Fallout 4 tester revealed how he broke the game with nuclear weapons and found four glitches

Fallout 4 Tester Shared How He Broke the Game with Nuclear Weapons and Found Four Crashes

Former Bethesda Softworks tester Colin McInerny told a GDC tale about pushing Fallout 4 into places the developers probably didn't expect. He wasn't trying to stage a spectacle; he was doing his job — in a way that looked a little reckless.

While assigned to QC, McInerny decided to see what would happen if the Xbox One (with its meager 8 GB of RAM, esp. by today's standards) took on extreme memory pressure. The method was purposefully odd: via the console he dumped a billion XP onto the player (i.e., level 247) and then fired off a hacked nuke that launches multiple bombs at once. The wasteland, in his words, literally "rained" nuclear strikes.

That morning produced results — four serious crashes uncovered. The fallout from those crashes reached beyond the test floor: error reports were routed automatically across ZeniMax Media, sometimes landing on the desks of upper management such as Robert Altman. Small annoyances for execs; big wins for bug-hunting.

McInerny framed the experiment as an argument for the kind of testing only a person will try: weird, stubborn, and not always logical. He put it bluntly:

“I’m professionally stupid to such an extent that even a machine couldn’t dream of it.”

For the curious: recently Fallout 4 in the Anniversary Edition was released on Nintendo Switch 2.