Obvious Beta

10/10 It's Okay.

"Playing this game is like driving a beat-up old car. You're always afraid it's going to break down."

— The Angry Video Game Nerd on Super Pitfall for NES (1986)

Before releasing a product, it must be tested. Software is tested in stages; while the exact number and terminology varies between companies, they typically include two phases called "alpha" and "beta". Alpha testing is done by the developers themselves, while beta testing is done by a specific, outside quality assurance team. In late phases of beta testing (this phase rarely called "gamma", "open beta", or "release candidate"), select members of the public are allowed to test the game. During alpha and beta tests, testers seek out bugs, note them, and forward them to the parties responsible for fixing them. Those developers then either fix the bug, delay the fix due to whatever time or business constraints, or declare that it "will not be fixed". Ideally, testing will last long enough to fix the most noticeable bugs.

However, sometimes, this isn't the case. Software may be rushed for any number of reasons, which may include: A holiday release, desire to compete with another company's product, a studio's closing, or outright laziness. When this happens, testing can be shortened or outright skipped. This results in buggy, unstable programs that no one likes.

The scale of how much bugs affect a game varies. Sometimes a game is glitchy or missing things, but still playable, albeit possibly harder to play than it should be. Sometimes, the game is nigh-unplayable. The developers may release patches later, so sometimes the glitches are worse at launch than they are after release.

While the name "Obvious Beta" implies that the game has only undergone alpha testing, sometimes it might not ever have had even that.

Sometimes, this is just Executive Meddling or Troubled Production; different people do marketing and development, after all. Other times, though, some companies may have no choice. Not all companies have enough time, discipline, or money to go through all the development stages for what they're planning, so they have to release the product and hope enough people will buy it that they'll have the resources to perfect the product later. The early access model is a way of doing this by essentially allowing any paying customer to be a "public beta" tester.

When reading outside sources, remember that different companies use different terms to refer to different stages of testing. What we're calling "beta" might be another company's "alpha" if they use the term to refer to a shippable product that's feature-complete but still has a lot of issues.

If a game's single-player mode is fine but the multiplayer isn't, please put the example under Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode. See Perpetual Beta for when the developers no longer have an excuse to update things (or no excuse not to have updated them, in some cases). If the media or system has been in protracted development, and the developers have been sitting on it for a long while, it may result in Implementing the Incomplete. This trope can also overlap with Porting Disaster if it occurs when software is converted to run on a different platform.

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Examples:

• Video Games (Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Sega, etc.)

Apple

• It's a common sentiment among Apple loyalists that often the first iteration of a product, or the first major redesign, is somewhat of a public beta, and most of the bugs are ironed out for the next minor revision or x.1 release. Examples include the antenna issues of the iPhone 4, fixed for the 4S, and the first generation Apple Watch, dubbed the "Series 0", which was slow and clunky, before getting replaced by the much better Series 1.
• Mac OS X spent years in development and missed numerous scheduled release dates to the point of being suspected as Vaporware, so when version 10.0 finally came out customers were disappointed with the slow interface, frequent kernel panics, lack of DVD playback and CD burning (present in Classic Mac OS), and spotty printer compatibility. Version 10.1 remedied many of the issues, but it wasn't until version 10.2 "Jaguar" that OS X was able to match the speed and stability of Mac OS 9 and Apple dropped development of Classic Mac OS.
• iOS 6 Maps was Apple's attempt to create a native navigation app for iOS 6, replacing the venerable Google Maps. They created it and released it four months ahead of schedule, surprising even Google in the process. But the app didn't work like it should have: entire cities were renamed, called hospitals, or covered by clouds in satellite view, some places were flat-out missing (replaced with blocks of solid color), and the maps contained some strange, incredibly tall mountains, among other nonsensical and inaccurate geography. Its route planning was sketchy at best (sometimes advising users to drive on train tracks and water), it didn't have public transit routes, and it had minimal coverage outside the U.S. It was clearly rushed into production without a second look. Although it has since been improved tremendously, it remains one of Apple's most visible failures. To maker matters worse, Apple removed the Google Maps app which had previously been a part of iOS. Google showed how it should be done by making a freely downloadable app of its own for iOS 6 in response. iPhone users even put off updating their phones to iOS 6 to give Google time to make it.
• iOS 8.0.1 was pulled a mere half hour after going live. It was touted as a fix for, among other things, the Health app bugs that prevented HealthKit-enabled apps from going live on launch day. Instead, it broke several important features, including the phone itself.
• Apple Music was the company's attempt at a music subscription service that would revolutionize the field in the same way that the iTunes Store had revolutionized the Digital Distribution of music over a decade earlier. As longtime Apple fan Jim Dalrymple enumerates, it came with a whole bunch of bugs and glitches. It would only add parts of albums to users' libraries when they requested the whole, randomly mixed up album and playlist contents, and had a poor and unintuitive music recommendation program. It had relatively few features compared to services like Spotify. And people who tried to quit the service reported that doing so deleted large chunks of the music that they outright owned, with no apparent method of recovering it. Apple didn't even offer a public beta of it like they did with the then-upcoming iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan.
• The 4th-generation Apple TV and its new operating system, tvOS, lacked several capabilities of previous models. It didn't work with Apple's own Remote app, nor could it work with Bluetooth keyboards or iOS devices to enter text. There was no Podcasts app, which was weird since virtually every Internet-connected Apple product since 2007 could natively play Podcasts, and Apple's commercials and in-store demo loops clearly showed one on the home screen. Siri worked for finding movies and TV shows, but not for music. Many users also weren't pleased Apple inverted the interface to black text on a light grey background with no dark mode option, a feature of older models and every other streaming player and TV interface, given that TVs are more often used in darkened rooms. Many of these shortcomings were fixed in the following months.
• Early buyers of the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro had to deal with a laundry list of issues: inconsistent battery life, glitchy graphics cards, unresponsive keyboards, drive failure, speaker crackles, thermal throttling, and display malfuctions. The battery issues caused Consumer Reports to decline recommending them, the first time it had done so for an Apple laptop. While firmware updates remedied some of these issues, the infamous "butterfly" keyboard that was used in Apple's laptops was prone to key failure and could only be fixed by bringing it into the store. It was regarded as one of their most half-baked product features, and they went back to their old keyboard design in 2019.
• iOS 12.4 is famed for inexplicitly reintroducing the Sockpuppet Exploit, which was first found on 12.2 and patched on 12.3. It took them a month to issue a patch to fix it. Apple ended up being credited in the Unc0ver jailbreaking tool for their contribution to Jailbreaking.
• iOS 13 can be described as such, with plenty of bugs plaguing the OS from the start. Apple's attempts to patch the bugs somehow wound up introducing more.
• The release build of macOS Big Sur bricked older MacBook Pros.

Gamebooks

• The sixth volume of the GrailQuest series, Realm of Chaos, appears to have suffered from a severe lack of playtesting before being released. Several paragraphs don't link together properly, several characters give you clues and instructions that never come into play, and it's entirely possible to miss plot-relevant information by accidentally never encountering one character.
• The same goes for the sixth book of Way of the Tiger, whose central part is a twist of broken links and mismatched situations. If we add that even the ending was somewhat ambiguous, it is no wonder that the authors eventually came around releasing an edited version, plus a seventh book.

Pinball

• Interplay's Star Trek Pinball was badly rushed, filled with numerous bugs, a wildly unrealistic and inconsistent physics engine, and frequent game crashes. To add insult to injury, a note in the package mentions that the advertised network multiplayer feature was not completed in time for the game's release.
• Many new Stern Pinball games have been shipped with unfinished (albeit playable) software, and often extended periods of time pass before a code update is finally released. As of late, this trend has been decried by vocal enthusiasts and resulted in a fan movement called Where's the Code?. It was significant enough for Stern — who is notorious for not replying to anything on social media — to respond within hours. Many highly-requested updates have since been released, but the movement still speaks up whenever a game isn't getting the polish they think it deserves.
  • After languishing for years with no "Super Hero" Wizard Mode, few callouts, missing animations and rules, programmer Lyman Sheats produced several meaty code updates in his spare time to transform 2007's Spider-Man (Stern) into what some fans consider to be one of Stern's best releases. Later releases like The Walking Dead and Metallica got similar treatment.
  • 2008's Batman had several truncated modes which indicate the game was unfinished before it shipped. The most prominent example is "Final Challenge", the game's Wizard Mode, which was completely absent until a 2010 software update added one.
  • For 2015's WWE Wrestlemania, the only parts of the game that were available at launch were multiballs and modes pertaining to the tiny wrestling ring near the top, which meant that gameplay was extremely centralized in an area that doesn't even take up one-tenth of the playfield.
  • Batman '66 — meant as a Milestone Celebration for both Stern and the television show — was unplayable at the 2016 Pinball Expo due to incomplete software. It wasn't until November 2018 where the code version finally reached 1.00. Regardless, many players believe the last few months of updates up to that point have been incredible progress on a game that had felt relatively complete way before then.
  • Star Wars (Stern) was released with its Lightsaber Duel mode completely absent. Some of the modes and awards mentioned in promotional materials to be activated with the "F-O-R-C-E" drop target bank were also not present. There was also a glitch associated with Victory Multiball that causes it to last much longer than it should. Fortunately now that the code has reached 1.00, Stern has made good on their promises to add missing features, fix some of the most game-breaking bugs, and revamp the games' mini-wizard modes to better integrate them with their scenes.
• The 19 released tables of Magic Girl were built in a rush to stave off a lawsuit by crowdfunding backers, and shipped with software designed 3 years previously for a whitewood prototype with different hardware. The entire media package was complete, so the artwork and sound are beautiful, but the gameplay can be summed up as "the spinner kind of works".

Microsoft

• It starts early: Word 3.0 for the Macintosh was released in 1987 with about 700 bugs.
• MS-DOS 4.0 suffered massive problems on its release in 1988, including poor compatibility with older programs and a number of potential data corruption issues. This one wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault, though — IBM were the main culprits here, as they forced Microsoft to shoehorn in a number of OS/2 features at the last minute, then insisted on releasing the resulting product before adequate testing could be done. This lead to a subsequent 4.01 release which fixed the major problems. You'd think Microsoft would have learned something from this experience, but unfortunately it was just the beginning.
• Many, many versions of Windows have been hit with this over the years. To their credit, it's usually sorted out after the first few months, but upgrading to the new OS before at least Service Pack 1 is a bit of a gamble:
  • In Windows 95, the plug and play functionality was nicknamed "plug and pray" because it was that unreliable.
  • The original release of Windows 98 was horribly buggy, to the point of being physically unable to run longer than 49.7 days without crashing due to a serious timing bug — though this was a rarely seen problem, as the system was overwhelmingly likely to crash from any of a zillion other bugs long before such an uptime could be achieved. When Bill Gates and Chris Capossela unveiled it at COMDEX it blue-screen-of-deathed in front of everyone and on live TV when they tried to show off its fancy new plug-n-play feature. Take a look. It was so bad that they had to release a Second Edition just under a year later in order to patch everything. Admittedly, 98 SE went on to become the most stable and successful branch of the "9x" branch of Windows.
  • Legend has it that the Windows Me launch party coincided with the filing of the 500th urgent bug entered into the tracking system. This Windows version was so buggy that Microsoft abandoned it once Windows XP was released barely a year later, with all support for Windows Me being terminated on the same date as Windows 98 (July 11, 2006). Millennium Edition was said to have been Christmas Rushed after a consumer-oriented version of Windows 2000 codenamed "Neptune" was canned for whatever reason. If there's any silver lining to it, the NT-derived Windows XP born from the ashes of Neptune and the failure of Me would be fondly remembered as one of if not the best Windows release of all time.
  • Windows XP ran into several problems early in its life, which led to it being criticized by tech sites (though not to the same extent as Me). Later on, particularly upon the release of Service Pack 1, it became usable to the point that it had a longer lifespan than previous versions of Windows, and received a critical security update in 2019, five years after support for it was ended.
  • The infamous Vista stands out in that while it's not the worst OS in and of itself, its hardware requirements were much higher than its predecessor, which caused even basic tasks to run very slowly on most PCs at the time. This was exacerbated by Microsoft slapping "Vista capable" on a bunch of computers that only barely met those requirements, which led to a very poor UX. Another issue was that for various reasons a lot of old software had to be rewritten for Vista, whether it's due to incompatibility or Microsoft changing how drivers worked.
  • Windows 10 had Microsoft change to a Perpetual Beta model where they would push updates twice annually, as a public beta of sorts, and then fix any bugs discovered. Even so, the 2018 October update was more of an obvious beta than usual, as it had issues with completely breaking Edge and Windows Store apps, was blocked on many devices due to Intel Driver incompatibilities, and had the nasty habit of completely wiping your files.^note It was supposed to be a fix for an earlier bug, where moving a folder from one location to another would leave an empty copy of that folder in its original location - the fix was supposed to delete the phantom folders, but somehow targeted the live ones too. The update was soon pulled from Windows Update.
  • Windows 11 was also this at launch, though unlike the other Windows examples it was at the very least fairly solid stablity and security wise. However, it launched with a lot of documented bugs, including a fairly nasty (if admittedly quickly patched) one that severely hampered performance on Ryzen CPUs.The UI overhaul that was meant to be the major focus of the OS was still unfinished, with many remnants of older versions of Windows (including some UI elements that date back as far as Windows 3.1 from 1992) still being plainly visible. The UI also removed a lot of features, like not being able to see the time on secondary monitors and the inability to drag and drop items onto the taskbar. Android app support, one of the major selling points of the OS, was also missing at launch.
• Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac. Despite Word for Mac 5.0 being considered one of the best word processors of all time, Microsoft decided that it wanted the next Mac version of Word to share the same code-base as the Windows one, and thus they abandoned all traces for 5.0 in favor of a direct port from Windows. Not only did this alter the user interface into something that felt very out-of-place in Mac OS, it also produced a Porting Disaster that was so buggy, slow, and unstable that the Windows version ran faster under emulation.
• Developers at the small set of companies who were sold Microsoft's Visual Interdev when it was released were dismayed to see the splash screen labelled 1.0a and a large Alpha after the name. The actual product crashed regularly, lacked key documentation, generated non-functional code, and had unremoved warnings that it was not for public release.

Electronic Hardware

• Amazon has released quite a few poorly-tested products under its Fire brand:
  • The first version of the Kindle Fire tablet. It had a slow screen refresh rate; the device was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time; the web browser was clunky at best; and items on the screen were so small it was easy to accidentally select something you didn't want, to the point that one could struggle to log onto a website with two text fields and a button.
  • Amazon's second generation 4K Fire TV streaming player seemed rushed out to hit the market before the Apple TV 4 and Roku 4. Early customer reviews were scathing, noting that there was no support for surround sound other than for Amazon's own apps, Wifi frequently disconnected, and the remote would lag. Amazon reportedly assigned hundreds of employees to test the unit, and flew out engineers to test them in customers' homes. Amazon issued software updates over the next few months to fix the issues and give it features that were already present in the older model.
• Many cell phone models often fall into this trope, considering how many updated models come around that improve bugs and complaints about the previous models.
  • Nokia's 3650,^note Sold in North America as the Nokia 3600 with different frequencies to account for mobile networks in the States for one, was the butt of numerous complaints due to its unique circular keypad layout—games had to be adapted to account for the keypad, though it's just the matter of an alternate control scheme as seen in the mobile version of Red Faction. Some people actually found the keypad easier to use, though. Nevertheless, an updated variant of the phone, the 3660 (3620 for North American markets) was released with a conventional layout, and a 16-bit, 65K-color screen compared to the 3600's 4096-color display.
  • Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phone, released in 2016, got infamous for batteries that were prone to explosion, forcing a massive recall. It was so sudden and desperate that Samsung even told owners to stop charging their phones until replacement units could be issued, and then the replacement batteries turned out to be explosive as well becuase the entire battery design was flawed. The phone quickly earned the nickname "the (literal) bomb", Several countries, America included, air travel authorities actually declared it a hazardous material that was banned from flight (moving this phone across the ocean had to be done through a hazardous material shipping company), and its entire model's name became so poisonous that effective immediately Samsung permanently retired it (the Note 7 itself was a very good design and was rereleased the following summer with a new, non-exploding battery as the "Samsung Galaxy Note Fan Edition" in certain third-world countries).
  • Samsung's woes doesn't stop there, however. Their Galaxy Fold phone was hyped to be a cutting-edge demo of what flexible displays are capable of, but reviewers have complained about their Galaxy Folds' screens getting trashed within a day or two of use. It doesn't help that the Fold isn't a breeze to repair either. One of the most glaring issues with the first generation Galaxy Fold was there appeared to be a factory applied screen protector. When users tried to peel it off, it typically broke the screen.
• Certain LeapFrog Epic units (e.g. those sold in Walmart with DISA activation built in; Academy Edition units are unaffected) with firmware version 1.7.18 had a major bug where streaming videos are unable to play back properly regardless of site (e.g. YouTube, Netflix or Vimeo), if at all, which was egregious as parents usually bought the tablets for children to watch their favourite cartoons on. And to rub salt into the wound, LeapFrog couldn't be arsed to fix the issue and dismissed complaints as having nothing to do with the firmware itself and blaming it on some third-party app they don't support, much to the ire of parents who spent $50 or more on a defective product. That is, unless you were a tech-savvy person or a parent who happens to be a hacker — one workaround is to replace the default firmware with a signed backup of a later Academy Edition ROM.
• The initial version of the drum set that came with Rock Band had a design flaw where its battery case didn't hold the batteries in tight enough. Since a drum set is a device designed to be hit repeatedly, this meant that just a few seconds of playing could cause the batteries to jostle loose and make the drums stop working from ordinary use. The official solution was to fold a paper towel into the battery case to pack them in enough.

Home Computer Hardware

• Intel's series of blunders in the 90s and 2000s:
  • In an effort to combat cheaper alternatives to the Pentium line, Intel created the Celeron line. The first version was a Pentium 2 without the L2 cache... but excluding this caused such poor performance that people immediately wrote the line off. The next version included an L2 cache and, along with its overclocking capabilities, turned it into a Hyper-Competent Sidekick.
  • IA-64, released in 2001, was meant to be the 64-bit successor to the x86 architecture before AMD's own 64-bit architecture took that title. While the initial implementation in Itanium did have x86 backwards compatibility, it was through software emulation that couldn't manage to outperform the then 11 year old 80486. Even running its native IA-64 mode wasn't that much more competitive than the alternatives. Though it did manage to carve out a niche given that Intel not only made a second generation, but it continued to receive incremental improvements until 2017.
  • Around the same time, the Pentium 4 didn't look so good as the successor to the Pentium III. The first iteration, the Willamette core, couldn't outperform the Pentium III Talutin core clock for clock. The second iteration, Prescott, struggled to keep heat and power consumption down.
  • In terms of hardware, Intel's first generation of Optane SSDs has a really stupid failure mode: when the drive decides that it's life is over, it puts itself into read-only mode. This was good and all, but then Intel also made the drive brick upon reboot as part of the end of life payload. This was not disclosed clearly. When the first of these drives reached end of life (and these were very early SSDs from early in The New '10s, thus the NAND has relatively short lifespan), the drive put itself into read only mode... Which caused Windows to blue screen because suddenly it couldn't save new files to or update the swap file on the OS drive. And then windows locks up because it couldn't write the dump file to the OS drive. People then rebooted which caused the drives final death payload to kick in, and the PC ended up rebooting to BIOS which shows the SSD missing...
• AMD has also had some issues throughout its years:
  • The successor to the Athlon 64 series, Phenom, shipped with a hardware bug that could lock up the system in rare cases. The fix then was simply to disable the hardware with the bug, cutting into performance.
  • AMD's "Bulldozer" series of CPUs, known as the FX series, serve as an example. AMD introduced a new process with the Bulldozer, which involved pairing every two integer cores with a single floating-point core, and using an extended pipeline for instruction execution in order to ramp up the clock speed. Unfortunately, these new techniques failed to boost the new chip to Intel's performance standards, and in some applications, they actually performed worse than AMD's previous-generation Phenom II chips due to the penalty for branch mispredictions and cache misses. The second generation core developed with this process, "Piledriver", may not have quite caught up to Intel's performance levels, but it did fix many of the mistakes of Bulldozer and represents an objective improvement over AMD's older chips, albeit they still had a big flaw: an absolutely insane heat output that required an aftermarket cooler on the FX 8350 and onwards.

• Happened a few times in the video card industry:
  • NVIDIA had a rocky start with the GeForce FX series (named as a nod to 3dfx^note famed for Voodoo cards in Windows 9x days, and taken over by NVIDIA in 1999/2000, after the later Voodoo cards made them belly up), particularly with the GeForce 5800 card. It introduced the idea that a video card needed two expansion slots to cool. However, they didn't get the implementation down right as the affectionately named "dust buster" or "leaf blower" had a fan run very loud for marginal gains. It also didn't help the architecture of the FX series was a Christmas Rushed production version of the 3dfx Rampage project, and a core problem that didn't perform so well against ATi's Radeon 9000 series.
  • When NVIDIA released the GeForce 8 series and ATi released the Radeon HD 2000 series, there was some excitement over the new architecture topology. Except in both cases, only the flagship, high-end card and the one below it performed convincingly well against the previous generation. Everything below it couldn't really perform any better than previous generation cards that dropped to a similar price value. It took another spin of the GPU to get it right, which NVIDIA did at least with the well remembered G92 GPU debuted as the GeForce 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB. ATi's next generation, the HD 3000 series, also pulled off a similar feat.
  • NVIDIA's GeForce 400 series appears to be this. They were months too late with a new DirectX 11 card after AMD released theirs. While the GTX 480 did win the single GPU performance crown (the fastest card at the time was AMD's HD 5970, it was a two GPU card), it did so at the expense of heat and power consumption. The cooler was insufficient, causing it to reach temperatures up to the mid 90sC when 100C is "stop everything and cool the damn GPU now." Its design also led to memes that it could double as a grill. The kicker as well, in order to improve yields the GTX 480 wasn't even the fully realized GPU. With improvements to manufacturing tech and switching over to a vapor chamber cooler allowed the next generation, the GeForce 500 to perform better in every aspect to the 400 series, including having a fully realized GPU on the top-end.
  • Invoked with the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which is based on NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture. Rather than wait for the 22 nm process to be refined for full scale production, NVIDIA built the GPU using the tried and true 28 nm process. This way, any design issues either on the hardware or software side can be stamped out. Improvements were made, sans the move to 22 nm due to manufacturing issues, in the GeForce 900 series under the Maxwell 2 moniker. Despite this, it became one of the best selling entry-tier cards throughout the mid-2010s, and serve as many people's introduction to PC gaming.
• Samsung’s 840 Series Solid State Drives and its enterprise counterpart, the PM 851 had a firmware issue that drastically crippled write speeds as the drive filled up, often reaching hard-disk level speeds.
  • Samsung eventually released a fix to make the performance decent—but only for the 840 EVO. The 840 and PM 851 never received such a fix, and as a result are often found at bargain bins.
• OCZ's "Agility 3" series of SSD hard drives featured a controller that was prone to failure, which was fixed in the next generation.
• The first generation of Corsair's MP600 SSD has a extremely high failure rate as it was indeed a beta product.
  
  At the time the PCI Special Interests Group had just launched the PCIe 4 standard and the MP600 was Corsair's first drive that could take advantage of the speed offered by the new version of PCIe. The product was Christmas Rushed to coincide with AMD's launch of the Zen 3 CPUs which supported the new standard. Sales were great as the drive was elusive for months as batches sold out as soon as they appeared on the shelves.
  
  Then it was found out that the controller was prone to die from a heat death after several months of use. This even after endowing the SSD with a heatsink (which up until that point, few SSDs have). RMA requests started to pile up, and Corsair had to release a firmware that nerfs the drive speed to PCIe 1.0 standard (from 5.5Gbps to just a platry 900Mbps) to mitigate the issue. The problem was only solved with the next generation of MP600 drives.

Video Game Consoles & Handhelds

• The Milton Bradley Microvision is notable for being the first portable game console that allowed players to change what game it played. While obviously there's only so much you can expect from a gadget released in 1979, the Microvision suffered from some very basic flaws. The console itself had an extremely vulnerable CPU; you could brick the thing just by holding it as you walked across a carpet, since this could easily transfer a static shock that could fry the CPU beyond redemption. The games themselves weren't much better; the system itself had no screen, so the screens were built into the game cartridges as LCDs, which were prone to breaking. It's no wonder the Microvision was retired within three years of its release and gamers had to wait until 1989 for Nintendo to get it right.
• The Atari 5200 itself, especially its controller, designed by someone who had never played a video game before. The controller was the first to feature a pause button and the analog joystick was ahead of its time, but it didn't center itself and was prone to breakage. Working controllers are incredibly rare in the wild, though you can buy a special mod kit that makes the controller much more reliable if you're willing to shell out big bucks for it. Rumors are that, despite knowing about its numerous flaws, a senior engineer at Atari mandated the use of the 5200 controller because he owned the patent for it and would collect royalties for each one sold. The second revision of the Atari 5200 would lower the controller port count to 2 and change the onboard BIOS to accomodate the Atari 2600 adapter for the system; which had the effect of rendering some of its own games incompatible with the system unless the original BIOS program was reinstalled into the system.
• According to its creator Gunpei Yokoi, the Virtual Boy was only a proof-of-concept prototype when Nintendo halted its development because they wanted to devote all of their hardware development resources to the then-upcoming Nintendo 64. However, rather than scrapping the project entirely like they should have done, they released the Virtual Boy as-is, ensuring its place in history as the worst piece of hardware Nintendo has ever made.
• Early Color Dreams games cartridges may count, as they tried to get games to work by bypassing the lockout chip that was present in the NES by using a voltage spike to knock the 10NES CIC chip temporarily offline ^note  This is why with certain unlicensed NES games user's could smell plastic burning from the system, as the voltage spike would need to be maintained to stop the CIC from reactivating and initializing the reset loop . Earlier models were prone to render the games unwinnable, give it glitchy textures, hardly controllable etc. Later models worked much better.
• Atari Jaguar:
  • The infamous toilet bowl-shaped Atari Jaguar CD addon, which, due to faulty connections, rarely worked at all.
  The Spoony One: Not only is it prone to hardware failures, it's prone to about five different ways it can fail. It can fail if it isn't perfectly placed on the Jaguar. It can fail if the contacts aren't clean. It can fail if the Memory Track cartridge isn't perfectly set, and it can easily fail because the laser itself or the motor mechanism are defective, and they often are, and in my case, it would often fail because the lid is so poorly designed that, when closed, it actually closes too tightly and mashes the CD against the inside of the drive, preventing it from spinning, and that could easily cause additional internal damage. [...] Even when I did get it to work, it still froze all the time, and I do mean all the damn time!
  • When the same was attempted by The Angry Video Game Nerd, he couldn't get it working either, and so handed off his Jaguar and CD addon to his repairman Richard DaLuz, creator of the NinToaster and Super Genintari (an NES, Super NES, Genesis, and Atari 2600 in the same box). It seemed like if anyone had the skill set to get such things working, it would be him. Even after he hard-wired the CD addon to the console, thus eliminating any possibility of a connection problem, it refused to work.
  • One of the developers of the Highlander tie-in game for the Jaguar CD revealed why; when they were making the game for it, they found out the hard way that the add-on was clearly rushed out the door and was buggy and resource constrained, to the extent that everything for it had to be coded by hand from scratch just to make a game on it.
  • The Jaguar itself was a bit infamous for having come out of the oven half-baked. Atari was running short on time and money and determined to use the best tech available, which led to a system architecture that was custom-made, manufactured by a company (IBM) that hadn't worked with consoles before, very poorly documented, and incredibly convoluted. This was why a lot of Jaguar games were notorious for not being much more technically impressive than SNES and Genesis games; most developers ended up using a 16-bit CPU that was just meant to coordinate things as the main CPU because it was the only way they understood how to program the damn thing, and then having to use the second CPU as a math co-processor to pick up the slack, also leading to games with very little in the way of sound because the chip with sound capabilities couldn't handle both functions at the same time.
• The original Xbox's "Duke" controller proved an impediment to the console's adoption overseas. Microsoft hadn't tested it for markets other than the US, and the average hand size in other markets meant many customers couldn't physically hold the enormous controller comfortably. It was eventually phased out in favor of the smaller Controller S, from which all later Microsoft controllers are descended (though there was a brief time where Duke controllers were available for the Xbox One more than a decade later).
• Early adopters of the Xbox 360 found themselves acting as beta testers for the machine's cooling system, then as beta testers for the various fixes for this. Depending on who you believe and which motherboard variants you include ^note  There are 4 revisions prone to the dreaded red ring of death: The launch Xenon, Zephyr, Falcon and Opus, the last of which was made as emergency replacements for dead "Core" consoles at service centers. the failure rate within the first four revisions was anywhere between 30 and 64% ^note  with Xenon having nearly two thirds of all manufactured units become defective within a matter of weeks , with many customers requiring multiple replacements. These issues had numerous causes from defective soldering joints on the GPU cracking from the high amounts of heat and potentially desolder themselves from the motherboard or the X-Clamps keeping the pressure on the chip to come loose. And some units shipped with defective GPU's out the gate. These issues were only finally fixed with the release of the "Jasper" and "Kronos" revisions of the original model and the complete slim redesign five years after the original launch. This would be slightly reversed with the final "Corona" and "Winchester" board revisions ^note  Used in the later Slim and "E" Series which would start exhibiting defective NAND memory chips or XCGPU die's. It was later revealed that this was nothing compared to the assembly line failure rate, which was astronomically higher, to the point where the ones that were sold were the only ones that worked at all. Furthermore, this wasn't merely a matter of poor internal design. The several companies that they contracted out production to had used below substandard parts to keep their costs down, leaving Microsoft with hundreds of thousands of worthless consoles at launch.
• PlayStation consoles
  • The original PlayStation revisions SCPH-100X, SCPH-300X and SCPH-500X famously made use of too soft plastic for its laser assembly. This wouldn't be a problem initially, but eventually the heat from the laser would cause it to deform and make the laser misaligned and be unable to read discs. The only solution to this outside of replacing said laser was to turn the console upside down while you played and use gravity to realign it. The thing was also infamous for overheating in general thanks to a poorly optimized power supply placed directly underneath the already vulnerable to heat laser assembly and lack of venting. The SCPH-550X revision fixed this by redesigning the power supply, making the laser assembly out of die cast iron and relocating it so that it faces away from the power supply.
  • While nowhere as infamous as its predecessor and successor, the original PlayStation 2 also had many problems with its disk drive which occured in the first several revisions of the hardware ^note  SCPH-1000X, SCPH-1500X, SCPH-1800X, SCPH-3000X, SCPH-3300X and SCPH-3500X all exhibited this issue which seemed to just fail at random. This was because there was no mechanism in place to stop the laser assembly from falling out of alignment within the drive itself. This even lead to a class-action lawsuit. It was finally fixed in the 3300XR and 3900X revisions. Some later Slim units would also fail to read discs due to a damaged connector on the laser that would sometimes get caught on the chassis and be damaged by the movement.
  • The original PlayStation 3, thanks to Sony's initial idea to cram everything they could into it (hardware based PS1/2 backwards compatibility, Blu-Ray drive, memory card readers, etc.), was a poorly optimized behemoth of a console that infamously cost $600 at launch and was plagued with a whole host of design flaws: The CELL CPU and RSX GPU not only used subpar thermal compound on the outside of the heat spreader, but within the spreader itself, on top of the dies and V-RAM. This compound would slowly dry up over time, stopping heat from escaping the heat spreader and deep-frying the chip in 70-plus-degree Celsius heat. Not helping this is the fact Sony purposefully lowered the thermal profiling for the giant onboard fan to ensure the system was quieter over being cooled properly, while placing the large, inefficient power supply directly above the CELL and RSX.
  • The capacitors that supply and clean power to the CELL & RSX are NEC TOKIN capacitors which have a notoriously high fail rate. With age these capacitors lose their ability to deliver higher power requirements demanded by games released towards the end of the systems life and would eventually become one of the causes of "YLOD's" ^note  Yellow light of death which indicates general hardware failure. There is also the "RLOD", Red light of death indicating overheating and the "GLOD", the green light of death which indicates either a defective RSX, display chip or HDD Some of the original 90nm RSX chips used in the early revisions were also defective out the gate and would deteriorate over time to the point artifacts, severe graphical issues and freezing would occur, sometimes from mere seconds turning the system on. The Blu-Ray drive can also stop working and cannot be replaced as they are keyed to the system they are made for without hacking to replace the internal key data with a new drive. It would take over eight internal revisions and the second revision of the Slim in 2010 to fix the glaring design flaws present in the older models by drastically reducing the chip size from 90nm to 40/45nm to drastically reduce power use and heat generation, replacing the NEC capacitors with Tantalum capacitors to better deliver power, soldering the heat spreader's directly onto the CELL and using better thermal compound on the RSX,intergrating the Blu-Ray board onto the motherboard to allow drive swapping, redesigning the power supply and fan to remove heat more efficiently and stripping out the PlayStation 2 hardware, card readers and 2 USB ports.
  • The PlayStation Classic, released by Sony in late 2018 in a Follow the Leader moment to Nintendo's line of classic mini consoles has clear evidence that it was Christmas Rushed. The system uses an off-the-shelf open source emulator (PCSX-ReARMed to be exact), rather than one of Sony's making, that clearly wasn't configured or optimized correctly for the hardware since many of the games run with worse framerate performance than the originals, something made even worse by the fact that many of the selected games use the slower running European versions. The feature set is also very barebones with a very minimalist user interface and a lack of configuration options. Perhaps the most damning of all is a set of debug options that weren't properly Dummied Out and can be accessed by plugging in a USB keyboard and pressing the escape key.

Software

• This was how many computer professionals who worked with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems like VMS saw UNIX in The '70s and The '80s. (It was originally a research project designed for internal use, after all.) Unix was a much simpler system back then. The Unix Hater's Handbook gives a good overview of many of the complaints. It's an artifact of an era when many commercial Unixes often fell into this, due to vendors trying to compete on features without making sure they actually worked. This is one reason many of their customers jumped ship for Windows NT and Linux as soon as they could. A lot of BSD people see Linux as an Obvious Beta today.
• vBulletin 5. Indeed, for supposedly 'beta' software, it's buggy as heck, lacking in at least 50% of the features found in the last version yet still being sold for near 300 dollars. Oh wait, the whole thing won't work without JavaScript. And it changes every single URL on a website that upgrades to it, causing them to lose half their search engine rankings. For a supposed beta, it's more like an Obvious Alpha being sold at full price.
• The non-LTS versions of Ubuntu are notorious for this, as Canonical tends to make major changes without adequate testing. Canonical seems to position the non-LTS versions as public betas, directing most people to install the LTS versions on the Ubuntu download page.
• The Virtual Boy Emulator WiirtualBoy was plagued with slow frame rate, inaccurate sound, and graphical corruption with frameskip (which is used to bypass the slow frame rate). Raz0red, the emulator's author, less than four months later, released the much-improved WiiMednafen, which emulates NES, Game Boy, GBC, GBA, Sega Master System, Game Gear, PC Engine, PC-FX, Lynx, WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color, Neo Geo Pocket, NGP Color, and Virtual Boy. WiirtualBoy was removed from the Homebrew Channel shortly after.
• Canon's first DSLR with video recording, the EOS 5D Mark II, hit the market with a limited video feature set. There was no manual control of the lens aperture or shutter speed other than an "exposure lock" button that set the exposure when it looked about right. The video recorded 30 frames per second with no option for the common drop-frame rate of 29.97 or the film-like 23.98. The video files also had a tendency to come out of the camera significantly brighter than they looked on the LCD, but leveled out if converted to another format. Canon updated the firmware over the next few months, adding full exposure control, 23.98 and 29.97 frame rates, audio level control, and correcting exposure inconsistencies.
• Drivers for Nvidia GeForce GPUs, particularly the 364.xx releases, were considered by some PC gamers as this. This thread on /r/nvidia, along with a few others, are chock-full of stories from disgruntled users who either had their rigs locking up upon playing certain games, or claimed that their video cards went toast due to instability, the most common workaround being to downgrade to 362.00 or earlier.
• PGN Inc's OpenCanvas Version 6 - New Windows 10 users were plagued with various bugs and access violations- Creating a new image usually causes the program to give out an error message of "Failed to open new window". Trying to put your cursor anywhere on an opened project's window causes the program to freak out and give another error message about its controls. And worst of all, the program cannot be closed without resorting to Task Manager, due to the access violation. Oh there's one more- the program can respond to certain few drawing pads. Have the wrong one? Too bad. Thankfully Steam users are given an option for a refund.
• Netscape 6. On the one hand, this major rewrite of the venerable Communicator suite introduced the Gecko engine with vastly improved web standards compliance. On the other hand, it was rushed due to pressure from new owner AOL. So it had terrible performance, glitches galore, and a strange interface.
• The Valve Steam Deck was released in 2022 with what most reviewers described as excellent hardware and software they were optimistic would improve. Like many releases of its time, the COVID-19 pandemic had affected development. In order to release the device on schedule, Valve worked hard to get the hardware right (minus a small issue with some fans that wasn't noticed until a third party case with a magnetic stylus clamp was discovered to keep them from spinning), and planned to fix the software post-release. Tellingly, the first public previews (handled by YouTube channels Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus) were given very tight non-disclosure rules about the software, allowed to show six games selected by Valve and nothing of the Deck's actual OS. For what it's worth, the Deck was in good shape by third quarter 2022, a point where Valve was still filling pre-orders placed on the very first day they were live. The promised official dock for the Deck didn't go up for sale until 2023, even though it was promised in the initial reveal in 2021.

Tabletop Games

• Avalon Hill shipped the board game Assassin with rules that clearly had not been properly playtested, making legitimate moves ridiculously rare. The game's designer blames Executive Meddling (it was a localization of a game originally titled Eurohit).
• Chaotic:
  • The card game was, to say the least, not very well balanced on release. UnderWorld had strong cards up the wazoo while it was hard to even build cohesive decks around the other three tribes, and cards tended to have downright puzzling attributes with little overall cohesion in the first few sets. This was best exemplified by the Dawn of Perim starter decks, which not only featured numerous creatures with poor synergy (even when the creatures themselves weren't just nigh-unplayable), but also didn't even hit the 20 build point limit for their attack decks. It wasn't until Silent Sands and especially the M'arrillian Invasion block that tribal identities finally started to settle down and card designs became more reasonable (read: not unplayably bad in most cases).
  • The online client was also poorly polished, with loads and loads of bugs revolving around even simple scenarios like two engaged creatures dying at the same time. Notably, most cards interacting with the discard pile (among others) didn't even work properly, numerous card interactions contradicted the official rules, and while the site hosted a banlist, it had little to do with game balance and everything to do with the cards in question not being properly implemented; a particularly notorious example was Gintanai, the Forgotten^note a Creature intended to have the drawback of forcing you to sacrifice a creature every time it wins combat... except the client didn't properly restrict you to sacrificing your own Creatures. Many cards, like Siril'ean, the Songthief, never even became playable online before the website went down simply due to them never being coded in correctly.
• Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition was laden with this stuff; it was pretty obvious that the designers were still trying to work out the kinks of the new system. A lot of it resulted from things that had been retained from AD&D but now didn't work, including a major problem with Empty Levels and a lot of Game Breakers. This lasted until around when 3.5 showed up, by which point the designers had (generally) figured out what worked and what didn't.
  • Recreating every NPC in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting from scratch would have taken a lot of time, so most NPCs were run through a fairly basic conversion guide and then shipped out the door. Given that AD&D and 3rd Edition have very different mechanics, this led to a lot of NPCs having bizarre builds, too-high stats, and often vestigial abilities. For instance, Elminister retains his immunity to Time Stop, even though the 3rd Edition Time Stop is a burst of Super-Speed and not anything that affects other individuals, and Drizzt has taken five levels of Ranger despite the fact that he gets almost nothing out of them (unless he went eleven levels before taking two-weapon fighting).
  • On the other side, late 3.5 had the Tome of Magic supplement, which becomes increasingly this over its three parts. The first (about pact magic) was generally well-received and seen as polished. The second (about shadow magic) got a reputation for being on the weak side, which wouldn't be notable if the designer of the signature class hadn't outright stated it didn't really get playtested, and suggested fixes for it on his own. The third (about truenaming) was, at best, designed around a different balance paradigm than the rest of 3.5 leaving it cripplingly weakened and growing weaker unless aggressively optimised, and as printed lacked key information for several abilities. Even more curious, the pact magic and shadow magic sections are clearly linked in their fluff (a shadow-powered vestige can have pacts made with it by binders, and an organization of anti-pact magic witch hunters has a Dark World counterpart of a shadow magic cult). Meanwhile, the truenamers get only a few perfunctory mentions that don't really make any sense - for instance, being caught up in the binder's Unequal Rites and mistaken for them, even though the two forms of magic are nothing at all alike.
  • The third-party adventure The World's Largest Dungeon seems to have let beta testing take a backseat to living up to its name. Consequently, many encounters and Non Player Characters are poorly built to the point of being illegal, the names of characters and locations and details about the lore change from chapter to chapter, the geography frequently has territories that go through walls or sworn enemies living one room away from each other, and there's one major event involving an underwater siege that references monsters and items that don't appear to exist.
  • Many of the published (and third-party) adventures can feel this way, with sometimes obvious issues that should have been noticed come up with many of the groups that encountered them, even with ones that are overall received as high quality.
    • The very-well regarded Lost Mines of Phandelver which acted as the introductory module for 5E had an infamously tough first encounter because the extra Hit Points that characters had under D&D Next playtest did not carry over into the actual 5th Edition. As a result, many characters had their first experience with 5th Edition combat being unconscious as they were quickly incapacitated by the goblin and warg ambush before their turns.
    • Curse of Strahd has some infamously deadly (as in kill the whole party) encounters in the early part of the adventure. The first couple of levels are spent in the "Death House", a module that was tested as a one-shot (where characters dying aren't a big deal if they're not expected to continue on) with a meat-grinder that not only throws out a multitude of tough encounters including a thematically bizarre Shambling Mound, but attempts to kill the PCs with traps as they try to escape the house. After a few more encounters of appropriate challenge, the PCs can then run into another poorly balanced encounter with a coven of 3 Night Hags (the PCs are only level 3 at this point!) who can sling Lightning Bolts. For another obvious oversight that didn't seem tested, there is a point about halfway through the adventure where the PCs can resolve their Escort Mission quest with allowing a female character to join a ghost calling out to her. However, the module goes out of its way to trick Genre Savvy PCs into not allowing their companion to leave and specifies that this was the only way the character could escape, but then has no further notes about how to treat her (and her brother's) presence for the rest of the adventure even though this has major implications for the rest of the adventure.
    • Storm King's Thunder has an infamous issue of filler quests that don't explain the primary political nature of what's going on with the giants and the dragon very well until after it the game is over, meaning the players are just straggling around doing random plot things and told what they finally mean afterwards.
    • Dragon Heist has a lot of issues due to mashing together a lot of different concepts into one package: low-level railroaded city adventure (with four different options to run), running a business (that will almost certainly cost the party way more money than they can earn from it during the adventure), a gazetteer of Waterdeep, options for a high-level heist not directly related to the main adventure itself, skimpy faction quests, etc. Many Dungeon Masters were forced to fill in a lot of blanks and/or purchase additional downloadable materials in the nature of 100+ pages just to properly fill out the adventure. Despite being an adventure for 1st level characters, its very odd structure and layout implied that it did not have any actual feedback of people trying to actually run it.
• The board game Betrayal at House on the Hill originally shipped with several errors in the instructions — particularly in the game's various Scenarios. (For example, the Underground Lake is on an Upstairs tile.) This obviously could cause gameplay to grind to a halt as the confused players tried to sort things out... which was made much harder by the game's primary conceit: that one or more of the players pulls a Face–Heel Turn and starts actively working against the group. Errata for the first edition can now be found online, and only the (greatly revised) Second Edition is available for sale anymore.
• The second edition of Exalted was so buggy that the Scroll of Errata has more pages of rules than any given Splatbook — and that's not a joke, the Scroll of Errata weighs in at 205 pages while the rules sections of Manual of Exalted Power: Dragon-Blooded are only about 120 pages long. In brief, when you take a cluster of freelancers, don't require them to communicate, don't have enough good crunch writers to keep up with your schedule, and care more about the release date than whether something is in a releasable state, you get a desperate need for errata (some of it going down to the most basic functional elements, like the combat system).
  Robert "The Demented One" Vance: On page 49 of Scroll of Fallen Races, right under that big sidebar, there's a paragraph detailing the Leadership keyword. It's something that exists to tag effects that effect groups of Jadeborn based on their caste. Seems like a cool, thematic mechanic you could structure some of the Enlightened Pattern stuff around, sure. Now, try to find a Leadership Charm in SoFR. Try to find one in any of the books. You won't, because there are none. I think that's fairly indicative of the kinds of problems you're going to see in the Mountain Folk mechanics.
• Racial Holy War is a game about Neo-Nazis (you) trying to kill all non-whites. It is at pre-Alpha at best: There are rules for making Swastika shirts, healing yourself by reading racist propaganda, and Jews using "jewgold" to bribe White Warriors into skipping their turn ("explained" by "brain pollution")—but no mechanical values for weapons, stats, or accuracy. And yes, the authors were serious.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! contained one fairly obvious example early in its run in the Toon monsters. Toon monsters were the game's very first, prototypical attempt at the archtypes that would later become central to the game. "Toon" was made an actual ability type much like Tuner and Gemini to make sure they were kept together where today's modern archtypes are written with abilities specifically meant to work together, and the card central to the entire type, Toon World, has no given effect of its own beyond paying 1000 LP whereas today it would likely just be made a Field Spell meant to go along with the archtype. Which, in fact, later happened with Toon Kingdom in an attempt to update the archetype.
• The infamous F.A.T.A.L. features rules so esoteric and poorly written that it's near impossible to play the game (not that most people would want to) without fudging everything. The bodily dimensions of your character are randomly determined by dice rolls and run through bizarre algorithms, which can result in physically impossible results such as having orifices that have negative circumferences. The combat system is so broken, it's possible to attack someone with a sword and stab one of their internal organs without actually hitting any other part of their body — such as their skin, for instance. Some events are "(1d100)% likely" to happen, which means you roll a d100 to determine the chance of it happening, then roll another d100 against that number to see if it succeeds — which means that these events all statistically share a 50.5% success rate. Sitting, Spitting and Tasting are distinct character skills. Tearing someone's heart out kills them in two rounds; cutting off their balls kills them instantly if they fail a save. The "Fatal" spell the game is named after (which instantly kills all life on the planet) takes a full week to cast intentionally, or can be randomly cast by accident any time you fumble any other spell. It's not for nothing that many players consider it the worst tabletop RPG ever made.
• The first edition 7th Sea splatbook covering the nation of Eisen obviously suffered from a lack of quality assurance. The core book lacked a Sorcery school for Eisen, giving Dracheneisen armor and weapons as a replacement. The splat adds their "extinct" (actually very, very rare) Sorcery school and it blatantly doesn't work. How bad is it? One of the five abilities gives you bonuses to die rolls on a specific other ability...that doesn't roll dice.

Media

• Tintin and the Alph-Art features tons of scenarios that were supposed to be in the new album of The Adventures of Tintin, but as the name implies most of them did not even get past scenario. The stories themselves are also incomplete.
• Harper Lee's manuscript Go Set a Watchman, written before her agent advised her to instead do a story set in the main character's childhood that became To Kill a Mockingbird, was released without any editing work in 2015, being marketed as a sequel to Mockingbird. This resulted in several awkward bits, as Lee had altered several plot points mentioned in Watchman for Mockingbird and reused several entire paragraphs for Mockingbird almost verbatim.
• The release of Kanye West's 2015 album The Life of Pablo seemed mostly slapped together. Originally titled Swish, West changed the title to Waves less than a month before its release, then changed it again four days before the planned release to T.L.O.P. and then announced two days later that title actually stood for The Life of Pablo. West posted several track lists on his Twitter account, continuously adding new tracks, and oddly dropping "Only One", a duet with Paul McCartney which West had already released as a single and shot a music video for. The album's February 13 release date came and went with no sign of the album on any major retailers, though West staged a concert/fashion show at Madison Square Garden and performed several tracks. West later stated the album was delayed by Chance the Rapper, who needed to rerecord portions of the track "Waves". The album was released late on February 14 to coincide with West's performance on Saturday Night Live, streamable on Tidal and available for purchase on West's official site, the latter promptly crashed due to high traffic. The track "Fade" was missing, with an early version of "Facts" uploaded in its place by mistake, though the error was quickly fixed. West then removed the option to purchase the album from his site and refunded customers, and announced the album would never be available to purchase ever and would be accessible solely by streaming on Tidal, despite a download of the album being included in the cost of tickets to West's aforementioned Madison Square Garden event. West stated later that week the version of The Life of Pablo on Tidal was essentially a draft, and several tracks were being remastered.
• Exorcist II: The Heretic was pulled from theaters, recut, and reissued twice during its theatrical run due to negative audience reactions.
• The first season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Neutral Zone." With a writers' strike fast approaching, the producers simply pulled a rough draft script off the pile and put it into production with zero editing. This is most obvious in the episode's climax, where the Romulans accept a truce with the crew, then promptly turn around and tell them the truce is off as apparently the writer hadn't yet put in any explanation for this.
• Trailers for visual effects-heavy films often come out before the effects are completed for the final film. For example, the Super Bowl trailer for Jurassic World included several early version effect shots lacking fine details, causing quite a bit of flack.
• Foodfight! was in Development Hell for roughly a decade, due to director Lawrence Kasanoff accidentally deleting the saved animation from the beginning of production. When it was finally released in 2012, the animation was, well, not the image of perfection Kasanoff had promised it to be. The animation was stiff and jerky, with several moments of characters Milking the Giant Cow to make up for their lack of expressionism. Glitches are also in major abundance, most notably when the heroes start launching food like ammunition at the Brand X soldiers, with various foodstuffs disappearing and reappearing at random and phasing right through the buildings. The scene editing is also pretty bad. For example, when Daredevil Dan crashes his stunt plane into a tree, the scene briefly cuts to an ejector seat handle retracting, and in the very next scene, the design of the tree becomes largely different (Dan's plane also appears to be textured differently). You have to see it to believe it.
• Mockbuster tend to be loaded with unfinished material, be it rough-and-ready computer graphics, crudely edited scenes, unfinished backgrounds, and so forth.
  • In regards to animated mockbusters, especially those from Dingo Pictures, Vídeo Brinquedo and Spark Plug Entertainment, the animation looks very, very bad, even for their time and budget. The Asylum has also started dipping their toes into animated capitalism, with such movies as Trolland and CarGo having some of the worst quality CGI animation of the 2010's.
• The English dub of Transformers: Armada and Transformers: Energon were rushed due to a combination of having to coincide with the western launch of their respective toyline and Cartoon Network broadcasting requirements, leaving both as unedited first drafts.The dub of Armada suffers from odd, often incoherent, dialogue and an inability to keep the name of secondary characters straight, but was still generally comprehensible, likely thanks to additional help from Sabella Dern Entertainment. The issues with Energon, however, were more severe: TF Wiki specially created "Lost in translation" sections on its pages for Energon's episodes due to how rushed the dub was, and it's not rare to find instances of muddled plot points, characters saying the direct opposite of what is happening on the screen, and genuinely nonsensical dialogue (and often, all three in a single episode). Both dubs also had some unfinished animation due to airing well before the Japanese broadcast debut of the series. While the differences were minor in most cases, the plot of the Energon episode "Battle of the Asteroid Belt" was made incomprehensible to English viewers because the spaceship the characters are reacting to the entire episode was not drawn by that point.
• A new version of Cats was issued to theaters in its second week after the studio admitted that the visual effects weren't quite finished.
• The Ralph Bakshi adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is fairly notorious for this due to major Troubled Production. The film made heavy use of rotoscoping, but because it wasn't quite finished, many rotoscoped sequences never got the actual animation drawn on top, which leads to scenes where the characters abruptly transform from 2D animated characters to real-life actors with an ugly filter over them.
• invokedMonster a-Go Go: Writer/producer Herschell Gordon Lewis wanted a cheap movie to round out a double feature he was producing, so he bought a half-finished film reel out of Development Hell, filmed a couple of extra scenes, and called it a day. How bad is it? Well, the original had run out of money just before they could shoot the climax, so Lewis just gave it a Mind Screwy "Nothing Is Scarier" non-ending with the narrator cutting in to say that actually the entire movie was a lie and there is no monster. Lewis actually refused to put his name on it, instead crediting himself as Sheldon S. Seymour (and then also changed his production designer credit... to Seymour S. Sheldon). When people found out he made it anyway, he claimed the movie was meant to be a satire.
• Production on the 1999 anime film Gundress was so confused and haphazard (as covered here by Bennett the Sage) that when it was released, large chunks of the animation were nothing more than unfinished pencil tests, necessitating the studio to reportedly hand out flyers promising to send a VHS of the completed product to moviegoers. The film was not a hit.
• In June 2021, HBO Max updated their Apple TV app with a new custom video player that made it nearly impossible to rewind, fast forward or pause, which prompted HBO to apologize and roll back their app to an earlier version.
  • This and other issues with the service's streaming apps — most notably on Roku — led WarnerMedia to announce they were completely rewriting the apps for all platforms; the app's backbone dated to the earlier HBO Go and HBO Now app platforms and this, along with the AT&T higher-up's insistence on rush-launching a service to compete with Netflix and the like, is widely suspected as being a reason for the poor performance (many of the features promised in early looks at the service took far longer to arrive or haven't at all, though the pandemic could just as likely be a reason for this). The new rewritten apps began rolling out in September of 2021, and people are already responding far more positively to the improved performance.
• The Snowman (2017) infamously suffered from a production so truncated and mishandled that by director Tomas Alfredson's admission, 10-15% of the script wasn't shot by the time the film reached post-production. The absence of several scenes required further alteration of the scenes that were shot (usually through ADR to attempt smoothing over several plot transitions), and the haphazard reassembly really shows, with major plot elements and secondary characters being introduced before never appearing again, and many scenes of character (inter)action appearing without any established context. Further issues like jarring momentary edits and a distinct lack of visual processing (the trailers feature a Color Wash not at all present in the final product, which is drab and washed-out to the point of resembling raw camera footage) contribute to the impression of a film that's very visibly incomplete.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: A number of books published after Tolkein's death are heavily spruced-up and reedited drafts of varying completeness. This is most evident in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, which even in its title points out that none of the stories involved were ever close to publication, with characters appearing and vanishing, references to discarded pieces of lore, multiple different accounts of the same events, and some stories ending mid-scene and being followed by a rough outline of what would have happened next. The portion where it focuses on the history of Galadriel and Celeborn is so visibly unpolished that it ends up in Continuity Snarl territory, being a mishmash of three or four different versions that Tolkien wrote at varying points in his life, and diverging on some rather important details.

Other

• Clive Sinclair, head of Sinclair Radionics and later of Sinclair Research, which brought the ZX Spectrum to Britain and helped kickstart its home computer market, valued minimalist designs that the British public could afford, at the cost of neglecting to have his creations properly tested and polished. One of the two most infamous examples by far is the Sinclair Black Watch, an early digital watch that used an LED and sold for either £17.95 or £24.95 depending on whether you got it in a do-it-yourself kit (like most home electronics of the time) or preassembled. The kit was notoriously difficult to assemble; it had a battery life of only ten days (leaving many preassembled watches dead on arrival) and its batteries were just as difficult to replace; its integrated chip could be ruined by static from nylon clothing or air conditioning (a problem that also affected the factory it was produced in); and most damning of all, it was unreliable in keeping time because it ran at different speeds depending on the weather. Oh, and just for kicks, it could explode if you left it powered on for too long (made possible by the nylon weakness). The product was such a gigantic flop that Sinclair Radionics would've gone bankrupt if the UK government hadn't stepped in to provide subsidies courtesy of the NEB.
  • The other notorious example of this besides the Black Watch was the Sinclair C5, an early attempt at an electric vehicle touted as a replacement for the car at a time when no single electric battery could power one (The UK's electric milk floats were powered by banks of batteries). The result amounted to a motorised tricycle that could only go as little as 10 km before sputtering out (which, again, varied based on the weather), had great difficulty ascending gentle slopes, and left the driver exposed to the elements (during one of the modern UK's coldest winters, at that). That last one combined with its low height also meant it was very much possible for a C5 driver to have a semi-trailer's exhaust pipe blasting in their face. The C5 flopped just as badly as the Black Watch did, and this time, Sinclair wasn't so lucky: with the NEB having fallen by then, he had no choice but to sell his "Sinclair" brand computer products to his rivals at Amstrad (of CPC fame) just to keep his company alive.
  • Early versions of Sinclair's 1984 QL computer had bug-ridden firmware, which also spilled out into an external dongle^note  It was originally claimed that this was because they couldn't fit the 48KB ROM onto the internal PCB as originally designed, but a 30th anniversary retrospective suggests this may have just been an excuse.. In addition, there were reliability problems with the microdrives. While all these were later fixed, they probably contributed to its commercial failure. Even at the time Your Computer magazine said "I sense that the time for foisting unproven products on the marketplace has gone [..] The QL may have been announced six months too soon."

• Facebook has entire groups dedicated to hunting and showcasing its buggy updates. It has even led some people to call it "Pajeetbook", because only a development outsourcing sweatshop based in India could create such terrible coding mistakes. It also really doesn't help that Facebook has been known to still promote the Silicon Valley startup mentality of "breaking things is good", which might be good for startups that need to move fast or disappear, but not so much for big companies that can afford both speed and quality control.
• Boeing has had several of these:
  • The Boeing B-29 Superfortress suffered from numerous reliability problems, most famously the overtaxed engines that would sometimes set themselves on fire in flight. In this case the problems due to the need to rush the new bomber into production during the height of World War II, and they were ironed out by the time the B-29D was designed (and re-christened as the B-50A Superfortress in 1948, three years after the end of World War II).
  • The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was released with batteries prone to catching fire. Fortunately, the fires were caught before they caused a fatal crash, and Boeing was able to fix the design.
  • The most infamous of all was the 737 MAX. This was the first time Boeing shipped a civilian plane with the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. The goal of MCAS was to have the MAX have similar flight characteristics to the previous 737 NG, as the engine mount design of the MAX caused it to pitch up in certain maneuvers. Rather than do a lengthy redesign of the airplane's structure to accommodate for the different flight characteristics, Boeing instead decided to fix this with software using MCAS, so they could save on training costs by allowing 737 NG pilots to transition to the MAX with only minimal training. The biggest problem was MCAS could override pilot input and it was not obvious it was in control as it directly acted on the flight surfaces (other safety features tended to act on the pilot's controls). For whatever reason, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also allowed Boeing to remove the mentioning of MCAS in flight manuals and did not do a safety analysis since a previous version of MCAS was approved already. In short: Boeing used software to fix a hardware issue in order to save money and the FAA assumed since it was the same thing used on a previous plane Boeing made, it was fine. The result? Two accidents where 346 people died, the 737 MAX grounded for a better part of the year, and a huge credibility loss on FAA's part.
• The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was like the B-29, except more troublesome. Due to being mounted backwards (as pushers), its engines had such a high tendency to spontaneously catch fire that in at least one instance the engine was shut down and the mission was allowed to continue on the remaining five. Needless to say, it didn't end well - not because of that fire, but because of the others that followed.
• The very complicated nature and large scale involved in building ships means that a "shakedown cruise" is a routine step in any ship's construction whereby they spend time figuring out all of the things that are wrong with the ship for them to fix or correct back in port.
  • During the Battle of Denmark Strait, HMS Prince of Wales suffered numerous problems while fighting the Bismark because she was pressed into service before she could do her shakedown cruise.
  • The Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano had it even worse. She put out to sea before her water-tight doors could be installed, and had the misfortune to run across an American submarine, USS Archerfish, less than a day out of port. Struck by a spread of four torpedoes, she went down with 1,435 of her 2,400-man crew, including civilians who were still working on the ship. She had put out to sea in her incomplete state because an American scout plane had flown over the base, and the Japanese wanted to move the ship to another port before the Americans could attack.
• The video game database MobyGames's 2013 redesign was practically unusable, as glitches greatly complicated or prevented contributing any new info. There were also errors visible to regular visitors, such as screenshots which never loaded (apparently, in order to display an ordinary image, you needed a complex, failure-prone script). What made this even more ridiculous is that the redesign was presented months prior to the users, who proceeded to give their feedback and report the numerous bugs—and all of it was promptly ignored. Tellingly, when GameFly sold the site to Blue Flame Labs on December 20 of the same year, the very first thing the new owner did was to revert the site design back to the previous one.
• Wikia, a wiki hoster, introduced a new page skin that simply does not work the way it is supposed to while also managing to cut the usable page in half (the other half permanently displaying useless information that cannot be minimized to give space). Worst of all, not only did they force the skin as the default so that not logged in users are forced to use it, they also removed the much more popular and infinitely more functional skin "Monaco".
• The Healthcare.gov website has numerous bugs and issues, which has caused a great deal of controversy.
• TV Tropes:
  • The reworked design in 2015 was initially released with a number of errors and bugs, before being recalled and returned to the previous site design and working on those errors.
  • The June 2018 redesign was released in a half-functional state. Issues included but were not limited to spoiler-tagged text being simply underlined as opposed to blocked-out, edits not being registered, pages randomly getting locked, and users finding themselves randomly logged into other accounts.
• Sling TV, Dish Network's TV streaming service geared toward "cord cutters" has suffered from lots of performance problems, but the worst so far has been its failure during the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead. Any streaming service that's not Netflix tends to fall over under heavy load — considering that Netflix accounts for 30% of the entire Internet's traffic, it goes without saying that capacity planning for streaming services is not an easy task.
• Amusement parks will often quietly open new attractions to the public before the official date as a "technical rehearsal" to work out kinks and train staff. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood allowed park guests in two months before its official April 2016 opening date.
• The British nationalised railway system suffered from this repeatedly, but one of its worst examples was the Modernisation Plan of 1955. Urgently needing to move from steam to diesel power, they ordered small batches of prototypes from various manufacturers — and then ordered production runs before the bugs had been worked out of the prototypes. The results were predictable; in 1961 one entire class was returned to the manufacturer for remedial work on the engines and to stop the cab windows falling out while running. And and another class that were taken out of service en masse for engine repairs in 1963, and and yet another class that in Class 30 guise had to be re-engined due to their Mirrlees engines developing fatigue cracks in 1964. ^note  The original engines were reconditioned and send back into service as trawler engines, which you might think is a recipe for disaster, but they went on to give fairly good service for another 20 years.
• Harley-Davidson is known for reliability issues, but the Twin-Cam is one Obvious Beta. A recurring issue with the engines is the cam chain system driving the lower end, with a nylon shoe keeping the chain's slack in check. Plastic shoes as tensioners are nothing new, yet the way Harley designed it meant that it wore down after 50,000 miles, which is egregious as the bikes are intended to be used on long stretches of road in cross-country tours and such. Third parties like S&S Cycle came up with unofficial fixes for the issue, but they are way out of reach for most riders. And it's worth mentioning that despite Harley citing EPA regulations for using a chain drive system in the Twin Cam and its successor, the Milwaukee-Eight, Harley still continued to sell the Sportster, a model that has used what is essentially the same engine as it was first introduced in 1957, albeit with enhancements over the years to keep up with the times. The Sportster still uses a gear-driven set of cams for its valvetrain, making Harley's EPA compliance claims with the Twin Cam somewhat suspect. Some speculated that Harley was simply too unwilling to invest in precision tooling for them to manufacture a more silent gear system.
• The introduction of the All Live streaming service to the World Rally Championship was seen as a welcome move by fans who were previously just content with highlight footage and rally standings, but its launch was far from perfect, as it was (and still is) plagued by connection and login issues amongst other things, such as in 2019 when viewers were kicked out of the service all of a sudden on certain occasions. It didn't help that the official mobile apps weren't any better either. Besides the lack of screen casting support and occasional clunkiness, for whatever reason, some versions of the WRC client refuse to run on a rooted Android device, necessitating a root cloaker app to continue.
• Magic: The Gathering superstore and content hub Star City Games had a disastrous relaunch of their web site in 2020, breaking functions as simple as searching the store.
• The Memorymoog counts as one of the coolest vintage analog polyphonic synthesizers and nearly fulfilled the expectations of a six-voice Minimoog with patch memory. But even after four years of development, it proved to be half-baked in practice. For one, the internal power supply was way undersized. If it didn't fail entirely, the heat it emitted into the synth rendered the oscillator tuning so unstable that the auto-tuning function couldn't cope with it anymore. The excess heat was so much that the heatsink on the back couldn't nearly dissipate it all, so the sheet metal case got so hot one could fry eggs on it, making the synth's very operation hazardous. As if that wasn't enough, some of the many internal connectors were so frail that they'd lose contact just by moving the synth a bit more roughly, so the Memorymoog would fail particularly frequently on tours when it had to be particularly reliable. No wonder Saga toured with three Memorymoogs, hoping that at least one would work at any given gig. This isn't saying anything about the Memorymoog's initially less-than-impressive operating system yet. It wasn't until 1992, some seven years after Moog had folded, that Rudi Linhard of Lintronics managed to thoroughly debug the synth.
• In the 19th century, Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev created the first periodic table of the elements. Mendeleev's table had numerous gaps for elements that fit its patterns but hadn't been discovered yet. Even in Mendeleev's lifetime, numerous other scientists started filling the table's gaps (confirming his predictions about their chemical properties) and expanded it well beyond his original version.

In-Universe Examples and Parodies

Anime and Manga

• In episode 5 of Haganai, the characters play an MMO game using virtual reality headsets. The game is in a playable state, but the first enemies they encounter haven't even been programmed with attacks yet, nor does the main character Kodaka have any abilities to use despite being a "wizard". There are also balancing issues as the boss they fight is a bit too tough, though their healer is taking a nap at the time (since she's only a ten-year-old) and they don't coordinate their moves very well either.
• One chapter of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has the student council trying out a board game created by the Tabletop Gaming Club which is clearly still in the development stage, most prominently with the fact that it's almost entirely luck based. Ishigami (who is the son of a toy company president and knows a thing or two about game design) ended up having a very long list of things that need to be improved before letting people play it when giving Fujiwara his feedback.
• In The Vampire Dies in No Time, Draluc is approached with an offer from his roommate's editor to do a video game review, with the understanding that it's a special request from the editor-in-chief. When Draluc turns it on, the game turns out to be an absolute nightmare with every conceivable example of bad game design on full display. But because he doesn't want to insult the editor-in-chief by tearing into a game that he personally requested, Draluc leans hard into rationalizing every single terrible element as an avant-garde masterpiece. When he finally slogs his way through it, it turns out that the editor-in-chief was well aware that it was an unplayable mess, but respects Draluc's tenacity enough to offer him a column reviewing other bad games.
• The World God Only Knows has an early story where Dating Sim Otaku Keima Katsuragi struggles to get through one of these. Filled with every bug imaginable, the biggest one he has to overcome is getting stuck in a loop that prevents him from reaching the ending. Not only that, but trying to save the game will fry his PFP, so in order to find a way around the loop, he has to try every single route. And when he finally does manage to get past the loop, the result is corrupted graphics and text that make it completely unplayable.

Film — Live Action

• In Tomorrow Never Dies, one of Carver Media Group's profit-making schemes is to deliberately release unusable software for cheap, and then sell the patches at high prices.
• Free Guy
  • Based on the concerns from his employees that Antwan completely dismisses, Free City 2 sounds like it's far from playable even just days away from launch. The poor reception it receives at the end of the movie kills Antwan's career as a game developer.
  • Antwan, as a last minute resort to stop Guy, orders them to upload DUDE, which seems to be a buffed-up version of Guy planned as an Ascended Meme for Free City 2. Most of his dialogue consists of placeholders and his AI is roughly equivalent to a child.
• The Enterprise is presented as this in both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
  • The first flight of the refit Enterprise is explicitly a "shakedown cruise" that ends up being full of disasters; these include a transporter accident that kills the science officer, directly the result of Kirk pushing the timeline to the detriment of safety, and a glitch-created wormhole that nearly destroys the ship.
  • In Star Trek V, the Enterprise A embarks in mid-refit, with interface panels lying open on the bridge and welding still going on around him as Kirk gets his mission briefing from the admiral. Even the padds are lemons (with, as we get to see in close-up, large spaces permanently set aside solely for fatal error messages!).

Literature

• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? takes place in what is explicitly a closed beta test of a video game. Several of the features are noted as being unfinished. Many of the background characters lack textures and the tutorial area skybox is a grid.
• I'm The Only One Who Knows This World Is A Game! uses this as its primary gag, where the main character is stuck in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse that happens to have been programmed by a rather incompetent and sadistic development team. Among other things, the difficulty curve is incredibly wonky, weapons are coded with the wrong attributes, animations can be cancelled in a way that completely breaks the game's combat, the AI suffers from Artificial Stupidity, sounds aren't timed correctly with events, and there are countless clumsy subsystems designed to paper over the game's various issues.

Video Games

• Super Mario 64 ROM hack B3313 invokes this as part of its dream-like haunted game theme, mixing elements from known beta builds with content from the final game, and altering the controls and physics to make them feel off to veteran players.
• A side-mission in Borderlands 3 asks the Vault Hunter to play an augmented reality game titled "Destroyer of Worlds" which at seen upon first glance is an unfinished beta at version 0. The sorceress who has to be escorted is constantly in a T-pose while continuously shouting the same lines before falling down randomly to be revived, the enemies are given placeholder titles as they're just floating orbs moving at random speeds. At one point, a object that needs to be collected glitches out and breaks into a hundred pieces to be collected, with the last boss moving at random slowly as well as having an impenetrable armor with the name Boss_Final_ReallyFinal_06 for extra measure.
• Deadpool:
  • At one point in the game, Deadpool runs into an area full of wire frames and enemies clumsily pathfinding, requiring him to call up High Moon Studios and fund an emergency patch to continue playing.
  • At another point in the game, due to blowing out the game's in-universe budget on expensive explosion effects, it reverts to an 8-bit Zelda-like design.
• The Kayfabe of Sonic Dreams Collection is that the game is a collection of these, taken from a Dreamcast purchased off eBay. In-game, this leads to things like characters in t-pose and weird physics glitches (that can be used to break out of the game areas). Buggy items are also available for shooting glitch hellscape movies. Eggman Origins is the most beta-like, taking place in an untextured white void and featuring your character turned 'birdlike' with no arms, though this is used for artistic effect.
• Parodied in the Stylistic Suck Mario Kart parody Supra Mayro Kratt. There are only three characters, slapped-on graphics for the skybox and terrains, and two levels.
• Parodied by DLC Quest, which contains a zone named "Allan Please Add Zone Name". It's a completely empty rectangle, save for one sign in the middle which reads "ALLAN PLEASE ADD WORLD." This is a direct reference to a placeholder item description that was accidentally left in the final version of Hitman: Blood Money.
• Parodied in Nifflas's official Knytt Stories level "This Level is Unfinished". It consists of crude black pen drawings with notes such as "Animate water here" and "Dangerous blocks (draw spikes)."
• In The Magic Circle the player is a tester in an unfinished game that's been stuck in Development Hell for ages. As one might expect from such a premise, there's plenty of Stylistic Suck.
• In Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, the Killer Marathon level is this. It's a third person lobby in a builder with placeholder textures and skybox leading to an endless hall, which then inexplicably turn into a Captain Ersatz of Asteroids. Due to it being incomplete, the Dragon Ball-esque wish granting tiger deity only resurrect Bad Man's daughter as a little dog. Later in the DLC the real "Killer Marathon" can be acquired and Bad Girl is properly resurrected as a girl. The final collectible game "Central Intelligence Agency" which isn't part of the official Death Drive games, has a crude ASCII-based logo and title, and the game itself consists of Pac-Man esque mazes with Hotline Miami arcades scattered around the game area. It's a masking device for a teleportation device to the actual CIA headquarters in a Thanatos Gambit by the designer to destroy CIA, thus Travis sees the actual CIA agents as video game bugs.
• One of the bonus dungeons (Smileton) in Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is this - the entire third zone is named "Under Construction (Sorry!)", and it's still visibly being built as you go through it.
• A key plot point of Fallout: New Vegas is that the Securitron robots that Mr. House uses to protect and police New Vegas are using a buggy operating system that doesn't have drivers for their primary weapon systems. He's made due for the past two centuries using the secondary weapon systems: submachine guns and a 20mm grenade launcher. The game's primary MacGuffin, the Platinum Chip, is a bug fixed, 2.0 version of the Securitron OS, made but not delivered in the last days before the Great War. Recovering it and using it as House instructs will unlock the Securitrons' primary weapons: Gatling lasers and missile launchers (also turning the image on their central screen from a cartoon cop to a cartoon soldier). And the installation where you do so also has an order of magnitude more Securitrons than are online in the city proper, ready to be switched on.
• The concept of The Adventures Of Radish Boy 2 is that you're testing a platformer so unfinished that the developers decided to have the character move left and right automatically instead of letting you control it, only leaving the jumping to you. To beat its otherwise impossible levels, you have to exploit the flaws of its poorly-written engine, which mostly revolves around pause shenanigans.

Web Comics

• "Mad Snacks, Yo!" in Homestuck is a skateboard game riddled with glitches that get the Player Character stuck in walls or other decor elements, assuming the game doesn't crash first.
• In this strip of The Trenches, after Quentin wows the staff with "in-game" footage, they discover that most of the game is so thoroughly Beta that it doesn't know where the ground is. The actual development state of the "game" is this article's page image. But at least the game isn't released in this state.
• The El Goonish Shive non-canon story Goomanji 2 is about the playtesting of a magical board game created by Hanma. Some of the internal spells don't quite work the way she intended, or interact in unexpected ways.

Web Original

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Android 19's coding is... very messy, to say the least. The first time he tries to activate his combat program (murder.exe), he crashes and has to slowly reboot, and even then it only manages to run properly after he absorbs Goku's energy. His dodging protocol is also uselessly slow in a world where certain people can teleport/Flash Step and hit you near-instantly.
• Sword Art Online Abridged portrays the titular game as this, owing to being Christmas Rushed. Boss minions display error messages about missing sound files, NPCs (including the one from the game's tutorial) can be "kidnapped" by players starting but never finishing their quests, the crafting system is described as "seizure-inducing" (the one instance we see is a simultaneous shoot-'em-up, mecha battle, and rhythm game set to "Big Blast Sonic"), teleport crystals randomly fail to work or even Tele-Frag their users, bosses can glitch out and die without opening the exit doors to their boss room, and the biggest glitch of them all: players dying for real when their avatars do.

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