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Comment by eddyfromtheblok | Hacker News Reader

That garbage code brought about the speed run culture, highlighted by charity events like Awesome Games Done Quick. The speed runner and their crew on stage will explain the latest level skips, wall clipping to avoid tedious areas, enemy weaknesses and exploits, and frame perfect input strings needed to accomplish those. And some will perform speed runs blindfolded with only the audio cues to work with.

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That hardly has to do with code quality, but instead that some edge-case "features" were not anticipated by the game designers, programmers and QA team, but "discovered" later by speedrunners.

Sometimes it is about code quality. Defensively written, well-documented and well-tested code would not be as likely to suffer from such bugs.

It's not just subtle floating-point errors either, but also outright wrong maths that appears to work (see [1] for an example), memory leaks [2], buffer overflows [3] etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gNYTqn3qRc

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20410166

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/how-to-beat-paper-mar...

I think they made the right trade-off, back in the 90s on hardware that could barely run the game, sticking extra defensive checks to make sure you have not accidentally clipped through the geometry, or simpler ones like making sure you are not running too fast, seems excessive.

They weren't coding for some NASA space probe and they knew it.

Typically you'd put the checks only in debug builds.

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