First official patch for a retail computer game?

[SirBruce]

So, an interesting question came up today -- what was the first official patch for a retail computer game? Back in the old days, patches were usually distributed either via a floppy disk in the mail, or a download from a local BBS if you were lucky. I did some poking around on USENET and saw some early "patches" that were homebrewed, often to get around a game's copy protection. I know EA used to have some games that had, say, a non-copy protected version you could buy, but those aren't really patches, either.

So aside from all that, was was the official, company sanctioned "patch" for a retail computer game?

Bruce

[Naked_Lunch]

Earliest I can remember is...maybe Origin's patch for Ultima 8 but I'm sure it probably goes way back.

[JMR]

Since I didn't have a modem I called Spectrum Holobyte to have them send me a patch for Falcon 3.0.

[Lum]

Back then most companies "patched" via addons (ie the Wing Commander series, the first addon of which patched in speech support IIRC).

A few companies ran BBSs that you could dial up and download demos but I don't think any of them offered patches.

Once the web hit in the late 90s then you started seeing patches on a regular basis. Ultima 8 may well have been the first; it came out in 1995 and was pretty much required to actually play the game through. 1995 is also when the Web first took off, and shareware had really taken off by that point as well (Doom was released through BBSs in 1993, and by 1995 was the most popular game ever released).

Around that point you started to see the "ship it now, patch it later" mentality kick in with gaming companies. Prior to 1995 the PC game industry was a lot like the console industry today; you had one chance to get it right, and if you didn't, that was the version you were stuck with. By 1997 you had games released like Daggerfall, which required upwards of 5 patch cycles before the game could even be finished.

[Charles]

There were patches you could mail order from Sierra for Quest for Glory 4. They didn't fix anything, but hey.

Anyway, patches go way back before 95. There used to be a section in PCG or CGW (can't remember which) which listed new patches available via mail order from publishers. That's how I found out about the QFG4 patches.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Didn't Darklands go through multiple versions and patches because of all the game crashing bugs?

Troy

[Naked_Lunch]

Yeah, it did. It only had a handful and they didn't fix a lot of things. Still a damn fine game, though

[SirBruce]

The first patch I remember downloading from a BBS was the 1.00a patch for Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space in 1992. I'm almost certain there were some games for the Amiga and the PC that were patched before that, though.

Bruce

[Alan Dunkin]

I remember the Darklands patch specifically; I only remember the one big one that fixed a lot of things and basically made it playable, and I seem to remember it came on 10 floppies.

If you look and find references to The Patches Scrolls, you can probably find some very early patch references.

--- Alan

[Sam Jones]

Once the web hit in the late 90s then you started seeing patches on a regular basis. Ultima 8 may well have been the first;

Xcom had patches before that.

[SirBruce]

Well, the earliest DATE for a patch on The Patches Scrolls is:
Darklands v7 (Upgrade for v6) 03-Mar-93 600 Kb

But there were of course Darklands v2-v6 patches before that. According to MobyGames:
Sep, 1992 v483.06 (Version 6)

Whoops. Stop the presses! According to Moby Games, Microsoft Flight Simulator released version 1.05 in May, 1983! But was it really a patch, or was it just a new version of the game?

Bruce

[Lunch of Kong]

The first game I ever patched was Sierra's Kings Quest IV. It would crash when you entered the waterfall scene, and Sierra issued a patch. That would be 1988 or 1989.

I'm sure there are patches that pre-date this, but I'm just saying that's my first experienced with patches.

[Alan Dunkin]

The Xcom patches woulda been in 1994, probably the difficulty-level thing.

I'm pretty sure early on various versions were "patched" - basically just re-compiled and re-packaged for release as the same product - by publishers, so I can't say for sure what the first release version was (for FlightSim).

--- Alan

[Warren]

The first game I ever patched was Sierra's Kings Quest IV. It would crash when you entered the waterfall scene, and Sierra issued a patch. That would be 1988 or 1989.

I'm sure there are patches that pre-date this, but I'm just saying that's my first experienced with patches.

I remember dowloading patches from BBS's for C-64 and Apple stuff back in the late mid-80's. Some of the game companies had BBS's. Man, it would suck when the board you were trying to get into had only one line and it would be busy, busy, busy. It would be great when you'd find some local board that had the files you were looking for. Stupid 300 baud.

The long distance charges were killer. I spent $1800 in one six month period on BBS phone time once, back around 1990 I think. Sheesh, that was stupid of me! Thank God for the Internet. Now all that's a click away.

[EvilIdler]

Did the internet make publishers lax with the quality-control?

[Alan Dunkin]

I'd say it certainly makes companies feel that they have a lot more leeway in putting out products. At the same time, early- to mid-90s MicroProse games were notoriously buggy (Darklands and MOM were the most heinous), long before patch distribution on the internet was connecting to someone else's machine via uucp or ftp'ing to Walnut Creek.

Yeah those BBS' were nasty long-distance... was happy enough to wait and get my Darklands patch via mail honestly.

--- Alan

[Thrag]

I'd say it certainly makes companies feel that they have a lot more leeway in putting out products. At the same time, early- to mid-90s MicroProse games were notoriously buggy (Darklands and MOM were the most heinous), long before patch distribution on the internet was connecting to someone else's machine via uucp or ftp'ing to Walnut Creek.

Yeah those BBS' were nasty long-distance... was happy enough to wait and get my Darklands patch via mail honestly.

--- Alan

Back then the common joke for any microprose (especially simtex) game was to wait until 1.3

[Alan Dunkin]

In fact it was MOM v1.3 that was the "good" version IIRC.. or was it v1.2. Jeez.

--- Alan

[Rod Humble]

When I used to type in games from my Sinclair Spectrum & Acorn Atom magazines, the next month they would often post code changes/updates/bug fixes the month afterwards.

So it goes back at least that far.

[SpoofyChop]

I used to dial into the Sierra BBS from PA when I was a kid to pick up demos and stuff. Our phone bill was out of hand for a while.

[Papageno]

I remember back in about '92 I sent a postcard or something to the company (Graphic Simulations?) that put out Hellcats Over the Pacific (a WW2 Pacific-Theater flight sim) so they could send me the patch on a floppy, no less. And they did.

[Mox]

I seem to recall Crash! magazine publishing pokes to fix the bugs in Jet Set Willy (http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/bugsi.html) in 1984, which they claim they got from Software Projects themselves. Would that constitute a patch?

[mok]

http://www.patches-scrolls.de/ goes back to 1995 in archives...but that is certainly very late in the game.

I can recall pulling patches from compuserve and GEnie late 80's early 90's.

[Rob_Merritt]

Google groups has

a 1984 patch for a version of Rogue
http://groups.google.com/group/net.games.rogue/browse_thread/thread/90756d419f5e90d/9ab674d346cac55a?lnk=st&q=game+patch&rnum=1&hl=en#9ab674d346cac55a

[Shadari]

Google groups has

a 1984 patch for a version of Rogue
http://groups.google.com/group/net.games.rogue/browse_thread/thread/90756d419f5e90d/9ab674d346cac55a?lnk=st&q=game+patch&rnum=1&hl=en#9ab674d346cac55a
Was there a retail version of Rogue?

[SirBruce]

Yeah, see, people having been "patching" freeware games forever, and there were patches for commercial programs too. But I'm hoping to track down the first patch for a commercial (retail) game.

Bruce

[DrDel]

Did the internet make publishers lax with the quality-control?

Yup. .

[EvilIdler]

Was there a retail version of Rogue?
I remember one on the Amiga, at least.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Did the internet make publishers lax with the quality-control?

That's only part of the story.

The internet makes patch delivery easy, meaning that if there is an imbalance in the game or an exploit, there can be a consumer demand for a patch. Plus, it is good customer service to fix this sort of thing.

In the bad old days, game crashing bugs and exploits were common, but there was no incentive for the developer to spend time working on a lot fixes since only a small number of players would get them. Re-releases or new version numbers would only fix game stopping stuff most of the time and even that was only on a few of the games that really needed it. Now every game gets a patch not because QA sucks, but because they can get the patch to users and hopefully keep sales coming.

Troy

[Quitch]

Yup. .

Couldn't agree less, PC games have always been buggy. You see more patches now because PC hardware has grown infinitely more complex.

[Lee Johnson]

EA issued a patch for Starflight in 1986. They didn't write it, though; I did. I came up with two patches for it, because it didn't run at all on my PCjr at the time, and I was determined to make it work. The problem was that Binary Systems was initialising the video hardware directly, instead of using BIOS calls. I guess it would work on a 'normal' PC, but on the PCjr, it just went nuts and lost video sync. I went traipsing through the code in DEBUG until I found what they were doing. (An interesting mixture of Forth and assembly code... I still have the notes somewhere.)

I first came up with a patch that let the game run in the four-colour CGA palette; this is the patch that EA initially distributed to people with EGA cards (it was better than nothing.) Soon after that, I came up with a way to run the game in 16 colours on the PCjr, but that patch had a somewhat more limited audience. Later, I think that EA came up with a 16-colour patch for EGA cards.

EA was nice enough to contact me and offer a game from their catalogue in thanks for my work. I thought that was decent of them, even if I chose Return to Atlantis. Har!

Anyway, patches for retail games have been around for quite some time. I remember grabbing these from CompuServe in the late '80s and early '90s.

[copeknight]

A retail version of Rogue was published by Epyx.

Interstel patched Empire: Wargame of the Century on the ST several times in the late 1980s. I recall mailing my floppy to them and they would return in with the new version. I think that SSI's Atari 8-bit version of Sons of Liberty also needed to be patched due to incompatibilities with the XE line. This was also done via disk swap.

SSI also in the early 1980s offered updated versions of games...for a price. I'm looking at the Spring 1982 SSI catalog, and it included:

Computer Quarterback: The Second Edition ($15...now including sound effects!)
Computer Ambush ($20; rewritten in assembly)
Cartels & Cutthroats v. 1.2 ($15; "slightly faster play")
Computer Air Combat v. 1.2 (same)
Operation Apocalypse v 1.2 (same)
Computer Baseball ($5, printing of box scores)
Napoleon's Campaigns: 1813 & 1815 ($5; now resolve battles with miniatures and enter the results!)

[wildpokerman]

Couldn't agree less, PC games have always been buggy. You see more patches now because PC hardware has grown infinitely more complex.


Plus the games being released are much more complex, and the coders are a lot better and more experienced so It's rare to get a game that just won't run at all on very many machines.

[instant0]

But these days you have APIs and DirectX/OpenGL to programme towards vs. the old days of directly accessing the hardware (?).. Should it not be easier now?

[Charles]

But these days you have APIs and DirectX/OpenGL to programme towards vs. the old days of directly accessing the hardware (?).. Should it not be easier now?


Nope. Accessing hardware directly means you are responsible for any issues. With abstraction layers like OGL or DX, it means you are now dependent on a third party layer between you and the hardware to work correctly. And it often doesn't. And so you are stuck trying to work around potential bugs which make no sense, or function calls that don't work how they should because of shoddy drivers, etc.

[AndrewM]

Nope. Accessing hardware directly means you are responsible for any issues. With abstraction layers like OGL or DX, it means you are now dependent on a third party layer between you and the hardware to work correctly. And it often doesn't. And so you are stuck trying to work around potential bugs which make no sense, or function calls that don't work how they should because of shoddy drivers, etc.

If third party drivers are harder to use than first party ones, why don't video game companies produce their own drivers?

[malmac]

The first "patch" I remember was for Ultima II, Atari 8 bit version, it 1982 or 1983. There was a really bad bug in the Atari version, you needed to get an item, silk tassels I believe, from fighting monsters in order to be allowed on a ship. In the Atari version, you never got this item.
I played the game for many hours, and never could get on a ship. A friend somehow found out about the bug, maybe through a bbs. The "patch" required you manually hex edit your Ultima II disk to change a few bytes of data.

I also remember how badly the initial Atari version of Ultima VI needed a patch. The original Atari release was so buggy the game uneventually became unplayable. In one case a bridge between islands got corrupted and half of it disappeared so I couldn't access parts of the game. Lots of other horrible bugs. The game even printed out "Bug, Bug, bug" in the conversation area of the screen at one time. I always thought it was extremely hypocritical of "Lord British" to write games based on morality when his games, at least the Atari versions, were the most buggy software I ever encountered.

Malcolm

[Charles]

If third party drivers are harder to use than first party ones, why don't video game companies produce their own drivers?


They aren't harder to use. They are much, much easier. But it's much more random. If developers were still in the habit of writing their own drivers, you could be pretty much guaranteed that for the hardware they wrote it on, it would work exactly as it should, every time. Take consoles for example.

But now developers have to write around APIs instead, and they can't be guaranteed that it will work exactly as it should, every time. Because they have no control over what's underneath it.

[Quitch]

If third party drivers are harder to use than first party ones, why don't video game companies produce their own drivers?

Basically, the lower you delve the more control you have but the harder it is to code. All languages compile to assembly, but no one writes a game in assembly because it simply isn't practical to do it any more.

[Misguided]

When I used to type in games from my Sinclair Spectrum & Acorn Atom magazines, the next month they would often post code changes/updates/bug fixes the month afterwards.

So it goes back at least that far.

Yeah I was gonna say I thought I remembered getting bits of code in magazines in the late 70s early 80s to fix problems with games. Don't recall specific examples, though. They might not have been "official" either.

[Mox]

Aha! I've found A reference (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jg27paw4/yr06/yr06_05.htm#JSW) to the article I remember reading. It's a Your Sinclair article, not a Crash! like I thought it was. But there we have it, a commercial game being remotely modified in the field by the customer at the request of the original publisher. In August 1984.

Of course, if you insist on electronic distribution, or automatic installation, this isn't good enough (since the 'patch' was only published in popular magazines at the time).

[Lunch of Kong]

no one writes a game in assembly because it simply isn't practical to do it any more.

They do in Japan. :-)

[Quitch]

What full game was written in assembly in Japan recently?

[jafd]

Best thread ever. Thanks.

[SirBruce]

My ego thanks you. Seriously, lots of good information in this thread. The advent of the Internet certainly has made patching easier -- do any companies even offer to email CDs of patches anymore for those customers without internet access?

Bruce

[jafd]

Let's be clear: I wasn't thanking you.