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“Okay, but what if this bug was pretty weird and noticeable?”

“Well there’s another category of bugs that don’t get fixed, which is the ones that only ever happen once, and those are marked NR, No Repro.”

“Wouldn’t you fix it anyway, just in case?” I asked. Before answering, Matt gestured me to roll my chair a little closer.

“So I came up through playtest, so… here’s how it looks from that perspective. The fate of many, many bugs runs as follows: a playtester spots it once or twice, logs it in the database with a tentative classification—art, programming, design, or unknown. The report includes instructions on how to find the bug and make it happen again, but some bugs don’t happen reliably. Sometimes they come and go for whatever reason—there’s a little mystery there. But it goes to the bug meeting, where the lead for that area assigns it to a team member, who may or may not have caused it. Doesn’t matter.

“So now the team member has to fix the bug, and they’re cranky because it’s a brand-new bug and they haven’t budgeted time for it and they’re going to be late for something else. So first thing they do is run the game and see if it reproduces. If it doesn’t happen on the first or second try, some guys will slap a No Repro on it, kick it back to playtest, and go on to their next bug.”

“Do they think you’re making it up?”

“You have no idea the contempt people hold toward playtest. You see the logic—everyone else’s job is to get the list of active bugs to zero, except us, whose job is add bugs to the list. So people just kick bugs back all the time. And some of them are pretty hard to verify, and you’ve got to figure out that the bug happens only if the game tries to autosave while you’re actively wielding a plus-three glass dagger and there are exactly four lizard men within three hexes. And then walk into a meeting and do it with—I’m not going to name names, but they’re literally standing over you, staking their reputations on the idea
that this bug absolutely cannot happen, that it is literally technologically impossible.”

“So I guess you’re not in play test anymore.”

“Not for this one, no. I guess that’s the grand prize.”

There was nothing going on the rest of the day except other designers speculating about what more Darren had planned. I found a database showing records of bugs from previous projects, all closed and confirmed before shipping, but the records were there. I sorted for the ones that weren’t active, strictly speaking, but neither had they been fixed. The DNFs.

I searched around a little in the No Repro pile. It turned out there was no one bug exactly like the one I’d seen, but a few that might have been similar: “King Aerion dead when should be unkillable, WTF”; “Level three, dragon already dead when I arrived”; “Goblin children massacred? Why???” None of them repeated, and they could have been part of the same underlying bug or three entirely separate bugs.

They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.

They usually didn’t, because the game didn’t bother to simulate anything too far from the player in any detail—it would slow everything down too far. But maybe the game was having trouble deciding what not to simulate. Each one was marked No Repro, so maybe it just never happened again.

I noticed that most of these bugs belonged to the same person, LMcknhpt. I sent Lisa a quick e-mail with the subject line “RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112.”

The reply came a few minutes later.

That “probably in data” was an ever-so-slightly dickish sign-off. What she meant to say was that the code was working fine, so it must be the designer who screwed up—he just forgot to flag the king as unkillable, or he put a rock in the wrong place, or routed a goblin’s patrol path through a lit torch.

I wrote back, “I triple-checked the data. Want to see?” but she didn’t respond at all, except that five minutes later, the bug database had sent me three separate automated messages.

RoGVI bug 2917 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt

RoGVI bug 40389 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt

RoGVI bug 51112 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt

Where was the bug? How did I even start thinking about fixing something like this? A bug could be in either of two elements of the game, data or code, or it could be in both.

Something horrible was lurking in memory or code or whatever forsaken in-between region of space it lived in, and it was messing with our game. But bugs don’t happen without somebody making them, by stupidity or negligence. All I had to do was trace it back to where it lived. The first step, as everyone knew, was to find the version where it first occurred—the crucial change, an added feature or an attempt to fix some other problem, which had been copied from version to version ever since. So far I hadn’t even found a version where it didn’t occur, but there must be one. I’d just have to go back far enough.

I
slept late the next morning, sat for a half hour over cereal and coffee before wandering over to work, shirt untucked, past midday traffic, people with regular jobs already heading to lunch. No one minded. I lost myself in reading through old computer game manuals, role-playing game modules, design documents, even the italicized flavor text on game cards (
CORRELLEAN REMNANT
(5/4) / Submarine movement
/ The regiment fought on as the waters rose; they never stopped
).

Black Arts made role-playing games, strategy games, first-person shooters, even a golf game. But if there was one constant in the Black Arts games, it was the Four Heroes. They were—I think—based on the ones in
Gauntlet,
but you couldn’t say for sure because they were the same four heroes you found in almost any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere:

(1) A muscular guy with a sword

(2) A bearded guy in a robe

(3) A skinny guy with a knife

(4) A sexy lady

Whether you thought of them as Jungian archetypes or a set of complementary game mechanics, they’d been around almost since the beginning. Black Arts mixed and matched them depending on the plot
of a given game, but they kept the names the same. It was part of the brand, and people cared a surprising amount about them.

The history of Endoria was divided into three ages, which had in common the fact that the world of Endoria was completely fucked.

Of the First Age comparatively little is known, other than it was an age of near-divine beings, heroes, Dreadwargs, and tragedy. Games were never set directly in the First Age; it was just used to explain strange objects like the Hyperborean Crown and the Brass Head, which emanated from the gods and wizard kings of this era. A creeping darkness overwhelmed the Great Powers, and the world descended into warring kingdoms.

The Second Age: That was when the four central heroes made their first appearance: Brennan the warrior, Lorac the wizard, Prendar the thief, and Leira the princess. I had no idea what happened other than that it ended with a gigantic war involving practically everybody.

The Third Age, where
Realms
games are mostly set, was the era of rebuilding, the long struggle for the restoration of the world.

Third Age Endoria was a dangerous place; it wasn’t noble, it wasn’t mystical, and it wasn’t especially dignified. Dwarves lied; elves slit throats. The land was a chaotic mess of factions and cultures and species. Different languages split the world, Coronishes and Zeldunics at each other’s throats. Rival deities and pantheons played games with the world, spawning curious groups like the Antic Brotherhood, which served the chaos daemon, Quareen, and the Nephros Concordance, with its vast and mysterious wealth. Different schools of wizardry competed for supremacy: Horn Adepts were masters of illusion; Summoners and Divinomancers were like cosmic hustlers, making deals with unseen entities, playing powerful forces against each other, always trying to come out ahead. Pyrists and Infomantics clung to their disciplines like addicts; Necromancers, like engineers of a rotting eldritch calculus.
The world was dirty, as if in that tournament all the shiny, high-fantasy idealism had been hacked to pieces and ground into the mud of the Second Age.

The Four Heroes’ lives continued, through sequel after sequel. There was no fictional justification for their extended life spans—did they have identical descendants, or did they just live a long time, as people in the Old Testament did? No one explained. Prendar was half elf and half human, and Lorac was a wizard, so they might plausibly have extended life spans, but even this was pushing it. (This was to say nothing of their twentieth-century and far-future analogues, for which no rational explanation suggested itself.
Realms
had a ludic dream logic of its own.) The Four Heroes were more like actors in a repertory company than stable characters. Nearly every story needed to fill one or more of their roles, “fighter” or “wizard” or “thief” or, well, “generic female person,” and they always showed up and did their bit. Sometimes they were a little older or younger than they were in previous games.

Were the characters supposed to remember everything that happened to them? If I asked one of them, would it know? It didn’t seem like it—most of the time they seemed paper-thin, just empty things you steered around the world to get what you wanted. No way to ask them, and no point to doing so. They weren’t even people; they were half people, you and not you, or the half of you that was in the world.

The Heroes met, adventured together, betrayed one another, reconciled, and even married (choice of Leira and Brennan or Leira and Prendar; I went with the latter). Lorac recovered the Staff of Wizardry and became the evil Dark Lorac for a while. Leira and Prendar ended up leading an army against the other two, and even had a son.

The Lich King rose, the last Elven Firstcomer died, and her knowledge was lost forever.

And of course they explored about a thousand dungeons and had a thousand adventures. There was the urban conspiracy one. The icy
northern one that explained the elven tribes, the one about the swamplands, the one about the dwarven empires, the weird plane-traveling one, the forestlands, the drowned ruins one, the vampire one.

The Heroes saved the world and acquired vast riches, as one does, but when next we would meet them they were always back to square one, broke and first-level. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

After that… things got weird. If you paged through enough rule supplements and unofficial spin-offs you could find rules for almost anything—rules in case characters dimension-traveled into the Old West or postapocalyptic Earth, for example.

The Soul Gem turned the time line back on itself, stretching and looping it forever. The Heroes even turned up in the First Age from time to time. Rumor had them fighting in the final siege of Chorn, or seeking out Adric from his wandering years and putting him on the path homeward. People said Leira’s child was Adric’s and was the true heir to the crown before he fell. Or that one day the far-future heroes Pren-Dahr, Ley-R4, Loraq, and Brendan Blackstar would travel back in time to save the Third Age, or perhaps doom it, whatever that means—people are always dooming things in fantasy. The Third Age kind of doomed everything anyway.

As I thought of it, the First Age was like childhood, years of long-ago upheaval, trauma, and unbearable longing, during which our characters were formed.

The Second Age was high school. Battle lines were drawn, alliances hardened into place, strategies tested, scars acquired. The crimes committed in this Age would fester for millennia.

And the Third Age was everything after, when we went our separate ways and order was restored but nothing quite forgiven or forgotten. There was also a Fourth Age no one much bothered with, which marked the retreat of magic into mere legend and superstition and the ascendancy of humankind—i.e., the time when we grew up and got boring and our hearts, generally speaking, died.

I gathered there was a certain amount of armchair quarterbacking in the lower ranks of Black Arts, about how we were a little too loyal to the
Realms of Gold
thing. Don still believed the franchise had legs, that with the right game behind it,
RoG
could be as big as
Final Fantasy
or
Warcraft,
with bestselling tie-in novels, conventions, maybe a movie. But for now it was just another medieval pastiche, a sub-Narnian, off-brand Middle-earth, waiting to be a forgotten part of somebody’s adolescence, all the knights and ladies and dragon-elves left behind along with high school detention and Piers Anthony novels.

On the other hand, there were, out there, players who genuinely cared about the third Correllean dynasty, who read the cheaply ghostwritten tie-in novels, who were emotionally invested in the war against the House of Aerion, and who considered the death of Prince Vellan Brightsword in the Battle of Arn to be an event that genuinely diminished the amount of goodness and light in the world.

But it wasn’t as if Black Arts suffered from an exaggerated reverence for its own intellectual property. Maybe at first, but all the high-fantasy gravitas in the world wouldn’t survive the sight of Lorac hiking up his robes to nail a tricky hardflip-to-manual transition in
Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich.