The International House of Mojo

July's Flashbacks:

Chip "Stay on Target" Hinnenberg - Quality Assurance Supervisor

"We had a great staff on X-Wing® PC and we tested this title for a year while working out of a house in Fairfax. We worked until 2 a.m. or later in the morning and then crawled under our desks to go to sleep. The really memorable part of this is that one night they announced that the Death Star trench run was working and I was one of the first people to fly and complete it. Yup, me and Luke were the first people to destroy a Death Star!"

Wendy Kaplan - Duplication Specialist (a.k.a. Burning Goddess)

"When Grim Fandango® was in the final stages of testing, they were doing two or three versions a day. There were a bunch of people, both in the test pit and upstairs, who were basically living at LucasArts. We were all working so many hours that for some people, it didn't pay to go home. Luckily, I only lived a few minutes away, so I was able to sleep in my own bed.

But I remember one night they called me in to burn a new version. I finished around 10 p.m., but by the time I got home, they were calling me back again! The version had a new bug and they needed me to come back in - around midnight! That's when I found out about this late night slumber party thing they had going on. I saw people walking down the halls in pajamas and slippers, carrying their toothbrushes. There was a real feeling of camaraderie."

Tabby Tosti - Hint Line Specialist/"Bug Exterminator"

"When I was first hired I tested Indiana Jones® and the Fate of Atlantis™. One day I found a weird crash bug concerning this giant rodent that you need to whip. When you do so, a snake grabs the rodent and then you use the tree the snake was on to get to the other side of a large gap. Well sometimes the game would lock up when I got to the part where the snake grabs the giant rodent and sometimes it wouldn't... so I tried to find out what was causing the crash to see if I could get it to happen consistently.

Finally I wrote up the bug in our database and told them I thought the crash might be related to which cat statue you pick up in the very beginning of the game. I got a reply from the programmers telling me that they would look into it, but it couldn't be the cats that was causing the crash. I forgot about it and continued to test. The next day I looked up from my testing to see Hal Barwood, Mike Stemmle, and Sean Clark staring at me in total disbelief. They told me that they had researched the bug I reported and darn it if the cats didn't cause the crash after all!!! They were totally amazed telling me that the source code for the cats should not have affected the snake at all, but somehow it had and they could not figure out how I had known. I felt so proud that they actually came down to tell me that!"