My last job, I did a bunch of QA work for an absolutely horrible game. It was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Grand Theft Auto. There were a bunch of other games trying to copy that formula, so to make their stand out, the developers looked at what made the GTA series so succesful, and with piercing insight, they managed to strip away all of the useless froth that was dragging that game franchise down, and focus on what made it really popular. They got rid of fripperies like open-ended gaming, immersive enviroments, varied mission structure, and clever writing, and put all their attention into expanding the real draw of the game: killing as many uniformed police officers as humanly possible.
Okay, that’s wasn’t quite the motivation, but it sure felt like it. See, they wanted to have a gritty “urban” type game, but they weren’t competent enough to do more than a half-assed third person shooter, with the player in the role of a gangbanger. And since clever gameplay, story telling, or even moderatly advanced AI, was completely beyond them, what they made was a game where an endless horde of cops come running straight at you, firing their guns, until you shoot them.
But that wasn’t the really stupid part. The really stupid part was that the developers were so lazy, they couldn’t be bothered with actually creating any art for the game. If they wanted a level in a supermarket, instead of paying an artist to draw a library of textures to create the store shelves, they sent a guy out to a real supermarket to take pictures of the store shelves, which were scanned into the game. Which meant that if you went into the store level in the game, the shelves were covered with easily identifiable trademarked brands. Which in theory would get us sued, although that wasn’t really a concern, because Sony and MicroSoft would never have given us permission to publish a game for their hardware with so many glaring IP violations in the game. The problem was, getting these guys to change anything was like pulling teeth, and they could never get it through their skulls that, if we told them that they had to get rid of all the trademark images in one part of the game, then we were probably going to make the same requests for all the trademarked images in every other part of the game. But they never took the hint, continuing to add new copyright infringements in every new build, even as they were removing the old copyright infringements we’d already flagged. And they kept trying to “game” it by skirting as close as they could to infringement without going over the line. Except that they were idiots, so every attempt to get as close to the line as possible ended up way the hell over on the other side of it.
Examples include a Coca-Cola machine, clearly labeled as such. When told they had to remove the Coca-Cola name from the machine, they sent back a build where the machine just said, “Cola.” In that distincting, swoopy red-and-white font that is instantly recognizable to almost anyone, anywhere in the world, as being the Coca-Cola trademark.
One level included a picture, for no discernable reason, of Yoda holding a sign reading, “Will levitate X-Wing for weed.”
The level where your gangsta character goes back to his tenement apartment allows you to break into a number of other apartments in the area.* All of these apartments (which are inhabited by black people) are filled with 40 oz. bottles and empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets.
But the best (meaning, of course, worst) bug was the Console Bug. They had a level set in a mall, and the mall had a videogame store in it. In the store was one of those kiosks where they have a console set up so that customers can try out new games. And in the kiosk was a Playstation 2. Looked just like one, too, because as usual, they had simply take a picture of one and scanned it into the game. Now, Sony has this list of requirements that a game has to adhere to in order to be released as a PS2 game. Most of them are technical things, but one of the requirements is that you can’t have any actual Sony products in the game itself, unless you’ve properly licensed them. So you can’t show a PS2 in an actual PS2 game. Plus, we were also going to release the game for the XBox, and if Sony doesn’t want you to have a PS2 in their games, you can imagine how MicroSoft feels about it! The issue was bugged, and a few weeks later, it came back fixed. Their fix? They took the name, “PlayStation 2” off the side of the console.
Clearly, this wasn’t sufficient. We sent the bug back, insisting that the entire console had to be removed, or replaced with original art. A few weeks later, we get the second fix. They changed the PS2’s dimensions, so that it was square instead of rectangular. Except, since they used photographed textures to create it, it’s still pretty clearly a PS2. We send the bug back, again, insisting that they remove the console, or change it so that it’s not recognizable as a real game console. Their third fix? They write on the console, in the same blue-purple font that Sony uses to label their PS2s, “GamePube.” That’s right, not only have they not fixed the art, they’ve now dragged Nintendo into the mess. We finally got it fixed when the lead suggested they make it look like someone broke into the kiosk and stole whatever was inside, which would look more “ghetto.” That suggestion they took to heart, and the console was finally removed. About four months after it had first been logged as a bug.
We ended up having to open up a seperate database just to keep track of the copyright and trademark violations. The joke around the office was that we were going to release it as “Grand Theft Intellectual Property.” The other joke (because the game was so horribly buggy) was that we would just release whatever broke-ass version of the game that was currently in test, bundle it with a copy of the bug database we used, and call it, “Sim Game Tester.” We ended up releasing it as 25 to Life. As I recall, we actually turned a profit on it, thanks to the Jack Thompson-fueled media hype over our “cop killer sim.” Thanks, Jack! Without you, the game might have been one of the biggest flops in the company’s history!
[sub]*You don’t actually burglarize them, or anything interesting or creative like that. The incredibly straight forward, “Start and point A and walk to point B” level path included going through a few other people’s apartments. Since your character lives in the apartment complex, and is trying to get back to his own apartment, one has to wonder if breaking and entering is simply a requisite part of his daily commute home. How else does he get around the 12 foot security fence inexplicably walling off three of the apartment buildings in the complex?[/sub]
