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Trenches comic: Tuesday March 13, 2012 - Lawstar
Bogey
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
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.
Bogey on
0
Posts
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/15/magickas-buggy-launch-we-didnt-know-the-game-was-being-released/
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.
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...
Yeah but usually the people working on the game are aware that it's going to be released.
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.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.