If you ever owned a Sega Dreamcast, you probably played Sonic Adventure, one of the launch titles for the system. Presumably because of the urgency of its release, the game was chock-full of bugs. Sonic, or one of his various other animal buddies, would often fall through the floor (killing the player in the process) or skip around the screen. Still, it was a fun game, and the fact that I played it to death probably means that I found more glitches than many.
Well, X-Cult.org have posted Sega of America's official bugs listing from an ex-playtester. It's in Filemaker format so isn't too easy to open, but I persevered because I have an obsession with all things SEGA during the Dreamcast era. Here's where it gets good: obviously, the bugs reported by the playtesters are often pretty mundane and uninteresting (and many of them seemed to make it into the final product), but what's funny are the suggestions and complaints made by the team:
These include creative and artistic demands to the game producers, where the playtesters tell the actual creators of the game how they should have done it:
Often with a strangely precise degree of accuracy:
80%? Not 75 or 87%? Definitely 80?
The absolute best ones, though, are the moral and ethical concerns of the game testing staff. You can draw your own conclusions from these.
(How the fuck did Jet Set Radio, the game about spraypainting, ever get past this?)
Hey, hands on the desk!
If they're concerned about marijuana leaves, it's probably for the best that these playtesters were probably all looking for work a few years later, when the acid-trip known as REZ would have been kicking around.
There are also legal concerns:
And this utterly baffling ethical worry, filed under "Advisory":
Yes... yes it is.
"Welcome to today's meeting of Anonymous Game Testers Who Desperately Need To Get Laid.
....I see we've all arrived and made it for today's meeting.
As first order of business today, I'd like to open up the floor by inquiring... what the fuck is wrong with you people? Thank you."
In much the same way that I expect most film censors are people who wish they were filmmakers but don't have the talent, I have a feeling most game testers wish they were actually on the design teams and use bug reporting systems such as this as a way of adding their own "insightful" input.