Interesting Space Quest 3 "bug"

[notbobsmith]

I was watching a video by Space Quest Historian on an interesting feature of Space Quest 3. The video is worth a watch, but I'll summarize. The end of the game has a sequence where you have to fight pirate fighter ships. It is apparently possible to trigger this sequence earlier. The game has a timer that counts down while you are in the Aluminum Mallard. The variable is set to the highest value it can hold, 65536 (2^16-1) and ticks away once per second. When the counter hits zero, you are attacked by fighters. If you defeat them, the game continues from where you left off. The problem is that your shields suffer damage during this fight and don't regenerate. This means that you will almost certainly be unable to win the end game fight. But the only way to trigger this is to spend a total of 18 hours inside the Aluminum Mallard, making it effectively impossible to encounter this. It's not known why this timer exists. There was speculation in the comments that perhaps there was a plan to have the player face random encounters with the pirates as you fly around. They abandoned this idea and rather than remove the code, they just set the timer to an impossibly high value and left it in. Here is the video set to where he talks about this:

[Tawmis]

Interesting.

SQH loves the "f" word, as well. Like in abundance.

[notbobsmith]

Interesting.

SQH loves the "f" word, as well. Like in abundance.

Yeah, he does that. I'm not sure what Youtube thinks about this. Some videos censor language. I though that if they didn't, Youtube would demonetize them.

[Tawmis]

Interesting.

SQH loves the "f" word, as well. Like in abundance.

Yeah, he does that. I'm not sure what Youtube thinks about this. Some videos censor language. I though that if they didn't, Youtube would demonetize them.

Yeah, I am not sure on their policy for profanity. I imagine it's gotta be pretty loose. I know there's a filter for violence, because some games get demonetized. But I think swearing isn't, if at all... because there's a lot of those cop chasing crook videos where cops are shouting profanities to drop their effing weapon, get on the effing floor, etc etc.