Pedalboard Games Co-Founder and Fallout 4 Game Tester Colin McInerney Crashed the Popular Game in a Single Morning

Before Fallout 4 became one of the most popular and successful games in the Fallout series, it went through some intensive game testing to make sure the game would run as smoothly as possible for players, especially considering how large the game Fallout 4 is. According to McInerney, he game tested Fallout 4, and described an interesting event during his QA.

McInerney says that he wanted to see what it would take to crash the game while playing on the Xbox One. The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, and if you get above that, you’ll crash whatever game you’re playing on the console. McInerney wanted to test this, so he gained a ton of XP points, bringing his player level to 247. He started walking around the expansive open world of his game with a peculiar item. A nuke launcher.

He launched two nukes, then gave the launch the add-on of making each nuke launch an additional 10. Needless to say, McInerney crashed the game. Not only that, the game crashed 4 times that morning, and Robert Altman, the former CEO and co-founder of Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda, recieved emails about the crashes. It was probably an eventful morning for McInerney and Altman that day, a story that is funny to look back on today.

Colin McInerney Interview with GamesRadar+

McInerney sat down with GamesRadar+, touching upon the issue of generative AI in game development, something that many game developers have opted to use when developing games today. McInerney expands on the issue by providing his experiences with game testing, using the story to make a comment on generative AI. Here’s an excerpt from his interview with Games Radar+:

“When I was testing Fallout 4, my approach shifted out of the publisher side and into the dev side. I was working with the Bethesda developers and learning shit from them directly and working on weirder stuff.”

“At one point, I just decided to play hot and cold with the RAM because we were on Xbox One. The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, so if you get above that, the game’s going to crash. So I brought up a RAM readout and was just like, how can I break this? That thought occurring to me, no one else was doing that. That isn’t a standard testing practice of, how can I leak memory from the game?”

“What I ended up doing was: I went into the console and gave myself a billion experience, which put me at, like, level 247. And I walked around with the unique nuke launcher that launched two, and then gave it the add-on that made each nuke launch 10 nukes. So I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found four crashes in a single morning.”

“Back in those days, that would send out an email blast to the entire Zenimax Media company. So, like, Robert Altman was getting emails that somebody found four crashes in a single morning. I would love to see an AI do my job. I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.”