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Gearbox Had A Hilarious Response To The Aliens: Colonial Marines Bug
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Last year a modder discovered a bug in the initialization file for Gearbox Software's Aliens: Colonial Marines. The bug was actually a typo in how the initialization for the AI tethers worked in the game. And since one of the words was misspelled... specifically "tether," it messed up the AI routines, forcing the xenomorphs in the game to behave a lot dumber than what was originally intended. Well, Gearbox Software has responded to the recent news about the typo and the company did so in a way that is nothing short of absolutely hilarious.
The response from Gearbox was posted to the company's official Twitter account shortly after the news spread about the AI fix coming by way of correcting a typo. The company joked that if you feel "teathered to your current" job that they have a job for you.
There's a link to the Gearbox website, where it's a job opening for a programming copy editor. So the job would be to look over game code for typos. Yes, a full engineering position to look over programming typos.
The responsibilities require reviewing all the code for typos and the desired skills and experience section requires enjoying "finding typos."
You can apply for the full time job, but you'll need to be a full-time engineer for the task.
The job obviously looks like a joke post, but it's in relation to the typo appearing in the ini file located in the game directory for Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Games have a ton of bugs and glitches, and oftentimes when the code is being compiled there will be checks in place to see if there are any syntax errors. Alternatively when you're working with the source code and an error pops up or a line begins to execute as an error it creates a loop, which will usually return an error in the debugger or during compiling.
The issue with Aliens: Colonial Marines, however, is that the typo wasn't in the game code, it was in the initialization file. These files are outside of the source code, and oftentimes they're tweaked and modified throughout development. It's one of those things where the team was likely so focused on all the major bugs found in the first-person shooter that the ini mishap was overlooked as the team at Gearbox focused on fixing all the other serious issues.
On the upside, at least Gearbox found some humor in the situation. I imagine neither gamers nor the staff found it all that humorous when Aliens: Colonial Marines came out back in 2013 for the Xbox 360, PC and PS3, and it was all over the news for being a broken mess, which eventually spawned a lawsuit.
At this point, though, the development studio is able to joke about it even though the original game's release was probably nothing short of a PR nightmare and a headache. But it's good to see Gearbox taking the typo in stride and joking about it with the gaming community.
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