA process by the publisher or the console maker.

The "right" amount of QA is about the cost of fixing errors. When you manufacture a ton of ROMs for a cartridge, there's not a lot of cost effective fixes you can do when an error is found. Hopefully it's minor, because if it's a major error, you're looking at a full replacement campaign and that's going to be super spendy.

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.

The easier it is to update something the worse state you can ship it in.

Never trust a device with a reset button.

> Recent AAA games seem to forgo even a multi-minute QA process by the publisher or the console maker.

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 games QA, the deadlines are fixed and development creeps into QA time. So you get less QA time than you originally planned. If you're lucky, a patch will fix some bugs.

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.

> In non-games testing, QA is a career that pays double and is usually a respected part of the development process.

Pays double relative to developers, or pays double relative to their counterparts in the gaming industry?

Relative to QA in the gaming industry I assume. I'm pretty sure (though I'm making significant assumptions, apply pinches of salt as appropriate) our testers are on less than our “standard” developers, certainly not more (though I think more than the junior/grad level), and that this holds for places friends work at.

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.

Well, the places that have QA people tend to respect them. But having QA people at all is not very common.

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.

Sorry about the confusion. Games QA tends to pay around minimum wage. So similar to working in a supermarket.

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 was indeed thinking of Cyberpunk but also games like Redfall, Wild Hearts, Outriders, etc. These games shipped inexcusably buggy and in the case of Wild Hearts, EA recently announced that they won't put in any more effort into patching performance issues which still persist.

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.

It's not because of how simple or not the games were, it might seem that way because because it's just not as important as updates can be provided online now.

These videos are refreshingly short. I feel like all my YT subs produce 45m videos these days.

I saw a review of a cheap Damascus knife today, and the guy was so busy cutting in jokes... it was infuriating. I just wanted to see how the blade failed.

he finally bent the unhardened knife at the sixteen minute mark. I wish I was kidding.

Install <https://sponsor.ajay.app/> and click “Skip to Highlight”.

45 minutes of legitimate content is great.

A 45 minute video of majority filler content/entertainment is just as bad as a 10 minute video of majority filler content/entertainment.

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