The Sims have always had great bugs. From Slashdot Games:

Maxis has recently released an update for The Sims 2 (both CD and DVD versions)… Another nasty bug (fixed in this patch) that I’ve encountered is one where stranger Sims walk off the lot with a baby!

Check out Grand Text Auto for a longer list. There’s something about setting a game in a ‘real world’ with AIs walking around that just makes the bugs that much better. Which reminds me: I bought the Sims 2 DVD edition, which included “outtakes”. Does that just mean bugs?

Working in games for a while, you start to appreciate the really good bugs and the unintentional hilarity they bring. Thankfully, when you work in games as large and complex as MMOs, you’re guarunteed some good ones along the course of development. Even more thankfully, most of these will never see the light of day. Although perhaps there’s a market for making a world in which living in it feels like living in a Dali painting. Someone could write a good book of all of the most amusing bugs to happen in the development of various games, especially online ones.

Once while developing Meridian 59, I killed myself with an Earthquake spell. The game went through it’s standard death checks – “You killed someone! You’re a murderer now!” Immediately followed by: “You killed a murderer! Congratulations, have some fame and standing!”

Most of the best bugs occur in the early days of a project, while building new systems. I missed the best Shadowbane bugs, having gotten in on the party late. I’m told that, for one day in the early days, you could put a house on your head like a hat (which was highly amusing, as it turned and dipped as the character idled).

Proof of concepts are also prone to hilarity, since they are usually done as sort of a quick ‘draft’ and don’t have the error checking they would if the feature was approved and slated for production. Again on Shadowbane, the team was experimenting with the notion of player beheadings – with a ‘/behead’ command. It would pop the head on the ground next to the corpse. A couple of problems with that – the command didn’t check to see if you were dead before you were beheaded. You could in fact behead yourself. Your head, lying on the ground, would still turn if your body turned. I’m told that, for a day, work stopped as the great internal beheading wars commenced.

Getting demos together at the last second is always a source of bugs – and you just pray that one doesn’t emerge during a demo. In Shadowbane, someone giving a pitch to the press accidentally flung a full-sized castle off of a catapult, crushing another character with it. “That’s a bug”, said the pitchman. “That’s freakin’ cool!” responded the press guy.

I was working down the hall from the Ultima:Ascension team when one of the programmers accidentally managed to change every single animation mapping in the game. Translation: you’d wander around town to see dogs standing upright and guards flapping their arms like chickens. Work stopped that day.

As a veteran, the strange bugs are the ones you see repeated in different games for no explicable reason. I’ve worked on two games now where you could take the moon out of your sky and put it in your backpack. Another example: in both UO and Shadowbane, there was a day where the NPCs all just decided to wander south. In UO it happened over hours, but in Shadowbane, the monsters broke out in a full sprint, ran south until they hit the ocean, and drowned. The dev staff that still remembers it refers to it as the Great Pilgrimage.

Bugs are inevitable in game development – these things are just so complicated that unexpected interactions will happen. The above examples are all examples of things that didn’t make it to live – they got caught either internally or on a beta server. But oddly, these were bugs that offered moments of levity to development teams that desperately needed. Emergent behavior always amuses, and this is a strange sort of Emergent behavior at the meta level.

But thank god they didn’t make it to live.