This is how an oversight revealed the best kept secret of this video game company in the 80s

“That 70% of the source code ended up being mass copied and sent to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of their customers, was a huge mistake.”

At the time when programs or video games were on the legendary floppy disks, there was a general fear among developers that some bug or unfinished version would fall into the hands of thousands of users. In the end, Any error on that master disk was multiplied thousands of times.

The problem is that this concern became a reality for Sierra On-Line, a well-known adventure game company, when a data deletion error resulted in the source code for its engine ending up on disk.

Lance Ewing tells this story from 1988, when Sierra On-Line released a version of Space Quest II on floppy disks that had much more than just the game. At first glance, the discs looked normal, but, Upon closer inspection, they discovered that they contained C programming code that belonged to Sierra’s game engine, named AGI..

As Lance Ewing explains on your blog, taking into account that this code was vital for the company, since it revealed its best-kept secret of success, the truth is that the tragedy was ignored. Luckily for you, The flaw was not discovered until 2016, although it has now become almost a collector’s itemsince it contained a unique section on how video games of the time were developed.

“AGI games continued to be top sellers from 1985 to 1988. During those years, the AGI interpreter was Sierra On-Line’s primary means of making money and therefore a critical part of its intellectual property. No Not only did they invent the 3D animated graphic adventure game genre, but they also had a lead over their competitors that lasted several years. It’s safe to say that the AGI interpreter source code is something Sierra would have preferred not to fall into their hands. competitors,” says Ewing.

How did top secret Sierra code end up leaking on a floppy disk?

Lance Ewing explains that when Sierra prepared a new version of a game, it created a master disk called a “production copy”, which was used in a duplication machine called FormMaster, which copied every byte of every sector of the disk, regardless of whether those sectors were in use or not.

FormMaster not only copied visible files to the disk, but duplicated all data, even data that appeared unused, so any residual data on the master disk was also copied to the users’ disks. The most important point of all here is that the master disk was completely formatted before copying the game.

In the case of the 2.0D and 2.0F versions of the Space Quest II game, someone forgot to format the master disk before using it, and as a result, the first disk of these versions had around 402,432 bytes of “unused” data which actually contained 70% of the source code for Sierra’s AGI game engine.

Luckily, and as mentioned before, they dodged the bullet: “It was almost certainly an inadvertent error. Surprisingly, no one seemed to have realized what happened, neither Sierra, nor its competitors, nor its clients, and it was only discovered , decades later, the first known discovery by online user NewRisingSun in October 2016,” says Ewing.

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