Red Dead Redemption lead multiplayer designer Kris Roberts once tried enjoying his much-needed compensated time off. The 2010 open-world game’s demanding pre-launch period put him in “an amnesiac state” of sleep deprivation, and he was starting to get irritable with his bosses at Rockstar. But then he got assigned jury duty, and then Red Dead’s multiplayer bugs started to show themselves, and any hopes for going to bed on time were replaced with cold panic.
“Sort of like the punchline,” Roberts tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview, which you can watch below. “I was on jury in a criminal case, where somebody was potentially going to go to prison when we shipped. And, I don’t know if you were aware or whatever, but when Red Dead shipped, multiplayer was broken. Just absolutely broken.” Members of the Rockstar New England team – he credits someone named Jeremy, likely programmer Jeremy Tudisco – helped him patch it up, but not before he was made to have a few 3AM sessions spent staring at the American frontier gone wild.
“There were people riding chickens, and old ladies flying around, and all these wacky things that we had never, ever seen,” Roberts says, “and it’s like, ‘Are we being hacked? Is somebody trolling us? What’s going on?”
He’d work on finding a solution after his jury duty sessions, and while presumably unpleasant, the hard work during what was meant to be his free time eventually paid off. “What we discovered was, there were these special assets for the competitive games, these bags of gold that were really resource heavy, because everybody needed to agree, exactly, on who owned them, where they were, all that kind of stuff,” says Roberts.
“And I remember riding around in a public session, and near Escalera, or some place like that where there was a competitive game, and I saw this array of bags, like, just there on the ground. Which shouldn’t be there. They should never be in free roam. And that was, like, the first clue.”
“We never actually, to the best of my understanding, figured out how it was happening,” Roberts admits. But Rockstar devs were able to make a good guess: there was likely “some edge case” where a player leaving a competitive game could grab a money bag and take it with them while they free roamed like an outlaw.
“Basically, the theory was those [bags] were soaking up all the resources so none of the actual game logic or scripting could function as designed,” says Roberts. Eventually, Jeremy came along and “came up with a script that would purge those bags with extreme prejudice. So, it’s like, if you’re in free roam, and you’re an asset with this ID range, you are a bag, and you are gone.”
“It was amazing, we were able to fix that,” Roberts says, sounding relieved even 16 years later. Jeremy linked his bag removal script with the sound of a slot machine payout, too, for extra, flashy satisfaction.
Even better, the irreproachable technology of 2010 allowed Rockstar’s multiplayer team to release emergency fixes with the easy slickness of shoe polish on cowboy boots.
Roberts observes about the money bag fix, “That kind of thing would normally have to go through a whole patch and approval process and testing, and, you know, it could have taken weeks or longer to deploy that.” But developers’ Xbox 360 and PS3 kits gave them access to title storage. “The intention was you would get, like, notifications about tournaments, or things that were happening, that could show up on the client,” Roberts says, “and it turned out we could deploy Jeremy [Tudisco]’s script through the title storage update.”
“So, with no oversight, and no testing, or no delay, we were able to get that script into the public sessions within 24 hours,” he says. “I thought we had won the lottery as far as, like, ‘It’s actually getting fixed. It’s not a catastrophe.’
In fact, it was finally over. “And it was three in the morning, or so, and I remember going to talk to – we had a new studio head then, Gordon [Hall] had left – and I remember talking to him,” says Roberts. He told his boss, “‘This is what we’re doing, this is how it’s being deployed, blah, blah, blah. But I got to go, because I’m expected in court in a few hours.'”
Sorry, Rockstar – duty calls.