{"id":16648,"date":"2022-11-11T20:06:50","date_gmt":"2022-11-11T11:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/?p=16648"},"modified":"2022-11-11T20:06:51","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T11:06:51","slug":"20221111-16648","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/news\/20221111-16648\/","title":{"rendered":"Metroid Prime devs once had to cool a GameCube in a freezer to test a hardware bug"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><br><br>Former Retro Studios member Zoid Kirsch has been looking back on his memories from the development of <em><strong>Metroid Prime<\/strong><\/em> and is sharing a number of stories on social media. One of the stories that is drawing a lot of attention is about the time they had to put a GameCube dev kit in a freezer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Metroid Prime<\/em> is a first-person action-adventure game for the Nintendo GameCube that was first released in North America in 2002. It was developed by Retro Studios, now a subsidiary of Nintendo, and Kirsch worked on the title as a senior engineer. For the freezer story mentioned above, Kirsch enlisted help from his friend and coworker at the time, technical lead engineer Jack Mathews, to tweet about it in detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Metroid Prime Dev Story #7: Here&#39;s a bonus story from my friend Jack Mathews, Technical Lead on Metroid Prime. He explains why we had to put a GameCube the freezer to test a hardware bug. Thanks Jack! <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/UHFc9uGqBO\">https:\/\/t.co\/UHFc9uGqBO<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Zoid Kirsch (@ZoidCTF) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ZoidCTF\/status\/1590750634793668610?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 10, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Mathews, shortly after they had released <em>Metroid Prime<\/em>, Nintendo told them that they had shipped a number of GameCube consoles that were equipped with a \u201cbad batch\u201d of CPUs. Apparently, <em>Metroid Prime<\/em> was the only game that had issues on these CPUs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Generally speaking, for goods that are manufactured with semi-conductor devices, there will be a number that do not meet the specified performance depending on the manufacturing yield rate. We don\u2019t know the exact details surrounding GameCube production at the time, but it seems that some of the consoles that were considered to be of acceptable quality actually had CPUs that slightly underperformed. <em>Metroid Prime<\/em> appears to be the only game that encountered negative effects while running on this CPU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the team looked at videos of the problem, they saw that all animated objects in the game were freaking out and moving in unintentional ways. The problem was occurring because some of the game\u2019s code was actually running too fast for these underperforming CPUs to handle. In order to fix it, they needed to adjust the code and slow it down for these CPUs. However, this was not a simple task: if they slowed it down too much, it would have a negative effect on the game\u2019s framerate, but if they didn\u2019t slow it down enough, it would glitch. This meant that Retro Studios had to test it over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To make matters worse, Nintendo only had one dev kit with the CPU in question, and for some reason the problem could only be replicated when this dev kit was cold\u2014freezer cold. So Mathews and the team literally put the dev kit into the break room freezer, and after it was cooled, ran it to the TV where they could test it for around 15 minutes before they had to cool it again. The team was frantically loading save games as fast as possible to test as many places as they could, then trying new code, and doing it all over again. Mathews said that it was an experience that he\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">We literally were running the kit from the break room freezer to the TV, and loading save games as fast as possible to as many places as possible in 15 minutes, then trying new code, re-freezing, and back. I&#39;ll never forget it. 5\/7<\/p>&mdash; Jack Mathews (@jack_mathews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jack_mathews\/status\/1590748830290841601?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 10, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In the end, they were able to solve the problem, but back then, games were not able to be fixed via online patches like they are today. So what actually happened was that whenever someone contacted support about the problem, Nintendo would send them a new game disc that included the updated code.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Metroid Prime<\/em> will soon celebrate the 20th anniversary of its North American release on November 18, and Kirsch is sharing various dev stories in the lead up to the day as a way to commemorate it. He has revealed a number of other interesting anecdotes in addition to the freezer story, including the fact that doors sometimes open slowly because the game is making the player wait as it loads the next room, the reason why <em>Metroid Prime<\/em> save files could be so small, and the technical reasons behind placing elevators between worlds. Fans of the game or anyone interested in its development should definitely take a look at Kirsch\u2019s tweets to learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">On the day we went gold I took a magazine poster and got everyone\u2019s signature to commemorate that day. The poster is still on my wall today. You may notice no one signed on top of Samus&#8211;that\u2019s how much respect we had for the character. My signature is top center, it&#39;s my poster! <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5XQz0hfhkN\">pic.twitter.com\/5XQz0hfhkN<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Zoid Kirsch (@ZoidCTF) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ZoidCTF\/status\/1590493891903770624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 9, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><figcaption><br><br><br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:12px\"><em>Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the <a href=\"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/articles\/newsjp\/20221111-226292\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">original Japanese article<\/a> (original article&#8217;s publication date: 2022-11-11 15:17 JST)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Retro Studios member Zoid Kirsch has been looking back on his memories from the development of Metroid Prime and is sharing a number of stories on social media. One of the stories that is drawing a lot of attention is about the time they had to put a GameCube dev kit in a freezer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":16650,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-16648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-global-news"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Metroid Prime devs once had to cool a GameCube in a freezer to test a hardware bug - AUTOMATON WEST<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Former Retro Studios member Zoid Kirsch has been looking back on his memories from the development of Metroid Prime and is sharing a number of stories on social media. 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