Recently, Colin McInerney shared his memories of working at Bethesda Softworks. At that time, the future founder of Pedalboard Games studio worked in the quality control department.
As a tester, he managed to find a way to break Fallout 4:
At some point, I just decided to experiment with RAM. We were conducting tests on the Xbox One. The console has 8 GB of RAM, so if you exceed that value, the game will simply crash. I displayed the RAM usage indicator and thought: how can I break it? As soon as this thought came to me, no one else had done it. It's not standard testing practice: asking the question "how to create a memory leak in the game?"
Colin used the console to give himself experience and reached level 240+. Then he armed himself with a unique version of the "Nuka Nuker": after modification, the weapon was capable of launching several nuclear bombs.
After that, Colin began to bomb the world of Fallout 4 and discovered four different crashes. At that time, each such crash was recorded and triggered a notification system for employees, as well as managers:
In those days, it activated a mass mailing throughout the entire Zenimax Media company. So Robert Altman received letters about someone finding four crashes in one morning. I would love to see how AI tries to do my job. I am professionally stupid to a degree that a machine can't even dream of.