[turtledragonfly]

Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.

[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:

[Pet_Ant]

Which resulted in the notorious release of Outpost [1]. I think owners of that would have happily accepted a large series of post release patches over that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(1994_video_game)#Rece...

[qingcharles]

Especially when it was cartridge games. I remember when PC games started to get updates and you'd wait for next month's cover disc to get them. I seem to remember Frontier Elite having about a dozen...

I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.

[cazum]

I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?

[gambiting]

I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them.

The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.

[AStonesThrow]

Ah, the HCF system call?

[gambiting]

Honestly it was just before my time at that studio so I don't know exactly how that was done, but everyone knew about it because it cost us a lot of money and damaged our relationship with Nintendo somewhat. The game actually went on to be pretty successful after that, but yeah, would have been a disaster.

[turtledragonfly]

It was a crash bug, but I'm not really sure the details (and it has been some years...). Even at the time, I wasn't personally involved in it, just heard about it through the grapevine.

But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:

[elzbardico]

The cynical in me thinks that probably it was bug in the anti-piracy code.