I love when people dig down to get to the bottom of stories like this.
There are quite a few of these stories that are false, actually.
The infamous “Donkey Kong 64 had a bug that nobody knew how to fix, but the Expansion Pack randomly fixed it, so last minute they decided to ship the game with the pack” was also debunked by one of the main developers. Apparently the game did have a killer bug near final production, which required some crazy last minute work to fix, but nothing related to the Expansion Pack and they were designing it with the Pack from the very beginning, as Nintendo wanted a title to show it off.
Nuclear Gandhi is another such story
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The version I’ve always heard isn’t that the expansion pack “randomly fixed it”, but rather that the issue was a memory leak that would cause the game to run out of RAM and crash after a couple hours. The extra memory of the expansion pack would just delay the crash for an additional 6-7 hours. I’m curious how true this is actually is now, as it seems like it would be easy enough to test.
And there it is! The best possible outcome: the story was true–it’s something that was done during the game’s development–but it was also fixed before the game actually shipped
Great share. Always kinda feel like a sucker for believing these kinds of stories at first sight.
At least the Morrowind on Xbox version of this is real (I think?)
https://kotaku.com/morrowind-completely-rebooted-your-xbox-during-some-loa-1845158550
I’m like 98% sure this happened with MOO2. I have it as a core memory of playing that game and was really disappointed that the newer bundled dosbox version doesn’t do that. I have the disk from back in the day still now all I need is a windows 95/98, anyone able to point me to a resource to virtual install them on Windows 10 and I’ll see what I can find out
