“I want you all to think about the Third Age, everything that happened there, the fall of Brennan’s house, Dark Lorac. How does the Third Age end? I mean, how did it end for you? What did you find at the end of a thousand years of struggle in the dirt and the rain, and what did you do with it? Were you brave? Did you win or lose? What did it take out of you?”
On-screen, the capsule history had gone to 3-D, a view of a warrior fighting wolves alone in a snowstorm. I thought about it. What was Darren’s story? What was Simon’s? Was he brave? Did he get what he wanted?
“It’s the end of the Third Age, people. You are going to slay gods.” A burst of applause, which Darren let run for a few seconds, then continued on. He had more coming.
“The ads talk about the technology. We’ll say it’s the fastest, most realistic graphics yet. We’re probably going to beat Carmack at id, we’ll beat Epic for sure. But it’s 1997, and games are about as realistic as they’re going to get, right?
“Think again. Big news, we’re throwing out all our old graphics tech, which means… a couple things. We’re ditching the Ukrainians, for good”—a modest cheer at that—“and we’re bringing in a fresh take on it. I’ve got a little surprise.”
Toby perked up a little, and then I saw Lisa. Her expression had changed very little, but her normally pale face was red almost to the hairline. She was watching Darren with what some might call nervousness, but it was more like hunger.
“I’ve been talking to a new person for this,” Darren said, and I saw Lisa’s posture straighten, flexing like a cat waiting to be petted. “We’re about to announce a partnership with NVIDIA, to be the flagship product for their next-gen graphics card. We’re going to get direct access to the software guys as well as their hardware team.”
I saw Lisa react. Her lips made the tiniest possible “no.” Otherwise her features didn’t change, they just went entirely slack, as if in shock. You would have to have known her a long time to catch the change. I thought I was the only one seeing it, until I saw Don’s eyes on her. Darren worked the room, but Don watched it.
Darren showed us a series of new screenshots. A waterfall with sunlight shining through it, forming a rainbow. A garishly lit nightclub where a generously proportioned, lingerie-clad woman danced on a pedestal, lit by multicolored spotlights. A domed temple with arches and gleaming black marble floors. The images looked like they’d taken a supercomputer a hundred hours to draw; they looked incredible.
Darren ticked off the list of features. “Translucency, curved surfaces, colored lights. Everything from a gamer’s wet dreams, all in real time. Bloom, specular highlights, insane poly counts, level of detail, all running at sixty frames a second, solid as a fucking rock. This is it, people.”
We were, yet again, looking across the threshold to the next thing, another phase change. Everything new this year was already becoming old, sad, and pathetic. Darren understood this so well. We were going into the future and he was taking us with him. We were the smart kids again, rich in the currency of our peculiar nation, foresight.
“And… number three,” Don said. “Scheduling.” Darren gave a quick nod, then ducked out the door while Don took us back into the mundane. Lisa followed behind Darren.
“We’re going to have about eighteen months for this one. We’ll be reusing a lot of tech, but it’s still going to be tight. Matt, could you—” Matt hopped up, and Don handed him a page of printout. He started sketching out a grid on the whiteboard on the wall.
Horizontally across the top, he wrote six items: PREPRODUCTION, ALPHA 1, ALPHA 2, ALPHA 3, BETA, and RTM.
At the right-hand edge, he wrote three words, arranged vertically: PROGRAMMING, DESIGN, and ART. These, I knew, were the three core disciplines of video game production. There was also production, which meant tracking the schedule, the budget, and doing a thousand other things, such as organizing translations for foreign publication, keeping in touch with publishers, and generally figuring out what on earth was going on at any given time. And then there was quality assurance, or playtesting, devoted to finding mistakes in other people’s work. No one was ever very fond of QA.
Don explained the schedule carefully—we’d have eighteen months for this, which put sharp limits on how much new technology we could create. I got the feeling this made the programmers feel a little pissed off. Working from the sheet, Matt began adding deadlines for each of these in neat, spiky handwriting. As Don talked us through the dates, I gradually picked up on rough meanings of the other terms.
Preproduction: planning the product and scheduling the milestones. As it would in a prolonged dorm-room discussion, the phrase “wouldn’t it be cool if” played a major part. Endless circular debates, pie-in-the-sky speculation. Lots of features that would be cut later for scheduling reasons.
Alpha phases 1, 2, and 3: building the game. This part was longer than the others put together, for obvious reasons. For most of this period, the game was going to be nonexistent or broken and decidedly unfun, and everyone would regret everything they said during preproduction.
Beta meant that the game, theoretically, was done except for all the many, many problems and mistakes and omissions.
RTM stood for “Release To Manufacturer,” when the finished master disk would be sent off to the publisher (note: we did not have a publisher). The publisher would do its own testing, and either accept it or send it back to have the problems fixed.
Of course none of these phases or deadlines would happen cleanly; there would be slippage and temporary solutions that would be fixed later, or, more often, become permanent. There would be interdependencies, times when art or programming couldn’t move forward because design hadn’t said what it wanted yet; or design couldn’t build its levels properly because art hadn’t produced the models or programmers hadn’t implemented the necessary features. It would be a dizzying creative collaboration that often took the form of a drawn-out, byzantine war of intrigue.
Preproduction started Monday. It was starting to sink in that this would be our lives for the next eighteen months. It was April then; it would be June when we started alpha 1 while my law school friends would be at graduation parties, the start of a lazy summer before moving on to New York or Palo Alto or New Haven, while I stayed behind in this made-up career. It would be June again when we got out of alpha 3, a year of my life gone, and it would be early October of next year when we reached RTM, and getting cold, and my life would be different in ways I couldn’t imagine yet.
Chapter Seven
I took the bug to Matt.
“In Realms VI?” he said. “It’s possible, I guess. But it’s probably already DNF’ed.”
“DNF?”
“Do Not Fix.”
“Why wouldn’t you fix a bug if you knew about it?”
Matt sighed. “Okay. So Realms VI has on the order of a million lines of code. It’s not going to be perfect, but it has to be shipped. At some point the producer and the leads sit down and go through all the existing bugs and prioritize according to various totally subjective criteria. How often it happens. How bad it is—where the top end is, like, ‘Game crashes, hard drive is erased, user catches fire,’ and the low end is, ‘Yeah, the text in that Options menu could be a more eye-catching shade of blue.’ Fixability, i.e., how loudly and effectively are the people tasked with repairing it going to complain.
“So these bugs are assigned priority numbers, but there’s a cutoff, and anything below that point is marked DNF, Do Not Fix, and officially closed. Ship it. So it’s, like, bugs that almost never happen, or are tiny aesthetic problems, or only come up when you have this or that shitty off-brand video card—it’s not our problem. Oh, and bugs that are part of a tricky section of code, so when you fix them you’d probably end up making new and worse bugs.”
“Okay, but what if this bug was pretty weird and noticeable?”
“Well there’s another category of bugs that don’t get fixed, which is the ones that only ever happen once, an
d those are marked NR, No Repro.”
“Wouldn’t you fix it anyway, just in case?” I asked. Before answering, Matt gestured me to roll my chair a little closer.
“So I came up through playtest, so… here’s how it looks from that perspective. The fate of many, many bugs runs as follows: a playtester spots it once or twice, logs it in the database with a tentative classification—art, programming, design, or unknown. The report includes instructions on how to find the bug and make it happen again, but some bugs don’t happen reliably. Sometimes they come and go for whatever reason—there’s a little mystery there. But it goes to the bug meeting, where the lead for that area assigns it to a team member, who may or may not have caused it. Doesn’t matter.
“So now the team member has to fix the bug, and they’re cranky because it’s a brand-new bug and they haven’t budgeted time for it and they’re going to be late for something else. So first thing they do is run the game and see if it reproduces. If it doesn’t happen on the first or second try, some guys will slap a No Repro on it, kick it back to playtest, and go on to their next bug.”
“Do they think you’re making it up?”
“You have no idea the contempt people hold toward playtest. You see the logic—everyone else’s job is to get the list of active bugs to zero, except us, whose job is add bugs to the list. So people just kick bugs back all the time. And some of them are pretty hard to verify, and you’ve got to figure out that the bug happens only if the game tries to autosave while you’re actively wielding a plus-three glass dagger and there are exactly four lizard men within three hexes. And then walk into a meeting and do it with—I’m not going to name names, but they’re literally standing over you, staking their reputations on the idea that this bug absolutely cannot happen, that it is literally technologically impossible.”
“So I guess you’re not in play test anymore.”
“Not for this one, no. I guess that’s the grand prize.”
There was nothing going on the rest of the day except other designers speculating about what more Darren had planned. I found a database showing records of bugs from previous projects, all closed and confirmed before shipping, but the records were there. I sorted for the ones that weren’t active, strictly speaking, but neither had they been fixed. The DNFs.
I searched around a little in the No Repro pile. It turned out there was no one bug exactly like the one I’d seen, but a few that might have been similar: “King Aerion dead when should be unkillable, WTF”; “Level three, dragon already dead when I arrived”; “Goblin children massacred? Why???” None of them repeated, and they could have been part of the same underlying bug or three entirely separate bugs.
They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.
They usually didn’t, because the game didn’t bother to simulate anything too far from the player in any detail—it would slow everything down too far. But maybe the game was having trouble deciding what not to simulate. Each one was marked No Repro, so maybe it just never happened again.
I noticed that most of these bugs belonged to the same person, LMcknhpt. I sent Lisa a quick e-mail with the subject line “RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112.”
Got something similar. Did this ever get figured out? Just curious.
Yours sincerely, &c.
Russell
Assistant Game Designer
Realms of Gold Team
The reply came a few minutes later.
Re: RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112
Nope. Couldn’t repro any of these, sent back to Matt. Probably in data.
Lisa
That “probably in data” was an ever-so-slightly dickish sign-off. What she meant to say was that the code was working fine, so it must be the designer who screwed up—he just forgot to flag the king as unkillable, or he put a rock in the wrong place, or routed a goblin’s patrol path through a lit torch.
I wrote back, “I triple-checked the data. Want to see?” but she didn’t respond at all, except that five minutes later, the bug database had sent me three separate automated messages.
RoGVI bug 2917 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
RoGVI bug 40389 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
RoGVI bug 51112 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
Where was the bug? How did I even start thinking about fixing something like this? A bug could be in either of two elements of the game, data or code, or it could be in both.
Something horrible was lurking in memory or code or whatever forsaken in-between region of space it lived in, and it was messing with our game. But bugs don’t happen without somebody making them, by stupidity or negligence. All I had to do was trace it back to where it lived. The first step, as everyone knew, was to find the version where it first occurred—the crucial change, an added feature or an attempt to fix some other problem, which had been copied from version to version ever since. So far I hadn’t even found a version where it didn’t occur, but there must be one. I’d just have to go back far enough.
Chapter Eight
I slept late the next morning, sat for a half hour over cereal and coffee before wandering over to work, shirt untucked, past midday traffic, people with regular jobs already heading to lunch. No one minded. I lost myself in reading through old computer game manuals, role-playing game modules, design documents, even the italicized flavor text on game cards (CORRELLEAN REMNANT (5/4) / Submarine movement / The regiment fought on as the waters rose; they never stopped).
Black Arts made role-playing games, strategy games, first-person shooters, even a golf game. But if there was one constant in the Black Arts games, it was the Four Heroes. They were—I think—based on the ones in Gauntlet, but you couldn’t say for sure because they were the same four heroes you found in almost any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere:
(1) A muscular guy with a sword
(2) A bearded guy in a robe
(3) A skinny guy with a knife
(4) A sexy lady
Whether you thought of them as Jungian archetypes or a set of complementary game mechanics, they’d been around almost since the beginning. Black Arts mixed and matched them depending on the plot of a given game, but they kept the names the same. It was part of the brand, and people cared a surprising amount about them.
The history of Endoria was divided into three ages, which had in common the fact that the world of Endoria was completely fucked.
Of the First Age comparatively little is known, other than it was an age of near-divine beings, heroes, Dreadwargs, and tragedy. Games were never set directly in the First Age; it was just used to explain strange objects like the Hyperborean Crown and the Brass Head, which emanated from the gods and wizard kings of this era. A creeping darkness overwhelmed the Great Powers, and the world descended into warring kingdoms.
The Second Age: That was when the four central heroes made their first appearance: Brennan the warrior, Lorac the wizard, Prendar the thief, and Leira the princess. I had no idea what happened other than that it ended with a gigantic war involving practically everybody.
The Third Age, where Realms games are mostly set, was the era of rebuilding, the long struggle for the restoration of the world.
Third Age Endoria was a dangerous place; it wasn’t noble, it wasn’t mystical, and it wasn’t especially dignified. Dwarves lied; elves slit throats. The land was a chaotic mess of factions and cultures and species. Different languages split the world, Coronishes and Zeldunics at eac
h other’s throats. Rival deities and pantheons played games with the world, spawning curious groups like the Antic Brotherhood, which served the chaos daemon, Quareen, and the Nephros Concordance, with its vast and mysterious wealth. Different schools of wizardry competed for supremacy: Horn Adepts were masters of illusion; Summoners and Divinomancers were like cosmic hustlers, making deals with unseen entities, playing powerful forces against each other, always trying to come out ahead. Pyrists and Infomantics clung to their disciplines like addicts; Necromancers, like engineers of a rotting eldritch calculus. The world was dirty, as if in that tournament all the shiny, high-fantasy idealism had been hacked to pieces and ground into the mud of the Second Age.
The Four Heroes’ lives continued, through sequel after sequel. There was no fictional justification for their extended life spans—did they have identical descendants, or did they just live a long time, as people in the Old Testament did? No one explained. Prendar was half elf and half human, and Lorac was a wizard, so they might plausibly have extended life spans, but even this was pushing it. (This was to say nothing of their twentieth-century and far-future analogues, for which no rational explanation suggested itself. Realms had a ludic dream logic of its own.) The Four Heroes were more like actors in a repertory company than stable characters. Nearly every story needed to fill one or more of their roles, “fighter” or “wizard” or “thief” or, well, “generic female person,” and they always showed up and did their bit. Sometimes they were a little older or younger than they were in previous games.
Were the characters supposed to remember everything that happened to them? If I asked one of them, would it know? It didn’t seem like it—most of the time they seemed paper-thin, just empty things you steered around the world to get what you wanted. No way to ask them, and no point to doing so. They weren’t even people; they were half people, you and not you, or the half of you that was in the world.
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