Microsoft Goes a Long Way to Fix Games

In our everyday quest to bash Microsoft as an evil empire we tend to overlook some little-known stories of Microsoft folks going "the second mile" to accommodate deficiencies of third-party software and their buggy behavior. If you feel nostalgic about the ol' DOS times, or a low-level geek still lives in you Raymond Chen's blog is an outstanding read.

In one of his latest posts, Sometimes the bug isn't apparent until late in the game, he shares a story of them chasing a bug in a computer game which occurred only on higher levels after hours of playing only because of... a lowercase letter with a descender that appeared in a mission name!

A commenter of this blog post, Tony Cox, says:

"So, instead of having dissatisfied customers, we (the games studios) just detect known bad driver versions, and work around the bugs. It doesn't really make me feel very good, but it keeps our customers happy."

Apparently, some game development companies don't give much crap about bugs in their games because their shelf life-cycle is very short (3-6 months) so they don't bother.

On another occasion, in his post Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter Raymond Chen wrote:

During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.

The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.

That's interesting... I believe I read about an old bug in Sims a while ago which Microsoft had to write a workaround for, but I can't find the link at the moment.

I remember reading a MS developer talking about the run-up to the release of Windows 95, where he spent a lot of time coding around a bug in Sim City 2000. I think the game did something it wasn't really meant to do (address some memory where it shouldn't), and he had to spend ages coding around it so that it wouldn't break Microsoft's shiny new OS.

It made me appreciate a little more the issues that developers go through just to make software work.