Trenches comic: Tuesday March 13, 2012 - Lawstar

Bogey

Of Course It’s Gold, Silly.

03/13/2012 - Anonymous

A MAJOR game was coming out and we were on the task force to do the debug on it. Finding all the minor/major glitches, and figuring out how to recreate them and what not. Mostly basic stuff, only this particular game happened to be *riddled* with glitches, albeit obscure ones. The ranged from harmless graphical errors to others that would consistently crash the game.
The group i was on spent weeks and weeks attempting to discover all the glitches so the coding team could isolate and fix the problems. Even though we knew we were a tad behind schedule, everything was going well.

Friday rolls along, and we do our usual stuff, write our little reports to say what we found, and head home for the weekend.

Monday morning, 7:00 AM. We arrive to work and some of us are smoking outside before we enter the breach, when one the lead programmers comes running out of the building utterly pissed off.

“What happened?”
“The games not here anymore”

***confused look by everyone listening***

“What do you mean its not here?”
“They told me it went gold over the weekend.”

***Awkward pause***

“Uh..the game isn’t done yet.”
“Well apparently it was done enough for them, because they went gold Sunday.”
“Musta been one hell of a weekend then”

Needless to say, since the game was “done” we all got sent home. I had a lot of fun showing my friends all the game crash bugs that made it into the final cart. We made a drinking game out of it.

RMS Oceanic

Ah, the good old master of Not-Law.

Kapitan_Jack

Didn't this happen to Magicka?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/magickas-buggy-launch-we-didnt-know-the-game-was-being-released/

sonofman

So should we assume the game was Batman.... ???

Vyolynce

"The final cart?" Is that just carry-over slang from the days when things were actually on cartridges or is this a really old story?

ArcSyn

Vyolynce wrote: »

"The final cart?" Is that just carry-over slang from the days when things were actually on cartridges or is this a really old story?

Is it still "going gold" when it is just being put on a cart?

Maybe it's a DS game or GBA game? Or even a 3DS game really, they all use 'carts' really.

jackal

It must have been before zero day patches were a thing or they would have continued to work on it. Either that or the company decided to just say fuck it and get whatever sales they could with a broken product.

Aurich

Yeah the game didn't just go live, the programmer said it was gone. I don't know anything about the biz, but that implies that what they were working on was physically removed, right?

halkun

You know, I find it amazing that companies try and lock down thier systems to prevent exploits to compromise the system, and then get all shocked when all you have to do is name a file or somesuch and break the protection. This right here is a perfect example of how it will always be like this.

Nothing against the QA guys, but here are the hardware designers adding nuclear-level security and then the QA guys wondering what happened to the code...

Mc zany

This isn't new. Just about every game has a bunch of crashes that only the qa guys and programmers know about. Launch games in particular. It used to be a hobby of some of our testers to go into a store with a demo station and crash the game.

Roger Wilco

Mc zany wrote: »

This isn't new. Just about every game has a bunch of crashes that only the qa guys and programmers know about. Launch games in particular. It used to be a hobby of some of our testers to go into a store with a demo station and crash the game.

Yeah but usually the people working on the game are aware that it's going to be released.

forty

“The games not here anymore”

Wha? Like, the leads removed the source code, version control database, etc. from their network? Or what?

B:L

This supposedly happened to Dead or Alive as well.

MuddBudd

forty wrote: »

“The games not here anymore”

Wha? Like, the leads removed the source code, version control database, etc. from their network? Or what?

Depending on the company, console test discs can be highly controlled. Copies get burned, given to the lead, who checks them out to the testers. At the end of the day they are collected. Presumably, when a new build is sent over or when the game is done, the old discs are destroyed. so it could well be there was no physical copy to test and the 'gold' master was removed from the network/db.

Same thing often can happen at my job where everything is handled digitally. At a certain point they don't want further changes being added to the code, lest untested code accidentally get released, so the build in the database is removed or locked down.