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Old 08-09-2005, 11:48 PM   #45 (permalink)
Strelich
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Location: Flushing, MI
This whole thing reminds me of two things that happened years ago, though neither hit the mainstream media.

I remember years ago a hubbub in the sim B-17 Flying Fortress 2, when a kid wandered through the huge volume files which contained all the graphical and sound assets for the game and ran across a bunch of porn links. Apparently, when they compiled the volume files, the empty space between individual files ended up being assorted bits of data from his hard drive, which included his IE history files. A designer seemed to like the porn, suffice it to say. I must admit it was back in 2001, so I can't remember how far the kid's mother got with her protest outside of Hasbro Interactive, but at least in the computer world, it caused a hubbub. The game's first (and only) patch 'blanked out' the blank areas in those volume files, and that was that.

Around the same time, there was a programmer in a published game who was released after people discovered he seemed to use racial epithets or somesuch as variable names and commented lines of code. Admittedly, I'd like to have remembered the game's name rather than report this second-hand without evidence, but as they say, the internet is a big place, and I can't remember where to look to refind stuff I read years ago.

In both examples, they solely depended on the wanderings of people whose curiosity revealed things that would never be seen otherwise. If anything, I'd blame the media and overreactive elements (though in both cases, to my knowledge they never reached the mainstream media) in stirring things up. If anything, it says something about curiosity, just as in this current example.

It's the first step in game modification to look at the file structure of games and see what can be modified and how, but if anything time and boredom has shown that sometimes developers have pretty funny/strange senses of humor when their code is dissected.
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Monty this seems strange to me.
The movies had that movie thing,
but nonsense has a welcome ring
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