[marban]

The thing I always wonder is how testing/QA worked back in the days for cartridge/disk games. I mean, there've been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can't even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.

[nsxwolf]

I remember Quest For Glory IV shipped with a game-breaking bug that required downloading a patch from a BBS and possibly starting with a new save. I never finished the game because of that one.

Much worse when it was ROM media - Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete because of a bug that made it into the release.

Still, this stuff was really rare. Very different QA mindset when recalling the product is impossible or expensive.

[anthk]

>Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete

Well, they were right.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Though there were more overall platforms back then, the hardware for any given platform was a lot more uniform than any modern PC. OSs barely did anything where they existed at all, which also helped. Finally, codebases were a lot smaller and everything was single-threaded so there was generally just less to go wrong.

[wgjordan]

According to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.

[phaemon]

The original Doom code basically broadcast packets to every machine on the network, which on any large network would bring everything to a crawl. It's why network Doom was explicitly banned on many university networks.

The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.