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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Still not as bad as when a company I worked for managed to press and ship a ton of CDs that included a virus.

Worked on a small game development project in university. It was meant to teach us project managment and coding skills. It took one whole trimester, 3 months or so, and we had a working game. The only deliverable we had not met was handing the mastered game over to the tutors. The Project manager reserved this responsibility for himself. He put the disc in a PC. Messed around with it. Handed it in. Got on his motorcycle and left the state.

Turns out he handed over a blank disc. We almost all failed, lots of students suddenly low on HD space had started purging their laptops of the files. The coders had to come in on semester break to put something together to hand in. There was one guy who backed up everything, out of a team of 30 or so people.

Ouch - no where near that bad but once I was working on a children's online game. The game was large (500MB or more), and this was still pretty early on in ADSL roll out - lot's of kids still had dial up. So we offered a CD with the game on for free.

After 800 of them arrived for me to start mailing out, they found a small issue with the game, which they patched - "don't worry the kids will just have to run the patch the first time they play" - I tested it, the patch was 800MB...

I didn't send any of the CDs out.

How the heck could a 500MB game have an 800MB patch? Sounds like someone had no idea what they were doing…

I just managed the website - I wasn't involved in the game, but it didn't seem to be that well managed from my outside perspective.

I think part of the issue was there was not system to 'patch' - so the far larger download in theory allowed them to add smaller patches to the game in the future, but that didn't happen as far as I remember.

I don't think we even ended up opening all the levels of the game as the uptake wasn't that great.

I worked at a game company in the 90s that shipped a strategy game with a bug where the AI would literally never attack the player. I think the cause was some last minute copy/paste while rushing to deliver the game to the publisher. It was discovered before the game hit the shelves, but the decision was made to ship it anyhow and release a patch, which had just become a somewhat reasonable practice with all those 33.6k modems out there.

Still could be worse. For example, the King's Quest 8 Master CD-ROM contained a copy of King's Quest 8.

???

Did you mean to type something different? Obviously the King's Quest 8 master will contain King's Quest 8.

That's the joke. It's a joke about the quality of King's Quest 8.

KQV was the best one. The later ones jumped the shark.

King's Quest 8 (Mask of Eternity) is a terrible game. King's Quest is an adventure game series. It is known for hand-drawn 2D character sprites moving over hand-drawn 2D backgrounds, collecting items and solving inventory puzzles.

This entry in the series tried to "modernize" it by adding in 3D graphics and RPG-like combat elements, which completely went against everything the series stood for. The 3D graphics were around N64 quality and aged very poorly.

It's considered to be a game that killed off the whole Adventure game genre.

That was Gabriel Knight 3 with the infamous 'cat hair moustache' puzzle right? ;)

Indeed it was! https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

It was a true catastrophe.

There was a game startup a long time ago that shipped the heavily instrumented debug build of an Xbox game instead of the certified gold master.

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