Properties5
| Type | Article |
| Author | wcnews.com |
| Date | Sep 18, 2023 |
| URL | https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/16279 |
| Note created | Sep 18, 2023 |
the original quote ended up being pretty easy to source: it was left as a comment on August 20, 2009 in response to a Gamasutra article called Dirty Coding Tricks by Brandon Sheffield (archive). Here is the original post, verbatim:
Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We’d clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like “EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah.” We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read “Thank you for playing Wing Commander.”
I decided there was only one way to solve this mystery: see if we could reach Ken Demarest and ask him. He very kindly responded to a Facebook request in about 45 seconds and made us feel like real idiots for not just asking him first:
In a way I would have loved to ship with that hack in there, but once we found the cause of the error message I couldn’t in good conscience leave the hack in there. Besides which hand editing it added time to completing the build, which was inefficient. And there it is! The best possible outcome: the story was true–it’s something that was done during the game’s development–but it was also fixed before the game actually shipped… so it’s a clever engineering trick and explicitly NOT evidence of a shoddy product!