The Curse of Monkey Island
by Dan Pettit, Lead Tester

Page 2

You see, our roles are sort of the opposite of the developers. They are trying to build this incredible game, and we go through with our wrecking balls and try to bring it down. Another cool part of being a tester is that we get to suggest ideas to make the game better! Of course, there are a few times where the two sides tend to disagree on a subject. That's when the negotiation process begins. Like the time I made a suggestion to Larry Ahern, the other project leader on Curse:

"Larry, we in Test think you should be able to feed the bubble-gum to the chickens of Puerto Pollo."
"Never! You can't push me around this time, Mr. Lead Tester!"
"Do it, or I'll make you write your own DirectX troubleshooting guide."
"Feed gum to the chickens...good idea."

But, at least for me, the most interesting part of the testing process is trying to see if you can make a project leader/programmer go insane before the end of the project. Well, here's the status on the key people so far:

Jonathan Ackley: Almost there. One more well-timed disc-swapping bug and I've got him.
Larry Ahern: Just waiting until we get the last cutscenes. Then I'll tell him that they all have this one teensy-weensy little white pixel flashing on and off in the lower left-hand corner.
Chris Purvis: Ah, the ex-tester turned programmer. No need to make him insane. Just being a tester causes insanity.
Chuck Jordan: Implementer of the new Save/Load screen. Between that and sharing an office with Chris, I'd say he's 80 percent of the way there.

Well, I'm off to go join my fellow testers on a NERF strike against a different project team. Oh wait, I just saw Jonathan go by, and he seemed kind of happy. I better go tell him about this nasty bug where...

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