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The role of a debugger is an important one in any kind of games development. These are the people who play through the games as they are being developed, pointing out any moment in which it goes wrong and crashes or lets the player do something that they shouldn’t normally be able to. In years gone by, the debuggers had to record their gameplay sessions on tapes to catch any mistakes, before turning them into the development team who would then analyse and recode.
Some of these very tapes have now been acquired by the YouTube channel Hard4Games, who has tidied up the footage and put together a video on the findings therein.
The video covers bug tests for the N64, Game Boy, GameCube and Game Boy Advance, with footage showing early builds of popular titles across all of the consoles including Super Smash Bros. Melee, Pikmin, GoldenEye, Pilotwings 64, Mario Kart Super Circuit and many more. Obviously, the footage focuses on the glitches alone, so if you wanted to get an idea of how these games were initially intended to run, then you won’t find it here.
If, on the flip side, you wanted to see footage of James Bond uncontrollably moonwalking his way off of an aircraft carrier into the sky, or see the inside of Mario’s head in Pilotwings, then this is definitely the video for you.
Aside from some serious nostalgia, it is interesting to see how diligent a process bug testing is. Nobody likes succumbing to a game-crashing glitch, but sniffing those slippery customers out is precisely the task of these testers.
Hard4Games has teased that there is also a tape dedicated solely to the PAL release of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, but says that it will be saving the contents for another video in the future. If there’s one thing that could make that moon even scarier, it would be seeing the inside of its ever-staring head.
What is your biggest glitch memory? Let us know in the comments!
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