🎮 MAJOR Gaming SCANDALS That Were Buried (Forgotten Game Drama)| Fact Hunt | Larry Bundy Jr 

Wait, Future was able to remove all traces of Driver 3 from the internet? They managed to break the "It's on the Internet forever" rule? I'm actually really impressed that they managed to do that.

Just for the effort you cleared the sky in the Driv3er universe and the few that made that too, there should be an award to do so. This is honest and clear journalism. Thank you!

Thanks for keeping the Driver 3 story alive - I remember this being a major deal in gaming at the time, and now it's completely forgotten. It's a shame too, because it seems almost too obvious these days that the same thing is happening with almost every heavily hyped game.

If a publisher came to me saying anything like "give us 9/10 and you can have the exclusive", my first response would be "why? Whats wrong with it?"

I like that, no matter how low grade the graphics on Krazy Kong were, they still made it a priority to give the ape nipples. Joel Schumacher would have approved.

Saying that you wrote a game in 100% machine code is more like saying that you're a professional Photoshop artist who uses a hex-editor to create a BMP file pixel-by-pixel.

Ah yes, my favorite video game character, “Running and Jumping Man”

It's sickening to think that today, these shills are on pretty much every single message board in droves, for a whole multitude of companies... and paid reviews are the majority now. Oh how far we have fallen as an industry.

How the hell do you have scores of 52, 59, 78, and 86 and yet still give the game an 81%? That's not how averages work Sinclair.

The point of specifying '100% machine code' was to distinguish it from commercial games that were programmed in BASIC. The assembled machine code game would run much faster and potentially have more graphical and gameplay features than something that was written in an interpreted language could offer. In the early Spectrum, Atari, Commodore and other 'home computer' days there were many games and even 'business software' released on cassette by tiny, or even one-man companies that had been written in BASIC. I think some of the problem with the screen shots was caused by the fact there were no easy ways to actually get pictures of games. Often they literally had to take a polaroid photograph of the television screen and this was amazingly difficult to get right with reflection and room lighting causing problems! I often made what would be called 'walkthroughs' today for my uncle and remember many times having to rig up what amounted to a mini dark room around the TV in order to get good photographs. This is why magazines hired people like 'Stu' to produce a hand-drawn artist's impression for publication in the same way a court-reporter does.

17:21 The real question is: were they _high-resolution_ guerillas? *rimshot*

Writing a game in "machine code" means it runs as fast as it possibly can. This used to be extremely important decades ago.

As always, well researched and almost unknown yet important part of gaming history. LB, you the man.

Story time: Years before Larry made this video. I went to a video renting store and found driver3 on the shelf's next to some N64 and PS1 games. Driver3 for the xbox. I picked it up and someone in front took the CD case and traded for the game itself, and I checked it out to see if the game is okay or in good condition. I saw the CD completely scratched out like someone hated this game so much or salty for losing in the game, whatever it was and I picked out another game instead. Years later Larry made this video and saw how buggy the game looks. I think who ever scratched that CD was a hero so that no one has to suffer like he did. Thanks man.

That explains so much! Someone I knew downloaded DRIV3R for PS2 using eMule. It played so poorly that we thought the disc image was corrupted, but it turns out that it was just buggy crap! LMAO

"Ever since the day the left bat in Pong was accused of misogyny" I love you Larry

That nemesis sinclair story is the biggest example of "dying on that hill" in gaming history

I think the machine code thing makes sense... but only because I'm a programmer. By machine code, they probably meant assembly (instead of BASIC or something), which would have been faster if it were well-done.

Would just like to say Larry, as a near-30 British gamer, your manner of speaking, style and editing MASSIVELY remind me of British TV video game coverage of the 90s and I love it. New favourite channel!

The 100% machine code thing, on that platform, in that era, was meant to imply that the programmers were so skilled that they build a fully optimized system. Apparently, they mistook effort for skill, and had a bit of hubris, but in that era, it would have been reasonable to assume that most high quality studios would also use their own low-level routines, and have to customize them significantly for each game. So it wasn't actually a bad thing for them to say that it was 100% machine code. Normally, that would have been a sign of high performance than was possible with high level languages (at that time, not in general, and not now that tools many high-level tools are widely available and affordable). The "compiling" would have been done in the minds of the programmers, on pen and paper. The high-end machines which would cross compile only really became affordable during the 16-bit era and beyond. Game development kits and engines were not widely available back then, at least not in the west. This is one thing that gave Japan an advantage: there was more focus on development tools there, and especially on making development easier for the developers or "artists" as Nintendo called them when they developed the Famicom specifically to be developer-friendly. By intent, those developer-friendly features were removed from the international release (NES) and thus, they were able to flood Japan with all forms of experimental games and localize them externally, maintaining control over the means of high quality production. Back then, however, microcomputer manufacturers (besides Nintendo) didn't appreciate this, and thus, the major tool needed was a knowledge of the system, and ability to build system level code: equivalent to the "middleware" which we all take for granted now, on both modern platforms and through retro-programming.

The Peter Molyneux jokes never get old. Lol

Just as he said "the worst is yet to come..." I got a Fortnite ad.

thats funny, that story behind Driver III is just common practice now. True Pioneers.

currently on a fact hunt marathon, taking a drink every time larry mentions peter molyneu(sp?) anyway i'm 6 episodes in and i think i might die

While I don't doubt that those "screen grabs" from Nemesis are just drawings due to the artists name, they look much closer to the Gradius version here in the US on the Nintendo. I remember that game running fast and some levels being crammed with enemies. When I saw the pic with the brain supported from floor and ceiling it really sparked memories. Great video as always Larry. Hello you from the USA.

It wouldn’t be Atari if they weren’t committing suicide via rushing games out

So it seems that nothing has changed with games journalism.

Don't know if you'll see this since I'm commenting on a 6 year old video, but I've been coming back to this video every couple months since I was a teen and I find it super weird that you haven’t received a larger following. Seriously, you haven’t changed one bit and you're still making videos that are just as good as your old ones. Probably don’t have to tell you this but keep it up, you’re awesome Larry!

I realized while watching this that your video editing and graphics are actually amazingly well done. The quality of your videos are fantastic and the work you put into them really shows. I really appreciate your videos, and the pacing of them is excellent. Well worth becoming a patron I think.

I love that the bulk of your content is based on material that I - not a young man - am too young to directly relate to. Honestly I do.

The more I hear about the corruption in VG magazines from back in the day, the more I respect EGM. They never sold out, never corrupted their morals, and always kept their integrity. That's no easy task, especially considering what every other mag was doing at the time.

1:50 - Actually, coding entirely in machine code can make a program extremely efficient. It's just a pain to do it that way which is why we have programming languages. Languages generalize common functions which causes some amount of wasted performance. These days the benefits of using a language far, FAR outweigh any extra efficiency you could obtain by coding in machine code but back then it could (theoretically) make a game run more efficiently on very limited hardware. For example, Rollercoaster Tycoon, developed by the absolute wizard Chris Sawyer, was coded almost entirely in Assembly (machine code) which was why it could keep track of 1000s of peeps and perform dozens of ride simulations on potato computers of the day.

I never get tired of hearing about the Driv3rgate scandal. Especially when narrated by Guru Larry.

I sure do love it when Larry sounds like he's about to kill me with an axe.

I'm pretty sure you must have a sticky note attached to your workstation reading "MAKE A CRACK AT MOLYNEUX EVERY VIDEO" underlined at least twice

Really, this is the first video to talk about certain events related to a game from 2004?! I'm not questioning the truthfulness of the video, I'm just genuinely amazed. I thought it was impossible to remove something from the internet for such a long time...

Driv3rgate is now a 2 paragraph section in the Wikipedia article for Driv3r so i guess this vid worked.

The advertising part crushed my heart when I was a kid, we were poor and my dad didn’t make much money but scraped enough to buy me a console for Christmas when I was 6 and instead of a SNES I chose a Master System with Spy Vs Spy because all the images on the cover lead me to believe the game was entirely different than the crap it actually was.

Having worked in Quality Assurance for Electronic Arts Canada on the Need for Speed series for 3 years in the late 90s/early 2000s I can say that the release version of Driver 3 wouldnt even qualify as an ALPHA build at EAC, the amount of tearing, texture holes, incomplete animation etc etc etc. were at the stage that our developers would first start sending MILESTONE builds to QA to look at, where they didn't even need our feedback to tell them the sheer amount of bugs and missing features, it was just to organize them in a database. It would be 3-5 months after that before anything approaching beta and golden builds would be coming our way, crap on EA all you like (and you have many reasons to) but EAC would have NEVER allowed anything that unholy to launch no matter what it cost with head office. They would cancel or restart development first.

Just as you said "The worst is yet to come" Origin popped up an ad for the new battlefront dlc on my screen.

Never knew about the Driver 3 thing.

"Funnily enough, the quality of the graphics matches the difficulty of the level." Hahahah, wow. They are either next-level reviewing on concepts in a way I've never even considered, or they're stringing random gaming-related words into sentences, I can't tell which.

That Driv3r stuff dropped my jaw. Thanks for turning the page back and uncovering it. Overall great work!

that official reply from the writer was stupid, he could've literally just said "we were told that the review copy was an early build and to disregard all bugs/jank as they would be addressed and fixed for the final release, so we reviewed it as such, blame atari, not us"

Having that face from the Assasin's Creed game appear was comedy gold.

"We're never advertise with you again if you post it!' '...You never advertised with us before...' "...I...uh... we'll NEVER EVER advertise with you again!'

In the 90s, the Italian distributor for Nintendo would print GameBoy catalogues using screenshots from the SNES ports of games, and then colorized green. I think that's when I lost faith in mankind.

The amount of confusion around "machine code" and assembly in the video as well as the comments is hilarious

Mario sure has come a long way from a black box with a letter A

A gaming channel that talks about stuff I don't already know. All your videos are interesting as fuck. Keep up the good work

This video is the primary source for anything regarding the "Driv3rgate" scandal. That's actually kind of sad, since this shouldn't have to hold that responsibility.

Really liking these videos Larry!

I remember Driv3rgate, but I didn't realise it had been purged from the Internet so well. I'm as impressed as I am disgusted.

DRIV3R gate needs to be made into a movie! It'd be the best live action drama comedy ever made!

I played Driver 3 for Xbox at the time. It wasn't glitchy for me but the AI was really bad. Still I actually liked it and had fun because it was the first driver to let you use weapons. My guilty pleasure! haha.

If it's any consolation, there is actually now a section of Driv3r's Wikipedia page devoted to Driv3rgate.

I’m doing a class where we write assembly code (which is sort of the step between machine code and high level human-friendly code like c++.) If I wrote a game in machine code I’d probably brag about it too because that’d be hard. But I’d brag about it in the same way I might brag about any of the useless things I do

Thanks for talking about drivergate

13:13 Atari rushed the game to market... LOL! They learned NOTHING from E.T and Pacman.. You know the games they rushed to Market and nearly destroyed their company? Just a few years ago they did it again with Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's blows my mind that in this day and age major came companies continue to make this mistake over and over again.

In the part about Krazy Kong you mention the claim in the advert that it was 100% machine code. This claim was made because, at the time, many games were released, partially or completely, in BASIC (an interpreted language) which made them a lot more 'clunky'. Machine code is much more time consuming to program in, and much harder to de-bug, but resulted in a faster and more responsive game. Of course there are good and bad machine code programs too......

This channel often feels like the only real place left for British gaming memories and views. I miss UK Resistance.

11:15 The worst is yet to come? Well indeed, I instantly got an Fortnite ad after you said that...

At least in those days you could take a crap game back to the shop for a refund... no questions asked... up to 2 weeks, a full 14 days after purchase. I know people that got games, completed them and took them back for a full refund. It wasn't until around the launch of the 360 or possibly the PS3 that the refund policy changed.

6:54 it is dead colorful, it’s so dead, there is no color

Guessing Krazy Kong wouldn't run in lower case because the ladders appear to be made of capital 'H's... Funny also how people complain about modern review sites overrating games when paid for reviews were so blatent in the old days.

I find this really funny because I only played the first Driver, but ended up with a rental copy so damaged that every other frame skipped, so I never touched the Driver series.

Stop adding -gate to the end of everything, people. It was called the Watergate scandal because that was the name of the fucking hotel, not because -gate is the go to suffix for every scandal.

I remember Div3rgate being talked about in Russian gaming mags of all things! It really was quite the mess and I am glad you made a video on it.

Oh man seeing old magazines like that brought me back to the demo era. When I was a kid I was trying for all the magazines so I could play the demo discs.

Let's all laugh at an industry that never learned anything (teeheehee?)

If Larry was a superhero Peter Molyneux would be his arch nemesis.

"the jerkiness of the gameplay is quite minimal" ...it's a static image I don't know why, but I stopped everything I was doing, and just laughed

What’s this about the left bat in Pong being accused of having soggy knees? Seriously, why have I never heard about this until now?! 😫

I remember a very different Driver 3... sure, it had some issues, especially regarding the physics engine, or lack thereof, but the quality overall quality and glitches shown in the video were something I never encountered. I have the PS2 version.

I didn't even know there was a third Driver game until just now. I make my friend play terrible games all the time while I watch and laugh. I think I need to buy this now.

I never knew about these scandals before. Thank you for exposing them, Guru Larry. Please do a special episode about Digital Homicide.

That Drivergate stuff is some serious Big Brotheresque levels of revisionism.....

Moral of the Story: Don't sell shitty, buggy, incomplete, glitchy, system bricking games to the public! (also helps to NOT attack the customers who purchased said crappy games when they comment on how crappy the crap has been crapped.)

I wonder if the dislikes from this video can be traced back to IP's of disgruntled ex Babel employees with vendettas.

The strangest thing is I absolutely rinsed Driv3r on the xbox but didnt encounter any issues with this at all.

Larry finally figured out the RU-vid algorithm. I've been watching his videos for almost a year and only now am watching these old gems.

“Machine code” is actually much much harder to work with than a modern programming language. Machine code is used for better technical performance. That said, I’m pretty sure all NES games were written in machine code.

It's crazy lol I haven't played Driver in years, and my memory is shit, but one thing I always instantly recognize and remember. Jericho, that trench coat and dual sawed off shotguns will be something I seemingly never forget. I'll have to keep that in mind if I end up with dementia, maybe it can help me somehow😂

Loving the intros to these episodes, so many great Amiga gaming memories... Shame that there isn't much talk about Amiga games on RU-vid, thank god for you Guru Larry!

I genuinely never heard about all the controversy surrounding Driv3r and those two high scoring reviews. I do however remember the insane amount of hype behind it, which just seemed to fizzle out and disappear once the game was released, I had no idea it was THAT bad. I'd heard stories but... Jesus Christ was that broken.

Everyone better grab a copy of this video while they can. Ya never know when Future or Reflections could strike again and bury the past!

Going back and rewatching the Fact Hunt playlist in hopes that it will invoke a new video to be posted from a healthy and happy Guru Larry Jr. 😄👍 I remember when I was young I used to hate how cool Atari and NES game covers looked compared to in game appearances, for a time I would judge games on hot different they looked and felt compared to the cover.😅

To think this guy has less than 250,000 subs since October 2010 is frankly criminal.

By far one of the most interesting videos I've seen in a while. Must have taken a while doing the research. Excellent work, mate.

I just found one. In 2008. Mystic Software made ports for 3 Humongous Entertainment games(under contract with Majesco and Atari) for the Wii. After it's release, it was found out that they had used ScummVM for porting without mentioning the VM team(which lead to an investigation). Not only that, but they broke Nintendo's policy by using an open-source software. It was settled out of court, ending with Mystic paying legal fees, destroying every copy of those games, and donating money to the Free Software Foundation.

Plot twist: Writers of Your Sinclair and Sinclair user are now working for the IGN.

I'm not at all surprised by the revelation of "pay for play" reviews with guaranteed "9 out of 10" scores. I'm certain this still happens today and frequently. I play games that have been reviewed highly and I wonder if the reviewer even played the game they reviewed. Of course it would be one thing if it were just a matter of taste and personal preference but, seriously, I can't believe it's the same game they're talking about and I'm playing. Trusted reviews are quite hard to find in my experience (over 30 years worth). The Driv3r incident is new to me. I'm amazed they were able to bury it so effectively in the Age of the Web. Makes you wonder what else has been buried... I never played any of the Driver games but the whole story sure sounds familiar and seems to be repeated rather more often than most people talk about. For some reason corruption seems to be expected these days. Aren't corporations great? I bet the programmers were ticked off and embarrassed as heck.

Wow, i used to send reviews to Future around ‘99 i was after a job there! I also owned a ZX Spectrum and can say with fair reason, that many many of it games where utter GASH and to read the way old CG magazines used to write about the ‘mind-blowing’ graphics is really charming to me. These vids are awesome Larry, you’re helping preserve all these lost tales of the crazy and wholly less regulated age of gaming.

"They went full Chris Bores." You never go full Chris Bores.

Something similar to to the whole drivergate thing was Toms Hardware and their dishonest review of the Geforce 4 Ti 4400 and 4600. They have managed to almost completely scrub it from the internet and since it happened 20 years ago, most of the younger folks have no idea it happened. NVidia was getting ready to launch the Geforce 4 TI series. ATI typically had better hardware but many games were optimized for NVidia and ATI didn't have the best drivers but there was stiff competition. The Radeon 8500 was pretty popular and the R300 chip(Radeon 9700pro) was just around the corner and there was much speculation that it would be the new performance king. Tom's Hardware was plastered with NVidia banner ads and they started posting the most loving reviews of the new high end NVidias. The benchmarks were very impressive and it seemed like a no brainier. Then it released. The fan was an absolute screamer, my friend had a computer room upstairs and I could hear it downstairs in the kitchen if the television was off. It sucked power, ran hot, and was ridiculously loud. Then people started noticing that They couldn't replicate the benchmark numbers that Tom's Hardware posted. Neither could the other review sites. As it got mentioned in the forums, mods began banning people. Not just new accounts but ones with 5000 or even 100000+ posts. If someone asked "Where is [insert name]", they would be permabanned. You could no even allude to there being an issue or you would be banned. They were banning people who were on other forums talking about it. The ones who used the same name on multiple sites. It was bad. They scattered most of the community. We would chat on DSLReports and sites like that and people were getting banned for the most petty reasons. They quietly took their false reviews down and I was surprised to see that about 5 or 6 years later, I could find almost nothing about it. There is even less now. This was a big deal in the pc gaming and pc builders circles but there is little to nothing left out there. I still to this day avoid that site like the plague. Also, the Radeon 9700pro own the performance crown over the TI4600. The Radeon8500 was close enough in performance to the TI4400 while being much cheaper that it was the popular mid-tier.

This is so weird... I played Driv3r religiously growing up, but I only ever played freemode. And I ran into barely any of these bugs, and barely any bugs at all. My friends and I played this game as our way of play GTA, since that game was banned in our household. I still love the game to this day

I think the first review of Driv3r I saw was one of those corrupted 9/10 reviews. I got the game the week it came out. I loved it. It was buggy sometimes but ran well 95% of the time. Free drive mode + cheats + being 11 when I got it = a good experience. May 27, 2020 8:19 am

The on-foot controls in Driv3r on the PC, both with mouse/keyboard and with controller, are so absolutely awful, you'd think the devs were asleep for twenty years.

Thanks, Stu...and thanks, Larry! You've helped make sure a lot more people know about this garbage.

You had no reason to throw Angry Joe under the bus but i'm extremely happy you did it anyway