I love when people dig down to get to the bottom of stories like this.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • AtomicPurple@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • leggettc18@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Nah it’s been confirmed that the expansion pack was used from the very beginning for the lighting engine (game does have pretty damn good looking lighting for its age, to be fair).