On his first day, in 1993, he is given a clipboard and assigned to a work station on a folding table at the back of the room. He's handed a 3DO console and told to play Wing Commander missions and "rat out bugs." Smith knows the missions inside and out already. He was a big software pirate before joining up with Origin. He's played all of the Wing Commander games. He's such a fan, in fact, he doesn't realize he's playing a broken game. He just thinks it's more challenging, which to him is more fun.
"There was a break point in the code where if the number of ships that ever came into an action sphere ever exceeded the memory, it would just crash," Harvey said. "So at the very end of that project, to fix a bug, one of the programmers, instead of fixing the bug and telling the designer, 'No you can't use five types of ships, you can only use four,' he just turned off that check in the code."
The programmer's shortcut means that the game will not crash, but it will also not display the ships. In the game's story, the enemies have discovered cloaking technology, rendering their ships "invisible" to the player. Smith's 3DO, struggling to display the variety of ships, but prevented from crashing and shutting down, simply stops rendering ships. To Smith, they appear invisible. He believes they are cloaked.
"We're flying these missions where we're fighting invisible ships and the only thing you can see is if the AI uses the afterburners, because those are shared between all the ships. They all have the same afterburners. So periodically you would see the afterburners jet on.
"One day, one of the programmers was in there and he was like, 'What the fuck are you guys doing?' And we're like, 'We're fighting the cloaked Kilrathi ships; what are you talking about?' That's the way QA was at the time ... we would just throw ourselves at the wall until we solved the problem."
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Originally Posted by SmoothPancakes
) to Bethesda.
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