Because a developer couldn’t solve a bug, he simply changed the error message text 35 years ago

Wing Commander is over 35 years old, but to this day there is a bug in the game. Developers simply disguised the bug because they didn’t have time to fix the error before the release.

Wing Commander is one of the most well-known PC games. The game was first released on September 26, 1990, for MS-DOS. There were later additional titles and spin-offs for Wing Commander, but the first part is still considered by many players to be the masterpiece.

To this day, the game still crashes at the same spot, namely at the end. However, a developer cleverly hid the error so that it goes unnoticed today.

Error message becomes thank you message

What kind of error is this? Wing Commander was published in 1990 by Electronic Arts as the publisher. Just before the release, the developers were under stress, as they could not fix an error. Ken Demarest, one of the original developers, explained how he turned an error he couldn’t fix into something positive (via wcnews.com):

Back then in Wing Commander 1, we received an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. The screen would go black and a single line would be displayed, something like ‘EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah.’

We had to deliver as quickly as possible. So I edited the error in the memory manager itself with a hexadecimal system, so that it read: ‘Thank you for playing Wing Commander.’

This means that the friendly thank you message when you finish the game is a disguised crash notification. The error has existed for 35 years and has never been officially fixed or removed.

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Star Citizen as a spiritual successor to Wing Commander

Between 1990 and 2007, a total of 17 titles were released for Wing Commander in various forms and spin-offs. Chris Roberts, the then lead developer of Wing Commander, is now developing the space game “Star Citizen” with his company, which he sees as a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and Freelancer.

Meanwhile, the creators of Star Citizen have raised over 800 million euros from players for development, but now they are faced with a new challenge: Star Citizen may have consumed 800 million dollars from its players, but still has a big problem even before release