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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

As someone who never played Crash Bandicoot, I immediately did a text search for "Baggett" to see if Dave Baggett mentions the bug that literally comes up in every online discussion about craziest debugging stories ever [0] and is the first thing I think about when I hear Crash Bandicoot mentioned. Surprisingly, it doesn't, but Baggett has a bunch of other interesting anecdotes about his work. CB doesn't look like my type of game, but ever since buying a PS4 (had a PS2 previously), I've snapped up Naughty Dog games based on my high estimation of their development quality (and, well, the high review scores that their games always seem to get).

[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/M...

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If you're into Naughty Dog games you should try Jak and Daxter at some point. It is, however, a platformer.

Thanks for the link, I had somehow missed that story. I think for a digital hardware engineer, bugs like that are not particularly strange. As software people we are usually shielded from it, because the hardware we are using has been thoroughly tested. Working with embedded software, you are often one of the first people to write code for a particular bit of hardware, and have to watch out for these things. On the other hand, it is tempting to blame the hardware for all mysterious bugs, and the hw engineers do not appreciate that much.

On a related note, Dave Baggett is also the co-founder of ITA which sold to Google for a reported 700 million.

Yeah, everything I've read from him has been interesting/inspiring. I even joined Quora because that seems to be his social media platform of choice (or was, at the time):

https://www.quora.com/profile/Dave-Baggett

He's been on HN a few times in the past too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmbaggett

Dave Baggett wrote a couple of nice text adventures for the TADS system before he worked on Crash back in the early 1990s, I remember enjoying both "Unnkulian Unventure II: The Secret of Acme" and "The Legend Lives!" (Unnkulian episode 5)... and I also remember some fun conversations on natural language text parsing with him back on rec.arts.int-fiction in the same time period.

forgot this story; archived link in case https://archive.fo/QNut8

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