Game Development Stories

[Moonface]

I was just in the car with @ShiraNoMai driving home from getting breakfast and I brought up Burnout 3 because the subject of tankers exploding came up and that game has tankers that can explode in it. Anyway, while talking about the game to her I recalled and shared the fact that the takedown feature in the game was added late in development and only one track (Downtown) was actually designed with the takedown feature in mind. Every other track was designed before the takedown feature was thought of and put into the game, which is why they feel more like the style of track the two games before it had whereas the Downtown track is glaringly different. I forget where and when I learned that but I've always liked knowing that little fact.

So what game development stories do you really like or just found interesting to learn about?

[Maniakkid25]

How did I miss this thread?

Anyway, my favorite game development story is actually Alan Wake. See, originally, the game was developed as an open-world exploration a la Grand Theft Auto, but then the devs actually wrote out the story. As the game's story developed, they suddenly realized that the game they were developing clashed with that story, as it was paced as a more traditional linear tale. In essence, they realized they were developing the wrong game, and had to pivot mid-development. The problem? They were already behind in development time and budget. So they had to basically beg MICROSOFT (who originally published the game) for more time and money because of this, and actually got it.

What Happened actually has a great exposé on the game's development cycle, and it's crazy to think that the sleeper hit horror-esque game was actually almost a big, sprawling sandbox game. The dev team managed to repurpose what they had VERY well, all things considered.

[Moonface]

Dang, I wonder if the devs would have tried to repurpose what they had into something similar to The Evil Within 2 since the approach that game took to its world design sounds fitting to what Remedy were trying to originally do with Alan Wake. It's cool to see they didn't really have all that work go to waste though by just cutting it down into smaller linear pieces, especially because starting that from scratch would've been time and money I wonder if Microsoft would've given them (I know you said they got that stuff but it probably wasn't for anything as monumental as a complete restart). It's definitely a lesson in figuring out what game you want to make before you start creating a lot of stuff though; their initial approach was just "Do everything Max Payne wasn't" like trying to cook a dish that isn't another dish without having the recipe ready and realizing halfway through cooking that their three course meal doesn't mesh together.


So I learned this during my Video Game Studies class last semester. Sayonara Wild Hearts has Queen Latifah as the narrator, but that only happened because the game director just name dropped her to Annapurna when questioned by them who he'd want to have narrate the game, expecting it to not be taken seriously. A few weeks later she was secured to narrate the game to the surprise of the director, and this was only a month out from the game releasing. The guy just made a throwaway response to a question in the spur of the moment and actually ended up getting what he asked for.

[Maniakkid25]

I've mentioned it before, but a series relevant to this topic is Ars Technica's War Stories. It's a series about the development of video games and the challenges that had to be overcome in order to actually get the game out the door. A really good one is Myst, because that one, the developer admits that they were basically coding the game blind. CD -ROM was a new technology when Myst came out, so the only CD burner he had access to was the publisher's. As such, as they were putting in the lush environments that would define the game, they had no idea if the game would even load fast enough to be able to display them before the user thinks "something's not working". He goes into more technical detail about it, but that's the short version of it.

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: Ooh. Does he happen to say what he might have done if the game hadn't been able to load fast enough? That was the first thing that came to mind reading your post that I'd totally ask someone like that about.

[Maniakkid25]

He does not, mainly because, by his description, they were basically coding by the seat of their pants. For those that don't know the turn of phrase, that means they were basically coding without any preemptive thought as to how it would end up. They didn't even test their game until they got the Gold Master of it. And yet, they got it working under those constraints.

And, rewatching the video, I can tell you the constraints. They had ~158 kB/s to work with, because that was the speed that single-speed CD-ROM drives could read off a disc. Now, for 1993, that's not an insignificant amount of data, but it's definitely not a great place to be in when you are rendering thousands of images, playing hundreds of sound effects, and dozens of music tracks that all need to fight to get pulled off the disc. They literally had to structure the order of data in the spiral of the CD in order to make this possible, to give the laser the minimum amount of distance to move. It's wild!

[Moonface]

Ooh, I forgot about this one until talking with @ShiraNoMai about sprites just now, and this one is really cool particularly from a "gaming the limits of the hardware" perspective.

So for Crash Team Racing, all of the tires are camera and input based 2D sprites instead of actual 3D models like the rest of the karts are. The idea came about when during development there were concerns about rendering 64 tires on screen for four player split screen, and so the sprite based system was created to fix that. It also allows all the karts to have wheels that actually look round as there's no polygons making them. I was curious if other 3D kart racers of the time such as Diddy Kong Racing used a similar approach but couldn't find anything, but my guess is they didn't because otherwise Naughty Dog would've just been inspired by DKR's approach to tires instead of coming up with something new.

Speaking of Diddy Kong Racing, Naughty Dog actually recreated Crescent Island during the prototype stage for CTR to test how the PS1 handled it.

[Maniakkid25]

So, there is a game that came out in 2009. You've no doubt heard of it; it was one of, if not THE best-selling game of its year. I also rate it as one of the best stories ever written for a game. Period. And it almost didn't happen. That game is Modern Warfare 2, and I like to describe it as "the best game no one wanted to make".

So, a little background: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare just released, and became a landmark release lauded by critics and gamers the world over. It sold like hotcakes, and Activision (Not Activizzard. Not yet; they hadn't merged with Vivendi Games yet to form the conglomerate) were raking in that sweet, sweet cash. So, they approach the founders of Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella, saying "hey, guys, we REALLY need you to get working on Modern Warfare 2, like, yesterday." Now, there was just one problem with that: Infinity Ward was done with Call of Duty. They told Activision they had a new IP they wanted to pitch, and when Modern Warfare was done, they were going to develop that, instead. This would eventually become Titanfall. So, according to the lawsuit, the two negotiated a deal with Activision that was WILDLY in their favor...but with a single catch: If West and Zampella are fired, Activision would retain control of the Modern Warfare IP. And so, they had 18 months to develop Modern Warfare 2 instead of the then usual 24 (Even back then, CoD games were on a yearly schedule, but Treyarch were also developing their own CoD games in tandem with Infinity Ward).

So, they had two options. They could phone it in, and make a decent enough game, or take one look at Modern Warfare and World at War, and say "That's cute", and proceed to push the envelope even further than those two games did. Infinity Ward went with the latter option, and we legitimately got one of the best FPS games ever released, and Activizzard (yes, the merger had gone through by this point) was raking in that sweet, sweet cash once again, turning the CoD franchise into a legitimately BILLION-dollar franchise. And then promptly fired West and Zampella, losing 40% of their entire development studio in the process of that colossal fuck-up of greed.

Activizzard: America's Konami (if you know, you know).

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: That story feels similar in ways to the ongoing dispute between Krafton and the Subnautica 2 studio CEO's, particularly in regards to finding a way out of paying out bonuses that were contractually agreed upon.

So I was reading an article about how a Fallout 4 QA tester broke the game so much that Zenimax executives got emails about it, and a comment on it was sharing a really crazy story I didn't know about before:

Reminds me of the story about Myth II: Soulblighter. M2S was made by Bungie in the late '90s. One of their QA testers found a weird but potentially very damaging bug late in the process. The last thing that the uninstaller did was delete the folder that the game had been installed in. The tester discovered that if you manually changed the install destination from C:\Program Files\Myth II to your root C: drive, the uninstaller would delete your C: partition, requiring you to reinstall Windows in order to keep using the computer.

This was, unfortunately, discovered after the game had gone gold and been sent out for production. So Bungie recalled those disks and had them reprinted with an uninstaller that couldn't ruin somebody's machine. They didn't turn a profit on the game as a result.

It's another one of those scenarios that most people would never think of, with very high stakes if an end user did it.

Emphasis mine in the quote to highlight what might be one of the most disastrous bugs/issues a game could launch with.

It reminds me of the story about Uncharted 3's development, which I wrote about here but the basic summary was the game didn't run on OG PS3's and was caught by pure luck days before it was due to go gold.

[Maniakkid25]

Ah, yes. The classic Myth 2 bug. That is just a massive oversight on Bungie's part to code the uninstaller to do that. And given that most people don't have alternate hard drives, that could have disastrous consequences for an unsuspecting person (though I do have to ask if you don't know what you're doing with computers, why would you change the default install path?). Still, that's the stuff that lives on in legends. Speaking of.

Bethesda is a developer that requires no introduction. What does require introduction is Daggerfall. The sequel to the successful Elder Scrolls Arena, Daggerfall is... troubled. And by that, I mean its a broken mess that can easily load itself to be unwinnable without any input from the player. Oops. It's probably one of the only games that cheats are not only recommended, but sometimes required. Which is a shame, because it's a good classic game.

Anywho, the first two Elder Scrolls were released as freeware a long time ago, and while you need to set them up in DOSBox, you can still play them. So, you might be asking: "Why has no one fixed it?" Well, they have. Sort of. There are multiple re-engines of Daggerfall, with probably the most popular one being Daggerfall Unity, which was once available on GOG. But, as far as fixing the original game? No one knows how to do that, not even Bethesda. Why? Because Bethesda lost the source code. Yup. Just straight up lost it. It's not even because the moved HQs; that happened years before Daggerfall was a thing. They just straight up lost it.

[Moonface]

Ah, yes. The classic Myth 2 bug. That is just a massive oversight on Bungie's part to code the uninstaller to do that. And given that most people don't have alternate hard drives, that could have disastrous consequences for an unsuspecting person (though I do have to ask if you don't know what you're doing with computers, why would you change the default install path?). Still, that's the stuff that lives on in legends. Speaking of.

I don't think most people would have had an alternate hard drive in 1998. I didn't own a computer then but wasn't the only ways to backup data either a floppy disc or a physical disc for a regular person?

[Maniakkid25]

Yeah, it would have been a CD burner in '98. Floppies only hold 1.44 Megs outside of very specialized variants. Still, a techie in the know probably would have a spare hard drive that they just kept around, because HDDs can retain data without being plugged in for extended periods of time. Your reminder that you should always keep backups of your important data.