Why do games get so much energy, and important stuff gets so little?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I am a little amazed to think about the effort some game modders make to reverse engineer a game. If this kind of effort had been expended on the human genome, we’d already have a cure for cancer:

But the full extent of what the modders had discovered was still unclear. “Our assumption at that time was that they were unused animations which were abandoned in the early development of the game,” says Wildenborg.

“There were, however, some references to these animations in the script files. As I was mainly focused on figuring out the scripts I decided to figure out what those references were and if there might be some abandoned code indicating how they might have been used. This particular section of code is complex so it took quite some effort and time to grasp what it did. As I dug deeper it became clear that the code that referenced the animation was not just some abandoned content, but that it was fully working, just configured to be inaccessible.

“Around March 2005 I felt certain this code could be fully functional if we were able to overrule the flag preventing it from executing. But we had no option to try it out on the PS2, so we would never know. That is, unless Rockstar left everything in the PC version due for release in June.”

Post external references

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    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee
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