“I’d like to hear about the craziest bugs game creators have ever encountered.” A recent X post by Japanese indie developer Kenpi Beniimo prompted numerous quotes and reactions from game devs and fans alike sharing stories of things going terribly (or hilariously) wrong during game production.
On our website, we’ve covered many of these kinds of bugs so far, ranging from creepy game-breaking ones to absolutely ridiculous ones that make your butt specs crazy overpowered, and in this article, we’ll be topping it off with some more developer horror stories across the industry, including anecdotes from both indie and major devs.
This is a story I heard from somebody else, but once they mistakenly used a photo of their (38-year-old) team leader, originally meant to end up in the company’s newsletter, for the sparkle effect that appears when you obtain a rare item. And then the debug team reported that ‘every time we get items, a bunch of random old guys appear on screen.’ Hearing that made me laugh my ass off.
While some people in the comments say that the incident may be too funny to be true (as it’s not very likely that the people working on the in-game effects are also the ones handling the company newsletter), there are real life examples of similar bugs actually happening. For example, Outer Wilds’ developers mistakenly had the face of the game’s producer appearing on a spaceship.
Video game scenario writer Masahide Kito, who most notably worked on the Ace Combat series, also shared his personal pick for the most terrible bug he’s ever encountered.
This was during the time I was developing arcade games. After the arcade machines were deployed, arcades started reporting bugs to us, and the whole dev team turned pale with fear. However, we couldn’t reproduce the bug in development. Looking into the issue, we realized that all of the arcades making bug reports were located in western Japan… The bugs were caused by the 60 Hz power supply frequency. We immediately fixed it via a software update.
The voltage used throughout Japan is uniformly 100V, but the frequencies are different in the eastern and western parts of the country. Eastern Japan uses a 50 Hz frequency, while western Japan uses a 60 Hz frequency. And despite it only being a slight difference in frequency, it seems to have been enough for bugs to occur all across western Japan.
On a related note, mobile game developer and artist Itau shared an anecdote from when they were working on making games for arcades – a bug which caught the development team rather unprepared.
There was an arcade game bug which would make the game unplayable after the cumulative number of plays reached 65,536. The issue started appearing in arcades in Tokyo, and the programmers had to go deliver the patched ROMs to all of the arcades. When I came to work, it was total chaos. My colleague told me “If it’s somewhere far away, just mailing the ROMs will do, but the arcades in Osaka are probably going to go out of order today or tomorrow” and set off for Osaka.
Geekdrums, a game developer and composer who most notably worked on the Pokémon Legends series, talked about a frustrating bug which delayed all of the in-game sound effects by exactly 15 minutes – likely caused by a broken buffer length variable.
There was a bug that made all the sounds play 15 minutes late.
I was told, “the sound completely disappeared, but when I looked into it, nothing seemed out of place. So I was like “I don’t get it,” and I sat back to sulk while the build was still running. And 15 minutes later, all of the sounds started playing. Even the sounds triggered by controls I input 15 minutes ago. I screamed “Huuuh?” at the office.
Takashi Tokita, developer at Square Enix, shared one rather creepy bug he encountered back when he was working on Final Fantasy 7.
“When I was doing work on my PC during FF7’s development, suddenly the Jenova cutscene started playing on the PS dev kit’s monitor, and I felt like I was about to get a heart attack.”
As confirmed by Tokita, the scene he was referring to was the Nibelheim flashback scene, in which Sephiroth uncovers Jenova. The Jenova scenes in Final Fantasy 7 contain a healthy dose of nightmare fuel and are pretty much engraved in the minds of some of the children playing the game at the time. However, it seems like that wasn’t just an example of “things that creeped you out during childhood but are actually not that scary once you become an adult” – because the scenes were sending shivers down developers’ spines even as the game was being made.
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