If you’ve ever played the 1995 action game The Terminator: Future Shock, you might’ve wondered why the heck some of the Terminators are able to move right through solid walls. Almost 30 years later, we know the answer: they were bugged and the designer figured it was more feasible to just make these superpowered robots canon by writing them into the manual than patching the game.
Ted Peterson, a veteran video game developer best-known for being one of the creators of the Elder Scrolls series, told PC Gamer during a roundtable discussion on RPGs that his first game shipped with a pretty serious collision bug that’s apparently still in the game to this day.
“We had a bug where Terminators would sometimes walk through walls,” he said. “There was some sort of collision issue going on and we had to write the manual before the game came out, and so I wrote in the manual – because I didn’t know if we had fixed this collision issue before it came out – ‘there are some reports from Skynet that Terminators have been known to phase through solid material, so be on the lookout for this.'”
Asked if the bugged Terminators were ever fixed, Peterson laughed and said “no, I believe they can still do that.” It’s worth nothing that a cursory Google search yields a bunch of results about Future Shock having collision issues not confined to Terminators.
As someone who writes about video games, many of which are endlessly live service, it’s bizarre to recall a time when video game updates and patches just weren’t a thing. In 1995 in most parts of the US, it was a coin toss as to whether households had PCs hooked up to the internet, and of course video game consoles at the time were entirely offline, so there would’ve been little incentive for developers to dig out the source code and remove bugs. That’s right, youngins, in my day there were no “day one patches” or “seasons” – you just had to live with the game you bought until a sequel came out.
Anywho, I absolutely love it when a video game secret is revealed after so many years, and the more time in-between, the better. A few months ago, we learned after 23 years that the cult classic horror game Alien Resurrection can be turned into a “boot disk” for playing burned PS1 games because one of its original developers snuck a cheat code past Sony.
Let’s get nostalgic with the best retro games ever.
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