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Mythbusters: Wing Commander I Edition
- softwaredoug 3y agoI just love that there’s a website for wing commander news in 2023 that is kept up to date.
- sumtechguy 3y agowcn... wow have not been to that site in ages. Glad they keep it up to date.
- voynich 3y ago[dead]
- MBCook 3y agoWhat a great ending.
- xcdzvyn 3y agoThere's this comment on the linked Reddit thread: > I remember playing Wing Commander I, for hours the first time I ran it... upon exiting after a marathon, I read that text and thought "Awe, how nice". Now knowing the truth, I wonder if they're lying or just misremembering.
- ElderKorihor 3y agoProbably just Mandela effect. I also remember this message that apparently doesn't exist. I was also a big player of Ultima VII so maybe my mental wires are crossed as the article suggests.
- beej71 3y agoI remember it distinctly, as well. Crazy.
- photonerd 3y agoIt’s also worth noting that it wasn’t exactly uncommon to have messages like that on exit. Apogee games did it a lot I seem to remember. Lots of DOS/4GW stuff too. So the memory is… primed, so to speak.
- I_am_uncreative 3y agoMaster Of Orion II (1996) has that when you exit the game as well, plenty of games did it during that time period.
- aidenn0 3y agoI can see if my floppies still work (they probably don't) and see if it's different from the GOG/Kilrathi Saga versions.
- Sharlin 3y agoMisremembering, of course. Our memories are notoriously unreliable, much more so than we'd like to think. Thes kinds of messages used to be not unusual, and the simple act of reading the story is plenty enough to generate a false or mixed memory recall.
- projektfu 3y agoWhat happens is someone writes an article that retcons reality to their version. Happens all the time.
- Innominate 3y agoI suspect they're using a much later release of the game. The versions most readily available online came much later.
- bruce511 3y ago[flagged]
- joshschreuder 3y agoI feel like given the comment from Ken, it is not unreasonable to assume the game shipped like he said. He did specifically say "We had to ship ASAP" which implies that it was done to get the game out the door and indeed shipping copies would have the message.
- theevilsharpie 3y agoThis reminds me of a hack that Traveller's Tales implemented for Sonic 3D Blast on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive. If you physically wiggle or hit the game cartridge enough while the the console is powered on with the game inserted in it, a "secret level select" screen pops up where you can select a level. It was long considered to be an easter egg, but actually, it was a custom crash handler that the devs created that trapped all of the main CPU's error interrupts and redirected to a level select screen. They did this to avoid having their game build rejected by Sega's QA team and delaying the game's release. (Sega's QA testing was a multi-week process, and a crash would mean the build getting rejected and having to start the process over again.) When people were wiggling the game cart, they were inadvertently unplugging the cart enough for the processor to throw an error. Source (3-minute YouTube video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA The linked "Coding Secrets" YouTube channels has other videos details similar hacks, if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole. It was wild the things these devs had to do to get games to work within the hardware and business constraints of the time.
- tschwimmer 3y agoI think it's telling when games were much (much) simpler mechanically that QA was a multi-week process. Recent AAA games seem to forgo even a multi-minute QA process by the publisher or the console maker.
- toast0 3y agoThe "right" amount of QA is about the cost of fixing errors. When you manufacture a ton of ROMs for a cartridge, there's not a lot of cost effective fixes you can do when an error is found. Hopefully it's minor, because if it's a major error, you're looking at a full replacement campaign and that's going to be super spendy. On the other hand, how much does it cost to run an update on a Steam game? There's certainly a cost, and some of the cost is reputation, which is hard to earn back, but the tradeoff of being able to get patches is the reduction in quality control because problems can be patched.
- 3y ago
- jonathankoren 3y agoWhile this story turned out to be false, I do remember installing the multiplayer game launcher for Half Life 1 back in 1999/2000. After clicking “install”, a dialog popped up and said something, “If the installer says the program failed to install, do not worry. The program installed correctly.” I took a screenshot. I had it for years. I may have lost it, or maybe it’s sitting on some old computer at my parents, but I swear it’s true. Sure enough, the error message popped up, and the program was installed correctly. I told the story once on Twitter, and someone responded that this was known problem. It had something to do with Windows 97’s registry updates if I remember correctly.
- bandrami 3y ago> Windows 97 I think I've isolated the problem
- Maakuth 3y agoThere was a time-unlocked beta version of Windows Memphis (98) making circles that was shoddily rebranded as Windows 97. Of course it's likelier that the parent mistyped either 95 or 98.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoIf you uninstalled half life 1's bundled Sierra Utilities it would remove 1 directory higher than where you installed it. Usually wiping out Program Files.
- lostlogin 3y agoOh that’s great. Then what? You wrote a stern letter and posted it?
- thih9 3y agoSometimes you posted on a forum, like this: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/i-tried-to-uninstall-sierra-utilities-it-tried-to-uninstall-everything-else.479484/ https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/i-tried-to-uninstall-s...
- courseofaction 3y agoSide note: Gamasutra.com -> GameDeveloper.com gotta be one of the worst brand identity decisions in recent memory.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seanthemon 3y agoTwitter -> X gives similar vibes
- psd1 3y agoThat and, "Meta". It's a prefix, not a word.
- hk__2 3y agoIt’s a brand name; you can use whatever you want. "Google" is not a pre-existing word either ("not a word" is a linguistical nonsense: anything is a word once it’s used as such).
- Earw0rm 3y agoWorse. At least GamaSutra to GameDeveloper makes it sound less like an adult website. "X.com" sounds like Netscape is about to start thrashing the hard drive with penis enlargement pop-ups like it's 1998.
- thih9 3y agoContext: https://screenrant.com/gamasutra-changing-name-game-developer-industry/ https://screenrant.com/gamasutra-changing-name-game-develope... > There is nothing inherently wrong with the Kama Sutra itself - it's merely an ancient instructional text on ways one might find fulfillment through emotional and physical love - but the play on words involved in the Gamasutra website title does admittedly cling "to a late-90s "LOL SEX" connotation," in the words of Game Developer publisher Kris Graft.
- hoppla 3y agoHeard a story about a developer auditing the code for missiles. He quickly pointed out that there was memory leaks everywhere … turns out that it was intentional, as the missile had its own garbage collection at the end of flight. Any OOM issues was handled by doubling the expected memory usage during the missiles flight.
- unwind 3y agoThere really is some magic power in being able to reach first-party sources for things like this. It's also fun how "impossible" it can seem sometimes, especially (for me) if there's an age and/or geographic distance. For instance I grew up in the 80s in Sweden, and was really into computers (!) back then, too. I had a Commodore 128 (followed by Amigas). There was a lot of gaming going on in C64 mode, and of course "Uridium" [1] and "Paradroid" [2] were more or less staples that everyone knew about. It's still weirding me out that I have their author (Andrew Braybrook) in my Xitter feed [3], and that he is still doing game devlopment after all these years. Back then he felt like some kind of distant (he's from the UK, and more than a decade older than me) magician; now he's kinda/sorta my peer, at least professionally speaking. So weird. I realize things like this happened all the time before the Internet too, but it must have been harder and/or more rare. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uridium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uridium [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradroid [3]: https://twitter.com/UridiumAuthor https://twitter.com/UridiumAuthor
- BSTRhino 3y agoThis is so strange because I'm sure I remember seeing the "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" message as a child. Am I the only one?
- erkmene 3y agoMe too! I definitely remember seeing that thank you note. Mandela Effect comes to mind of course but the memory is so vivid it’s creepy.
- tom_ 3y agoNope! It sound very familiar to me too when I first read about this. Feels like I played a lot of DOS games though, looking back, so perhaps I got mixed up. Printing stuff on exit was not that unusual.
- tom_ 3y agoI downloaded the version from archive.org. Looks like it might say thank you on exit from the character converter. I just did a string search through all the files to find this though. > Thank you for using the Wing Commander character converter > Thank you for using the Secret Missions II character converter Inside the zip, as well as loose files, there's what looks to be a CD image, containing this message. Perhaps part of the installer? Not sure why it refers to Wing Commander II either. It's next to a bunch of text about how you should upgrade to MS-DOS 5.00. This isn't part of any of the files. > THANK YOU FOR BUYING WING COMMANDER II! > > Nearly ten man-years of work went into this product. Without the support of customers like yourself, we would be unable to continue to create games of this quality and scale. Please, do not distribute illegal copies of this software
- Boxxed 3y agoI'm pretty sure the thank-you-for-playing message is actually in Wing Commander 2
- BSTRhino 3y agoOkay, I think I have confirmed this is the answer. I had this combined Ultima 8, Syndicate Plus, Wing Commander 2 CD: https://www.mobygames.com/game/144377/ultima-viii-pagan-strike-commander-syndicate-plus-wing-commander/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/144377/ultima-viii-pagan-stri... Which confirms that I was playing Wing Commander 2.
- concordDance 3y agoThe little distortions that get added to stories as they propagate can be infuriating. Though in this case its harmless.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Boxxed 3y agoI'm fairly certain it was Wing Commander 2 that had this message, not the original.