Thank You for Playing Wing Commander

Thank you for playing Wing Commander! C:\wc1> This is from an anecdote by Ken Demarest, one of the original developers who worked on Wing Commander I on the PC... ... we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"

A screenshot of an old Wing Commander command-line screen displays a cheerful farewell message after the game exits. The joke is that a developer secretly replaced a fatal EMM386 memory-manager error with the polished sign-off because the game had to ship quickly, turning a crash into a convincing goodbye. EN: A screenshot of an old Wing Commander command-line screen displays a cheerful farewell message after the game exits. The joke is that a developer secretly replaced a fatal EMM386 memory-manager error with the polished sign-off because the game had to ship quickly, turning a crash into a convincing goodbye.

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