Looking for Bugs

By Noah Isackson/Chicago

Andy Hanson, 24, is on a mission to break the most popular arcade game in America, a simulated golf match called Golden Tee. Over the next few months, he will spend days swinging at trees, walking into water hazards and bashing the game buttons as hard as he can, really trying to give the console a good whack.

Esteemed employee that he is, Hanson hopes to make the game stall, crash or buzz like a bad toaster. And, yes, he wreaks this havoc for a living, working as many as seven days a week in a Chicago-area office the size of a strip mall.

Video-game abuse has become a career these days, a crucial part of the $11 billion video-game industry. Hanson is a quality-assurance tester, who plays through every conceivable video-game scenario, looking for bugs, or problems, in a program before they hit the real world. Testers report glitches--a character walking offscreen, for example--to their company's programming department, which repairs the game's computer code. Then the game goes back to the testing department for further scrutiny, and the cycle repeats, often for months, until the game is bug free. "Testers are a special breed," says Richard Ditton, executive vice president of Incredible Technologies, the company that makes Golden Tee. "They somehow delight in breaking things." But he adds, "If they tell us not to ship a product, we won't."

Just one undetected bug in Golden Tee could cost the company as much as $100,000, the price of fixing the problem and sending an update from its headquarters in Arlington Heights, Ill., to game operators around the world. It's a frightening figure, Ditton says, when you consider the multitude of things that could go wrong with the programming, affecting everything from a game's 3-D images to its virtual sportscaster.

It used to be that video games were tested by their creators and perhaps a few colleagues. Today's titles, however, are far too complicated, requiring a new kind of watchful eye. "Testers are a lot like the crash-test dummies of the industry," says Jason Della Roca, director of the International Game Developers Association, a professional society. First-year testers make about $32,000, while bug hunters with six or more years in the field earn about $53,000, according to Game Developer magazine.

At Incredible Technologies, Hanson and his colleagues toil away in a dimly lighted room with charcoal gray carpeting, messing with the latest version of Golden Tee, due in 500 locales in November. Each tester has a code-melting specialty--simulating a drunken frat boy, for example--but all suggest that talent goes only so far when they're breaking games until sunrise. Admits Hanson: "You're just doing the same redundant thing, over and over again." Sounds par for the course.