I’ve been orbiting the game development space for over three decades at this point, so I have a lot of cool stories and weird artifacts from the past.
For example, I was emptying out a box this morning in preparation for the shredder and came across some interesting relics… First up is the complete design doc for Activision’s “Call to Power 2” – a game I did QA on:
For those who have never seen an old-school design doc – they tended to be immense…
This contains every asset ID, every variable, every internal gameplay rule and the reasoning behind them, and even wireframes of the user interface.
We used to get these all the time to build test plans from.
One other relic from the pile would be this:
Back in the old days, before online-everything and digital-distribution, games came on physical media. And said physical media didn’t have things like online updates and service patches – you had one chance to get it right before the cartridge / floppy / CD / DVD went into the box and took up paid shelf space at your local EB Games…
Because of this QA was a pretty big deal, and accordingly the major console makers like Sony had a pretty rigorous testing regimen that games had to go through to be certified for that console – and my company was one of the bigger third party QA houses in the space.
This meant that we spent a lot of time working with fancy development or test hardware and encrypted software images to do our job.
Here are a few more relics of the past:
The upper left is an XBOX Testkit (green) update from 2007, and the other two are fabled universal key discs for Sierra and Disc Makers SecuROM DRM.
Everyone will tell you there were no universal keys for SecuROM – those of us in the know will simply nod along… But I had these key discs for pretty much anyone who used SecuROM back in the day.
The last artifact for today are these:
When doing testing for the Gamecube, the client would upload an encrypted build to our secure FTP server, then we would decrypt the build and burn it to special Gamecube media via a special Gamecube media burner. The above is that special Gamecube media.
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