Forums - Sim City

Windows 95 had dedicated code to nix an OG Sim City bug

Quote:

"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere."

On a different operating system, however, this bug could stop the game working altogether: and SimCity was a very popular game indeed.

"Here’s the amazing part," writes Spolsky. "On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95."

These days every game receives post-launch support but, back then, whatever bugs a game shipped with would be a part of it forever...