hatred out of the room when it flared up, or at least to soldier on through the tension until it dissipated.
Insufficiently detailed bugs were ruthlessly kicked back to Quality Assurance. At least a quarter of the time, Don would get only halfway through reading a bug and someone would angrily shout, “Fixed! As of the lunchtime bug.” Or they’d shout, “Dupe!” for “duplicate,” a bug that had had the same root cause as another open bug but manifested in a different context. After weeks, five persistent crashes in five different areas were proved to be the same bug after one tester finally noticed they all took place when the player was carrying one of every type of currency while attempting to switch between primary and secondary weapons within thirty meters of a horse, pony, donkey, or unicorn.
Don congratulated people for particularly clever fixes, or, failing that, for committing particularly colorful errors. The best of these went into a permanent hall-of-fame list kept in red dry-erase on a superfluous whiteboard. Gallows humor, but hilarious.
July 14: “Texture-mapping error makes Prendar’s pants the same color as his skin ergo appears to be wearing no pants.” 100% repro for that build. “REPEAT PRENDAR HAS NO PANTS.”
July 18: The thermomantic spell Ice Storm had a bug in which it tried to reference the Giant Hailstone object and instead found the Pony object, which resulted in the spell Pony Storm, in which the caster fires a spray of between six and eight ponies at the target. Fixed, although we kept it open as long as we possibly could.
Lisa hid a secret spell in the necromantic arsenal. By combining elements of Poison Fog and a reversed Cure Disease, the caster could initiate a plague that could potentially depopulate the world. Not a bug, we decided, and hid the formula deep in the library of an abandoned castle half consumed by ocean.
Most bugs were more prosaic. “Fell through world (x = 65.7, y = 3809.1).” This one was a constant for months. No one ever stopped falling through the ground. I’d find it, too, constantly—one minute the world is a solid thing, the next you’re watching it disappear into the distance above you while you fall through white space, never to return. For an instant you’d see nearly a whole kingdom above you, then you’d splatter against the ultimate lower elevation limit of the world and the sad truth that all of Endoria lives inside a colorless rectangular box.
I walked by a machine that was doing nothing but showing split-second glimpses of Realms levels. It would appear, look around for a second, then vanish and appear somewhere else. I watched it for a while. Forest… dungeon… mountain… too fast to follow. Lisa had written a script to render a single frame of the game, teleport, and render another frame, logging everything that happened until the game crashed. Longest duration so far, sixty-one minutes.
Endoria was being atomized until it was hard to think of it as a place at all—the long, haunted walk north after the mountain pass, which seemed like an endless, grueling rite of passage in the extended playthroughs, seemed like an obvious trick when you knew you could teleport from one end to another in an instant. There was no ten-league stretch of forest, it reminded you; there was just a set of numbers. It was just data. In the same way, playing hide-and-seek with the marauders who have sailed upriver, it could take hours, days, to find your way through to the Endorian coast, where at last you reach the Lonely Tower and find the eerie Plutonian Dagger still gripped in the dead, unfeeling hand of the wielder who came before you. But the dagger was just a check box on a spreadsheet you could pull up in the editor. A click of a button and it’s yours.
It started to feel like a miracle every time you took a step and found solid ground, or every time anything in Endoria behaved like the coherent reality I once imagined it to be. The secret truth was that the thing we had created had a gossamer delicacy, and any given piece of it had a hundred options as to how to behave in any given situation. It would only pick the correct one if half a dozen different systems coordinated exactly correctly, systems typically maintained by people sitting in different parts of the building who might or might not be speaking to one another on a given