How can one programmer debug a problem that requires 16 people to reproduce?

What if you don't have 16 people in the building? What if your test department is 6,000 miles away?

Better use Replay.

Crunch Time. Every project knows it. Every producer fears it. The final few weeks of a project when everything is on the line, the ship date is looming, the manuals have been printed, and the stores are waiting for your game… not to mention the masses.

It's usually around this time when your most difficult crash bugs decide to show themselves. The showstopper bugs that only happen when 16 people are playing the game at the same time, and one of them does something bad.

The only problem is you don't know which one of them did something bad, and you don't know what ‘something bad' is.

This is the type of problem that the Snowblind team ran into at possibly the most crucial point of the project. Everyone was waiting for the game and Eidos had commitments to keep. John Chowanec, lead Producer, was charged to find and fix the few remaining issues. Fast.

One of the most challenging bugs left was a multi-player bug that only seemed to show itself under very rare instances with 16 players in the game. This in itself was a major obstacle as the developer in the Netherlands didn't have 16 people in the office.

“We recorded a 16 player game where we found the crash, sent the Replay to the developer, and they fixed it that night.”