Too Funny to Fix
I was working at a third-party testing house and we were working on a game that accurately replicated the city of Manhattan. By the end of development the bugs numbered in the thousands. I ran into some pretty impressive/funny bugs during my tenure on the game, most of which got fixed.
Some of my favorites:
1. Early in development there was a slightly disturbing feature. Pedestrians, hit with explosive weapons, left limbs behind that were usable as weapons. The bug I found was that they never went away. The bodies vanished, but the limbs remained. After a particularly impressive rampage, I took a screenshot of Wall Street littered with limbs and sent to devs.
2. The crowd AI responded with mayhem if you shot someone in broad daylight. Testing this feature with a Sniper Rifle had some great results. At a certain range, no one would notice when an NPC’s head was shot. They would continue their casual walk while their friends’ head exploded.
At an even further distance, the NPC didn’t get register being shot. Instead they spawned sunglasses (a la Matrix agents) and went about their business while everyone near them ran around in a panic.
3. My favorite bug of all time. The game had certain buildings you could walk into. Grocery stores, med clinics, banks and, of course, strip clubs. When walking into a building, the game dynamically loaded the models of the characters. Very rarely, the game would accidentally load every character in the building as the same model, but give them all the correct animations. After repeatedly being told I was just plain wrong; that it was IMPOSSIBLE that this bug could exist, I had my day in the sun.
Hours spent finally reproducing this bug, I caught video of my character walking into a strip club and every single NPC model was a cop. Cop on the stripper pole. Cop as a cocktail waitress. Cop getting a lapdance from another cop. Cop. Cop. Cop.
Beaming with pride at reproducing the bug and catching it on video, I walk into work the next morning with a note from the developer:
Will Not Fix: Too Funny.
