Leaked Nintendo Debugging Tapes 

I tested in three departments while at Nintendo between 1999 and 2003. We used the same tapes over and over again, but we also erased them regularly using an electromagnet to keep image quality decent and data secure. I hated using them, but tapes were the best way to document errors at the time. I'm kinda surprised any of them made their way out of the building.

Some of those look like they might be horrible to debug or even reproduce with just the tape as a reference. I can feel the pain of the programmers who had to fix these.

I worked as a tester for Nintendo right before the Wii launch I can confirm this is how they still did it around 2005-2006. A tester had a VCR hooked to the console recording at all times, if they wanted to transfer something they would record it to a second tape. Handheld consoles like the Nintendo DS required special setups so you would play until you found something, then use the recording unit to do what you needed to, take your tape and fill out your bug report. Reports were generally steps on exactly how to reproduce the issue. During my era the VHS tapes were digitized and attached to the bug, then everything was translated into japanese and sent to the developers at Nintendo of Japan in most cases.

20:44 seeing that early Zelda portrait in Melee was cool to see!

I just recreated the Pikmin bug report and it still works. Nothing in that clip seems out of place, either, so it's basically final gameplay.

I itemised every single glitch, because I am lame... correct me in comments. 1:36 - GoldenEye 007 (N64) - Spam watch menu left/right to crash the game 1:47 - GoldenEye 007 (N64) - Load too many enemies/objects to crash the game 2:09 - GoldenEye 007 (N64) - Load too many shots / shrapnel / sounds(?) to crash the game 2:28 - Blast Corps (N64) - Destroy target building whilst sliding and the mission end screen doesn't show 3:17 - Blast Corps (N64) - Bounce on top of the stationary loader doesn't end the level, do repeatedly to crash the game (I think the tester will be holding down some buttons, or something) 3:47 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Walrus Cove, Car - Enemy AI goes crazy whilst trying to avoid you facing the wrong way 4:07 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Quicksand fall geometry clip out of bounds to crash the game 4:21 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Credits crash! 4:30 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) - Jago soft-lock if killed mid-air 4:57 - Donkey Kong Land (Game Boy) - Soft-lock if hit whilst hanging 5:06 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - General Golgov game crash 5:27 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Wrong room loaded after item collection(?), soft lock 5:39 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Corruption when entering and exiting Odd Job lair 5:46 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) - Jago crash when going invisible and dying simultaneously 5:56 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) - Another Jago crash when going invisible and dying simultaneously 6:07 - Donkey Kong Land (Game Boy) - Double-unloading-tile corruption when collecting K O N G letter whilst defeating an enemy 6:18 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Corruption when entering and exiting Save Game menu 6:28 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) - Wrong Z-buffering indeces set on the chimney in Killer Wu stage 6:42 - GoldenEye 007 (N64) - Looks like the Frigate level unload behind you, if you shoot the wall (and I guess create more objects in memory?) It doesn't load back in if you don't turn to face it. 7:00 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Unjoined geometry in mountain in Rocket Belt Class B 1, allows clipping out of bounds 7:35 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Poor collision mesh applied to Mount Mariomore in Rocket Belt Class A 1, allows clipping out of bounds 8:34 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Sent out of bounds if attacked with bubble 8:43 - Blast Corps (N64) - Resetting game after finishing level, without returning to the menu, loses progress (don't know if it's the same video, but after the second attempt at finished the level the game goes crazy??) 10:18 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Erasing File B erases both files (lol how did they miss this!) 10:43 - Donkey Kong Land (Game Boy) - Simultaneously dying and collecting a gold token duplicates the item 11:16 - Blast Corps (N64) - Incomplete video, probably crash on foot whilst trying to do something 11:29 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Alcohol reference in First Party game 11:39 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Incomplete video, probably corrupted text when interacting with someone whilst too many objects on screen 12:02 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - MANY BUGS: empty photo score when crashing on target pad with no photos taken; landing impact 20/10; ring score 30/20; landing accuracy 1 33/30 12:40 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Looks like the game can't figure out whether the dealer has 21 or 30 (ace can be 1 or 10) and crashes 12:57 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Sound goes silent, player 1 loses control, and other weird bugs if hit when "final lap" sound plays (?) 13:22 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Horrendous fog particle effect lag (this was never fixed actually) 13:44 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Horrendous waterfall effect lag 13:56 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Ring can be collected during failure sequence, other weird effects 14:11 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) - Soft lock if game paused when destroying Meca Hawk 15:26 - PilotWings 64 (N64) - Can receive penalties when hitting the roof of a structure, can clip through structure 15:45 - PilotWings 64 (N64) - No fuel is lost when hovering (incomplete video again?) 16:00 - PilotWings 64 (N64) - Probably losing all pilot control after hitting the ground 16:28 - Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (N64) - AI launches to end of stage on contact(??) 16:50 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Poor balloon spawning in overworld after talking to Taj 17:06 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - Opening TT status window whilst exiting status window leaves the overlay on top of other character dialogue 17:31 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) - AI drives miles off the course. See mini-map. 18:00 - Blast Corps (N64) - Incomplete out of bounds clip, soft lock 19:12 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) - TJ-Combo can't be low-hit when holding Cyclone 19:40 - James Bond 007 (Game Boy) - Iqbal stun lock 19:55 - Super Smash Bros. Melee (GC) - Character selection defaults to Dr. Mario, and scrolling far left or right on the selection screen reveals the hidden character. Also lol at early pronounciation of "Fox". 20:52 - Pikmin (GC) - Get ejected out of bounds by landing on top of giant tokens 21:54 - Mario Kart Super Circuit (GBA) - Corrupted ghost characters when trading between English and Japanese game copies 23:08 - NBA Courtside 2002 (GC) - "Scrolling gears" sound effect is never stopped when changing menu options, and overlaps infinitely 23:53 - SSBM (GC) - Camera goes mental when transforming between Zelda and Sheik 24:08 - MKSC (GBA) - Bad track checkpoint placement, can skip (also that's a new WR!) 24:49 - NBA Courtside 2002 (GC) - Player can continue running out of bounds when activated off the ball

This watches like a tape of some group of early speedrunners in the late 90s sharing glitches and other strats they found before they could be circulated online

I currently work in QA and found myself nodding my head along to the majority of these. It's really interesting how the types of issues you'd see in a game, and how they are found/achieved, really has not changed over time. For example take the Diddy Kong Racing issue at 17:10: The player re-opens TT's UI after selecting to close it during the quit out, as the quit out will then close it automatically per code; then once the UI is called again when talking with Tah, both TT's and Taj's UI elements overlap as the data from TT's UI is still 'open' somewhere in data. Absolute classic.

23:35. interestingly, the icons of the GameCube controller appears to match up with that one early pre-Spaceworld design, with the start button being on the D-pad's spot

It's so interesting to see games from my childhood just bricking themselves so unexpectedly. I miss the games industry having to push out completed titles, tested and all

Game list: TAPE ONE 1:37 - GoldenEye 007 (N64) 2:29 - Blast Corps (N64) 3:49 - Diddy Kong Racing (N64) 4:31 - Killer Instinct Gold (N64) 4:59 - Donkey Kong Land 3 (GB) [all GB games played via Super Game Boy] 5:06 - James Bond 007 (GB) 5:48 - Killer Instinct Gold 6:08 - Donkey Kong Land 3 6:19 - James Bond 007 6:31 - Killer Instinct Gold 6:43 - GoldenEye 007 7:03 - Pilotwings 64 (N64) 8:36 - Diddy Kong Racing 8:45 - Blast Corps 10:20 - Pilotwings 64 [this indicates that most if not all of this game's bits are from the Japanese version] 10:46 - Donkey Kong Land 3 11:18 - Blast Corps 11:31 - Pilotwings 64 11:41 - James Bond 007 12:03 - Pilotwings 64 12:43 - James Bond 007 [this casino's rigged, I'm outta here] 12:59 - Diddy Kong Racing 13:24 - Pilotwings 64 16:30 - Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (N64) [rubberband AI: you're doing it wrong] [loved this game, though I found the sewer boss irritating and could never beat the palace boss] 16:52 - Diddy Kong Racing [apparently, Taj's text in the first clip isn't used in the released game] 18:01 - Blast Corps 19:13 - Killer Instinct Gold 19:41 - James Bond 007 TAPE TWO 19:57 - Super Smash Bros. Melee (GCN) [Zelda's character select pose, briefly seen in the first clip, isn't used in the released game] 20:53 - Pikmin (GCN) 21:56 - Mario Kart: Super Circuit (GBA) 23:10 - NBA Courtside 2002 (GCN) 23:55 - Super Smash Bros. Melee 24:09 - Mario Kart: Super Circuit [apparently, the course music is using different instruments than in the released game] 24:50 - NBA Courtside 2002

24:10 you can still do this in the finished version. Funny how they forgot to fix it before release unless this was made after Super Circuit's release

I applied as a Game Tester at Nintendo Germany in '99 or 2000 and was invited to the then German HQs of Nintendo in Großostheim (transl.: great east home), which is not really great, but rather rural, provincial and ugly. And the working environment for the testers was a super slim but deep room without windows (iirc) . It was a disillusioning experience. After the first meeting I got a second invitation but I kindly refused because I didn't want to move to this place and work in that room. The town was horrible as was the office for the testers. But yeah, I am pretty sure these are real deal tapes because the whole point of game testing was finding and documenting bugs and issues.

I appreciate that you give the quick intro then let the footage do the talking for itself. No obnoxious bullshit, skits, or commentary between clips. No forced "reaction" shots. Nothing but what the title says there is and what I came here for.

never in my wildest dreams would I think that I would enjoy something as benign as vintage debugging tapes. This is so rad.

20:44 Unused portrait render of Zelda???

This is how the Pilotwings glitch in 8:05 was solved: if you touch anything that isnt floor with any part of your body that aren't your feet its an instant failure and you must restart the stage. Its really interesting how i played those games a lot and never saw anything like this, even those who we all know at the time how a glitch was about to happen at every corner. Goldeneye and Killer Instinct Gold are the true surprise here.

3:30 this one really illustrates how fun and exciting bug-testing must be

I believe they may have had some kind of dual-VCR dubbing type setup where long stretches of gameplay were captured on one, and then the relevant portions were recorded onto a secondary tape for submission to whoever it needed to go to. The training tape you have there labeled “master” is pretty interesting, particularly if it was meant to be distributed to many bug testers.

24:10 who would've thought that the Frappe Snowland checkpoint glitch was a problem in Super Circuit too Doesn't seem like Intelligent Systems managed to completely iron it out though seeing how Flap times usually go

Super cool thing I picked up on: Zelda had a totally different character select portrait in the build of Melee shown here! She's bent over and pointing instead of looking off to the side as she does in the final game.

I just realized that a lot of this footage would be transferred from another VHS machine, causing even more quality loss So the way I think a lot of this footage is recorded, involves 2 VHS machines, where one machine records continuously to catch spontaneous errors or crashes, and the other machine is used to cherry pick clips from the first machine or for easily reproducible errors

This part of gaming archeology is my absolute favorite. It's like how archeologists love going through ancient 'trash' because it's just perfectly raw. It's just so natural and exciting, you really feel the day in a life, you know there's paperwork, a ticket, this was forwarded on to a programmer to try and resolve before launch and a full severity chart, etc. I'm also super curious if those bug reports were people in japan working to resolve bugs OR if this was an American testing team submitting bugs after translation. (After all many times the English version fixes a lot of bugs found by players). Is the training video from "The Super Mario Club" What was their process, etc. If the first one is a training video I wonder if that was from Japan/HQ whereas the second tape was American testers. Do we have any context for where these tapes were suspected to come from? Also If I ever learn Time Travel I'd love to apply for a job like this to blend in (I'd know enough glitches in early Pokemon, that I could prove my chops)

So that skip in mario kart super circuit on koopa Beach, was known about and nintendo didn't fix it

Zeldas portrait looks different in melee that's cool

The Pikmin debugger really got creative there.

This is a amazing descovery, i love when rare stuff like this gets found!

Feels like a creepy pasta. I love it.

Goldeneye literally broke with too many NPCs so of course they would cap them cleverly in the final builds

I worked in the video games industry from 2006 to 2009, so I know how painful can beta-testing be... You have to play the same parts again and again, while constantly taking notes to be able to explain exactly what you did before the bug happened.

Really hope more tapes like these leak out for all to see. Its so fascinating to see games breaking at seemingly innocent actions like pausing the game glitches it out when backing out of the pause menu. Games breaking because there's too many NPC's on screen or the audio just becoming choppy and sounding like you're trying to emulate the game on hardware that's not powerful enough.

This is awesome! Thank you for preserving these, and I hope you consider uploading the uncompressed copies to the Internet Archive! You guys do so much for preservation.

The VHS degredation is indistinguishable from N64's natural anti aliasing

Even the developers of the most iconic games make mistakes. Kind of reassuring.

What I find fascinating is just the genuine work on these tapes. Seeing frame drops in VHS footage is... not that I usually associate the vintage look with... When I think video games and VHS, I imagine carefully staged commercials or infomercials that only show the games in a positive light. It's easy to forget how much debugging goes on before a game becomes presentable, let alone marketable...

Seeing some goldeneye beta testing footage was amazing. Thank you for sharing with us brother!

All about this is a time capsule. Love it.

With modern day capture cards can you imagine the video quality of debug videos today? wow

It's the original "What the hell was that? Someone clip it quick!"

Thank-you for making these clips available! 😎👍

There's something really haunting about these tapes. The lack of commentary and the game basically going "uh oh, that wasn't supposed to happen" reminds me of the vibes of many analog horror videos.

Absolutely crazy to see debugging material like this. Wonder if there's more like this somewhere in the wild that's still in tact.

It's so cool that these rare tapes exist, let alone that we can see what's on them!

You get THE coolest stuff my friend. Thanks for sharing this with everyone.

This is fascinating af I never even considered this being a thing that existed. It's so funny and odd seeing them officially break the games the we try to now for experimenting. I was half jokingly thinking what if we see insane beta content from this and then oh you know... Just the motherfucking dam island with a boat taken to it. That is absolutely fucking insane. I never thought I'd see that ever.

these are fascinating af, super loving the content!

Thank you for archiving all this online! It is interesting to see inside ot the development of certain games, especially back then when it was much more scarse.

This was really interesting, thank you for preserving them!

How does Forest if Illusion keep finding this stuff?? I love it

I don't usually like the VCR preservation videos but this one was awesome.

Awesome video! One funny things is I'm pretty sure a variation of the shortcut bug in Mario Kart Super Circuit still exists in the final release for Shy Guy Beach.

Really interesting! So glad these have been found! Thanks for sharing!

Not too much mindblowing beta content in these tapes, but it's interesting nonetheless. I did notice one little interesting tidbit being Zelda has a different character portrait in Melee 20:44

Thanks for some of the behind the scenes on some of our favorite childhood focuses for fun.

4:28 The date on the "CODE" line says "29/08/97 09:53" with a version of 1.12.30

I would recommend using an SVHS deck for playback and the Magnavox MWR10D6 for DVD recording, then rip that. Hopefully you can find a PAL VCR for that 3rd tape. I recommend using a GoDVD magic box to convert to NTSC and then record that.

Brings back some memories of when I was back in there testing over summers in college. Learned a lot of valuable skills the made me a stronger developer later.

This is amazing to me, thanks for uploading these!!!

This channel does some fantastic work

Now I'd like to see dedicated fans try to recreate these bugs and see if they got fixed 😂 Great find and video tho, can't wait to see the Majoras Mask footage!

I wish you timestamp the different games so both we could go to the games you want to see glitches for and also so we can tell what games are being played

That rubber banding at the end is absolutely insane

this gives off crazy found footage creepypasta vibes

I managed to notice ONE difference in the games shown. In smash melee character selection Ice Climbers had a dash between there name but this is removed in the final game.

loving the mario kart super circuit one thats basically a speedrun

Thank you for letting us be a part of this piece of history

20:43 Oh wow, Zelda's portrait is completely different!

24:10 - LOL They found a speedrunning strat before the game even released!

Never done bug testing for Nintendo but I have done it for a few games in the past some very big games that required NDAs to he signed, one of the biggest games I tested required me to get a vga capture card and a second pc to use ot and record. We had to record all game play, make notes about if x was fun, felt balanced, too short, too long, try break things etc. The card was supplied by the company that I subcontracted through, had to be sent back after, but pc I had to buy myself, they did supply video editing software, extra hard drives including a hot swap bay (if it was a short clip we could upload it, but if it was long or lots of then we would send them the hard drives in after making a backup. Was a great experience id tested a few smaller games before then, and later that game became huge af. One of the worst parts about testing especially in the alpha stages of some large games wad the NDA, I am sure I could contest a few of them especially the perpetual ones that never expire, and of course the security around some of them, a couple required regular and random security checks, making sure you weren't emailing anyone, not recording on another device etc.

@Hard4Games: the last one about Mario kart superciruit, they know about the lap skip glitch, but they did not properly fix it, so on the track shown, they fix it on the inside, but the forgot to fix it on the outside because the lap skip still work on the finial release of the game, just by doing it on the outside of the track, instead of the inside, some other track it work both dirrection, for lap skip.

24:30 First Speedrun attempt

The Pilotwngs 64 one at 13:24 made me legitimately laugh out loud. This is super fascinating!

Wow what a treasure trove of footage! ALL never-before-seen footage of classic games WHILE they were in-development

Fab! Hopefully we can see the training tape someday!!!!

A speed runner is going to watch this and develop a crazy new glitch strat for one of these games.

22:01-23:01 it’s actually nice just to see debugging to test something actually worked ha! This proves that sometimes they do give feedback with passes

This is some good content!

Interesting to think about people play testing these old games and the coders reviewing the tapes, and now we get to actually see it.

24:11 And this, this is Mario Kart Super Circuit Ultra Shortcut Revolution ** We're Finally Landing starts playing **

This is just so fascinating

It's an expensive and decently complicated setup, but look into a Domesday Duplicator!!! Would be awesome to have your LDs and VHS preserved as 1:1 copies, bypassing all these awful HDMI upscalers and allowing you to do full TBC emulation in the digital realm.

Amazing video

Watching leaked debugging tapes is better than having someone's bathroom bugged and watching them take a leak.

Awesome VHSs

24:11 kind of crazy to see this infamous skip in VHS quality

Interesting to see the Debuggers used one of the dual controller setups for Goldeneye.

The speed running community is going to have a field day with these tapes.

This is so freakin cool!!

lol the Pilotwings ones were kinda hilarious!

Amazing video.

Very rare to come across something like this. Great insight into a world, behind the scenes...

I loved all of it, coded messages

I'm wondering how they did stuff like this did they have a VHS constantly recording until they ran into a bug and then they dubbed it over to a second tape so that they can have just the section they wanted to show? It's not like nowadays where our consoles are constantly recording and we can just say hey capture that last 30 seconds

I was waiting for him to start slapping some bass

That goldeneye pause music 🤌

5:19 Did that one even crash the Super Gameboy? The border gets corrupt too.

8:24 Looks like the playtesters had fun with this glitch

Now you talk! Just in time after I removed snow outdoor thank Tony. Will be interesting as ever.

24:10 reminds me of Wario Stadium [N64]

Oldschool way to do it!!