"How Windows 11 BROKE Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas"

[ROllerozxa]

Video:

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These kinds of minor technical oversights in major games, and the bugs that may not be discovered or even show up until many years later, are always really interesting to hear about. It makes you think of the huge effort put in by the development team to make the game come together and eventually get released, but the mistakes that are left behind show that they are still humans who worked on the game.

For an example of another flaw in a game that I heard about from this video (originally based on this blog post), and think is really interesting: The random number generator in New Super Mario Bros (the DS game) has a flaw that makes it so that if you end up at 1144735523 as the state (seed) it will keep rolling that number and feed it back to the RNG as the new state. Someone on the NSMB development team copied a textbook standard LCG random function and then bitshifted down the generated 64-bit integer to return the upper 32 bits (the return value is an unsigned 32-bit integer), but ended up completely breaking the algorithm in the process.

Statistically unlikely to happen, but if it does then all random behaviour becomes extremely predictable. And it has potentially happened in the wild for at least someone playing the game, even though they likely did not notice it. At least with consoles, the runtime environment is predictable (short of inconsistencies that occur when people eventually get it running in an emulator) and you don't have some OS update two decades later making the statistically unlikely chance a guranteed chance of it occurring, through some minor technical change.