3 ms·

I worked for Jay Smith, the inventor & CEO of the company that made the Vectrex, after the Vectrex was already off the market. I wrote PlayStation 1 games at hi

I worked for Jay Smith, the inventor & CEO of the company that made the Vectrex, after the Vectrex was already off the market. I wrote PlayStation 1 games at his company, where Jay is also the guy that basically invented realistic physics for bowling games. We wrote the Tiger Woods PGA Golf game with the South Park scandal at Adrenalin Interactive (Jay's company.)

noman-land 2y ago
What is the South Park scandal?
- bsenftner 2y ago
  The first Tiger Woods PGA Golf game for the PlayStation has/had a copy of either the South Park pilot or it's first episode. I don't really remember which it was. The original PlayStation's disc format required a 20MB file of audio silence at the beginning of every disc, which at the time was a bit of a hassle - the size of the file. This file was supposedly to protect home speakers if someone tried to "play" a game disc on their audio CD player. When this Tiger Woods golf game was ready for initial testing, a person on the development team did not have a 20MB file of audio silence at hand, and just grabbed a 20MB file he did have, which happened to be a video of South Park, renamed it, built the testing disc... and promptly forgot. Seriously, that's how the file ended up on the gold master, into replication, and eventually people's homes. I can honestly say, this is 1st hand information: I was on the team. The game was out for some time when a Florida radio DJ announced finding this incredible easter egg that the scandal broke. I seem to remember the lead developer at E.A. got fired over it, eventually.
  - noman-land 2y ago
    Hahaha, amazing story. I've never heard about this before. This also implies that anyone putting the disc inside an audio player could listen to the South Park episode.
    - bsenftner 2y ago
      No, they could take the first file off the disk, rename it to anything.mpg and then view that South Park episode in glorious 320 resolution video.

noman-land 2y ago

What is the South Park scandal?

bsenftner 2y ago
The first Tiger Woods PGA Golf game for the PlayStation has/had a copy of either the South Park pilot or it's first episode. I don't really remember which it was. The original PlayStation's disc format required a 20MB file of audio silence at the beginning of every disc, which at the time was a bit of a hassle - the size of the file. This file was supposedly to protect home speakers if someone tried to "play" a game disc on their audio CD player. When this Tiger Woods golf game was ready for initial testing, a person on the development team did not have a 20MB file of audio silence at hand, and just grabbed a 20MB file he did have, which happened to be a video of South Park, renamed it, built the testing disc... and promptly forgot. Seriously, that's how the file ended up on the gold master, into replication, and eventually people's homes. I can honestly say, this is 1st hand information: I was on the team. The game was out for some time when a Florida radio DJ announced finding this incredible easter egg that the scandal broke. I seem to remember the lead developer at E.A. got fired over it, eventually.
- noman-land 2y ago
  Hahaha, amazing story. I've never heard about this before. This also implies that anyone putting the disc inside an audio player could listen to the South Park episode.
  - bsenftner 2y ago
    No, they could take the first file off the disk, rename it to anything.mpg and then view that South Park episode in glorious 320 resolution video.