A Fallout 4 QA tester nuked the RPG so hard that Zenimax executives got emails about it: "I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found 4 crashes in a single morning"

Well before co-founding Pedalboard Games or joining indie powerhouse Strange Scaffold, developer Colin McInerney cut his teeth testing games at Bethesda Softworks in quality assurance during college. In an interview at GDC, McInerney tells me of one particularly eventful Fallout 4 QA side quest that, like a sufficiently severe DEFCON warning, was escalated straight to the top brass. It is, I believe, representative of the bar that all QA testers should strive to meet and subsequently break.

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

Originally, we'd been talking about generative AI in game development. McInerney makes a convincing case for the power of the human element in all areas, including QA, an often unsung but always essential part of game development.

"At one point, I just decided to play hot and cold with the RAM because we were on Xbox One," he continues. "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."

The best part? "Back in those days, that would send out an email blast to the entire Zenimax Media company," McInerney says. "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."

Fallout 4 was "missing something" at first, but lead dev says Todd Howard helped confirm "there should be this overriding sense of paranoia" so players "don't know who to trust."