The urban legend about a mythical video game that continues to circulate 35 years later

A legendary game, ‘Wing Commander’ contained a programming bulk error at a time when correcting a video game was more complex than now, in the same way as the testing processes They were less detailed and prolonged than the current ones. An error message that the ingenuity of a programmer made a brief congratulation to the player. That is what they have been telling us so far … but it wasn’t entirely true.

Problems in the galaxy. The year is 1990. ‘Wing Commander’, the legendary saga of space flight simulators starts with a Initial Delivery on PC (MS-DOS), whose success would give rise to a franchise that would reach the most powerful microororders and consoles of the time, as a friend CD32, Sega Mega-CD and SNES. In the saga, the Terrestrial Confederation faces a militarized feline breed called Killrathi in the Vega sector. However, shortly before launch in September, Origin Systems developers realized that A fateful mistake hung the game In his final bars.

Capital error. What happened was that they found An error message Produced by the memory manager Emm386, which frozen the game. As they needed to send the game to production, one of the programmers, Ken Demarest, directly edited the error message to show the message “Thank you for playing Wing Commander” instead instead of the technical description of the error. A real required required just in time … and that, in reality, never happened.

Urban legends. The truth is that this ingenious solution for the error was not published in the final edition: the team managed to correct the error in time, according to Demarest On the Wing Commander Commer Information Centerin its section dedicated to denying urban legends around the franchise. As they say, Demarest was also head of programming in ‘Last VII’, and this game contained a similar closing message (“Thank you for playing ultima VII”). Therefore, the anecdote could have been incorrectly confused or attributed between both titles, further feeding the myth.

Functional fudge. Over the years, the false anecdote (of which even There are captures) It became popular so much that this solution was used as an example of a “functional fudge”: a quick but little orthodox solution for the problem. By extension, some critics of Chris Roberts, creator of ‘Wing Commander’ and currently in the ambitious’Star Citizen‘, they have used urban legend to argue that the technical quality of their products has always been questionable. Finally, everything was one of the many urban legends that circulate in the industry.

It is counted, it is rumored. The absence of a serious and established press in the first decades of the industry made the video games of the eighties, ninety and even beyond (such as ‘Wing Cmmander’) into hotbeds of rumors and half lies. Since the time of legendary ‘Polybius‘, a mental control device through recreational machines, to the suicide melody of Lavander town in’ Pokémon Red/Blue ‘, authentic Material for nightmares Creepypastathrough the non-existence of A game that erased itself‘Kill Switch’, video games have always had urban legends commented on dark Internet forums and in the cartridge and discs exchange corrillos.

The ‘Wing Commander’, as we have seen, has already been officially denied, but it is clear that no one ever kills a good story.

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