Back in the 80’s and early ‘90s, game development was a special kind of chaos—an era where your best debugging tool was often a legal pad, a lot of coffee, and the sheer force of will. There was no Stack Overflow to bail you out, no Google search to reveal the solution to a compiler error some poor soul had documented before you. It was just you, the code, and maybe—if you were lucky—a phone number for a guy who knew a guy who wrote the driver you were trying to understand.
Welcome to the trenches of game development in the cartridge and early CD-ROM era. This is how we did it without a net.
The Atari Debugging Toolkit: One Eyebrow Raised and a Logic Probe
When I was at Atari, the development process was less like engineering and more like alchemy. The Jaguar was a famously complex machine—five processors, barely coordinated, and documentation that felt like it had been translated from ancient Greek by someone with a grudge. By contrast, we tested Lynx games on units hooked to TVs with a VCR recording every insane move we made. When something happened, we’d run the tape back and explain it as best we could. If the developer was not able to reproduce the issue, we would have to send the tapes to the developer.
Testing a game on Lynx hardware meant you were doing it live. If something crashed, there was no error message politely explaining what went wrong. The screen went black. That was it. You’d stare at the monitor like a poker player who just watched their opponent go all in with nothing—and lost.
The developers would often start with the assumption that the hardware we were testing on was causing the issue. We’d unplug and replug everything, cross our fingers, and try again. If that didn’t fix it, out came the handwritten code logs, line by agonizing line, trying to find the one rogue call or uninitialized variable that brought the whole system down. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was character-building.
Triaging with a Walkman and a Screwdriver
Back then, we didn’t have real-time debugging tools or integrated IDEs. We had “hope,” and if you were on the test team like I often was, maybe a pair of headphones plugged into the dev kit, trying to determine if a crash was caused by a corrupted sound sample. Spoiler alert: it usually wasn’t. Like bug searching sleuths, we would try to recreate the bugs, and nail down as many of the variables as possible to give the developers a road to run down.
I remember sitting in the test lab with a screwdriver in one hand and a Walkman in the other, trying to compare the quality of sound playback between what I had sampled in our home studio and what was coming out of the hardware. The hardware had no sympathy. If a sound channel went bad, it took the whole game with it. And so began the game of binary Jenga—remove one thing, test, repeat. All with very loose version control, of course. If you lost track of what build you were testing… well, grab another soda and start from scratch.
CD-ROMs: Now with 600 Megabytes of New Ways to Crash
When I made the jump to Accolade and started working on CD-ROM titles like Test Drive: Off-Road, the hardware had changed, but the tools hadn’t gotten much better. The new problem wasn’t “Did the cartridge fry?”—it was “Did the CD burn correctly?” Because if it didn’t, congratulations, you just wasted 30 minutes and a disc. And maybe the programmer’s will to live.
Early console CD devkits weren’t exactly robust. You’d burn a build, test it, find a crash, and then try to recreate the crash while praying the CD wasn’t scratched or the reader wasn’t flaky. Debugging was part QA, part superstition. People would move the dev console to a different table or turn the lights down just to “see if it helped.” Did it help? No. Did we still do it? Absolutely.
The Meeting Before the Internet
One of the more underappreciated tools we had back then was the whiteboard. We’d gather around it, trading stories of bizarre edge-case crashes like campfire tales. Every bug was a mystery novel with multiple suspects: bad memory allocation, sound driver loops, race conditions, or maybe just the compiler having a bad day.
I remember a particularly grueling bug in Kasumi Ninja where a character would randomly freeze mid-punch. We couldn’t reproduce it reliably—until someone realized it only happened when you taunted and kicked at the exact same frame while facing left on player two. That kind of bug doesn’t show up in a crash log. That shows up when the QA guy throws his controller across the room and screams, “IT HAPPENED AGAIN!”
No Stack Overflow, No Discord, No Problem
Today’s developers have it easier—and harder. Sure, you’ve got AI code assistants, a thousand forums, and error reporting built into your game engines. But you’ve also got infinite complexity, day-one patches, and players who can dissect your frame timing on YouTube by dinner.
Back then, we had to know our hardware inside and out. We didn’t ship a game with a bug and fix it later—we didn’t get that chance. If it was on the cartridge or CD, it was final. You had to get it right.
And somehow, with all that primitive tech and creative duct tape, we did.
The Joy of Breaking (and Fixing) Things
There’s a unique pride in having survived that era of development. We didn’t have chatbots or documentation libraries—we had intuition, community, and the stubborn belief that we could figure it out, eventually. And when the bug was finally gone, when the game booted clean and ran from start to finish without a hiccup—it was pure magic.
So here’s to the cartridge blowers, the CD-burners, the serial-cable debuggers, and everyone else who made great games with half the tools and twice the guts.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go unplug something and plug it back in. Just for old times’ sake.
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