Mr. Smith Goes to Vega Sector

Here's a great listen: the The Retro Hour podcast has posted an in-depth interview with game development legend Harvey Smith. He's best known as the lead designed for the Deus Ex series and more recent titles from Arkane... but like many in the industry, he got his start at Origin Systems! He tells great stories about his time in the military in the early 1990s and then how he joined Origin (first as a member of the softball team before actually being hired!). And there's one fantastic story about QA'ing Super Wing Commander and running into stealth fighters!

I'll tell you a 3DO story though that you might like. You know one of the games in [Super Wing Commander] and that it was all the... it was the Secret Missions packaged with Wing I and II I think, and it was like a good bundle if you were a Wing Commander fan, right. And this was like while Chris Roberts and his team were working on Wing III, so they called us to the cafeteria one day shuttered the the windows. And they showed us on a big TV on a cart Wing III. And it was just simply a tech demo of the dog fighting against Kilrathi ships but it had 3D models flying around with a lighting model so that the as the ships banked and turned the lighting would play across the facets. And that's nothing now, but I tell you everyone in the room was stunned at the time. And so, like, you know we went from these 2D sprites that flipped I don't remember how many positions they had, but, like you could see the ships flipping right because they only had like, you know, eight facings or whatever.

But anyway we we would sit there and play these missions and write them up and try to reproduce the bugs. Like, oh we're having a crash, make it crash tell us exactly what the three steps to make it crash are. And then the programmer can find it very easily. But the missions some of them are about the Kilrathi developing, the Kilrathi are of course lion aliens like like from the novel The Man Kzin Wars or something, but the part of the plot is about the Kilrathi developing cloaking technology. And I remember we were playing this mission one time. And one of the kilrathi ships went invisible. And I was chasing it and you could only see when they fired their weapons. You could see the brights, that it had the what we would now call B effects on them, for the blasters moving through space. You could, you could see those and the afterburners, the jets, when they came on. You could see those but otherwise the ship was invisible and I remember dogfighting and chasing one and one of the, one of the producers was standing around and he looked over and he was like "what the hell are you doing? What's going on?" And I was just like I'm just playing the game, you know, I'm trying to get this one thing to reproduce and he was just stunned and he called his programmer friend over and they were freaking out and and and finally the programmer was like what is it you think is happening right now? And I was like well I'm chasing this Kilrathi ship and it cloaked and blah blah blah because the game's about cloaking. And he was like "no it's just not drawing the ship. How are you guys playing this game if it doesn't draw the enemy ships?" And QA you get super good at games, right. You memorize the the the floor plan of everything, right, and so I was like I'm just dogfighting this invisible ship but I can see when the afterburners turn on and when the, the blasters fire.

And the programmer... this is like a, a life lesson moment, like you you know if you could look back over your life and you could track the like how many times did something happen that was, like, lit your brain up right. And he said you know every action sphere in Wing Commander is allowed a certain number of ships, a certain amount of art, and so you fly from one action sphere to another there may be another ship fighting you there but it you're not allowed to have all three in the first action sphere you can maybe only have two plus your own ship and whatever and so what has happened here is we've exceeded the amount of art that we can have in this action sphere. So it's literally just not drawing the ship and the reason the blasters and the afterburners come on is those are shared between all the ships and I remember just my brain just going like as a non engineer my brain just going wow that explains a lot that's what's going on here. And what had happened was there was an assert somewhere in the code where like if you ever exceed the memory in an action sphere assert, you know, crash and then give this little report so somebody can go figure out what's going on. And a programmer assigned with the bug for it being you know crashing had just turned that assert off and so which is not a very responsible way to fix that bug, but like what it meant was like, we were fighting these invisible ships in in, in Wing Commander 3DO and the programmers were delighted. And so, uh, I love that yeah but it because it was about cloaking and because process was not as organized like modern QA people are geniuses the the sort of process they have for checklists and making sure on 27 languages everything works and on multiple platforms and all you know but any any case that's that's my Wing Commander 3DO story.

You can listen to the entire podcast here or through any popular provider (it's episode 466.)