So Turok 5 for the Nintendo Game Cube. We send it to Nintendo, they send back about 25 items that have to be fixed for a green light, no problem nothing major. We send it back, and they run the entire protocol again (you have to pay for each submission so might as well get your monies worth I guess), and it’s green lit. I send my troops home after 42 straight 16 hour days. Hell we slept in the office for the last 2 weeks. We come back 2 days later, and have a nice picture in our email waiting for us, of the gold master disc for the pressing of Game Cube version, pretty cool. About three hours later I hear a particular buzz, that freezes my blood. It’s the buzz a hard locked Game Cube makes. I slowly walk over to the cube it’s coming from, praying it’s someone messing around with an old version. My guys face is white as a sheet, and the rest of my crew gather round, 16 of us gathered in one cube, starting in mute horror at a frozen Game Cube with the approved release candidate of Turok 5. Time to do some boss stuff, can we replicate it? Might be a one off, bad hardware, bad burn, could be plenty of things besides a bug. Yeah no. Replicateable, on every machine we’ve got, on 15 different discs. !$&*#&$(@&#(&((!@#!!! In case you’re wondering it shipped like that, no way in hell corporate was going to sink the money it had already spent to press copies. No patching for the GC either, not a capability. No “second version” release either, why risk having another bug sneak in fixing this one?
Honestly, I’d imagine that being able to patch/update has made QA worse. On any major label title (EA, Ubi, etc) I can guarantee you that 98+% of the bugs that people locate and post, even game breakers were logged in the QA database. The dev team just decided not to deal with them. That attitude was in effect back when you couldn’t fix software, imagine how much they probably leave for “the first patch.”
Oh man I had forgotten about Terminal Reality, they had some good games for the Mac. You’re probably right with them being a Mac/PC house at the time. Those tend to have much smaller teams, as the amount of money in a given SKU is a lot lower, leading to swapping people around from different teams all the time. Also most projects don’t stay on schedule for a variety of reasons, and the accumulated slippage has to be covered somewhere in the project.
Oh wow you had to go there! I had a buddy that was working for Ion Storm on that one, he managed to dodge getting stuck on Daikatana and instead went and worked on a little project called “Deus Ex”… That was about the time I decided to go back to college and finish my degree, so I passed on an offer to come work at Ion Storm here in Austin. If I had taken it I’d probably still be in the gaming industry, or not, who knows?