The last lousy bug

Inspired by David Jones’ “My Favourite Bugs”, here’s one of my own war stories.

Console video games are demanding pieces of software to write: in addition to being entertaining, they must be playable by six-year-olds and self-explanatory to adults. They must be able to gracefully handle corrupted save files. They must never run out of memory, be unresponsive to user input, or take longer than 16 ms to draw the next frame. Oh, and you typically only get one chance to get it right: when the game has to go out to manufacture on cartridge or DVD there’s no chance to fix things with a version 1.1.

( But there are compensations. )