Former Bethesda Game Tester Once Broke Fallout 4 So Completely The ‘Entire Zenimax Media Company’ Was Sent Email Blasts Saying ‘Somebody Found 4 Crashes In a Single Morning’

Former Bethesda game tester Colin McInerney once discovered so many crashes in Fallout 4 that the entire organization received emails saying, “somebody found four crashes in a single morning.”

McInerney, now at Am I Your Beast developer Strange Scaffold, worked at Bethesda as a games tester during college, and said that even then, his “approach shifted out of the publisher side and into the dev side.”

“I was working with the Bethesda developers and learning s*** from them directly and working on weirder stuff,” McInerney told GamesRadar+. “At one point, I just decided to play hot and cold with the RAM because we were on Xbox One. The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, so if you get above that, the game’s going to crash. So I brought up a RAM readout and was just like, how can I break this? That thought occurring to me, no one else was doing that. That isn’t a standard testing practice of, how can I leak memory from the game?”

McInerney added that he ended up going into the console to give himself “a billion experience,” putting his character at level 247. “I walked around with the unique nuke launcher that launched two, and then gave it the add-on that made each nuke launch 10 nukes. So I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found four crashes in a single morning,” he added.

“Back in those days, that would send out an email blast to the entire Zenimax Media company. So, like, [Bethesda co-founder] Robert Altman was getting emails that somebody found four crashes in a single morning.”

He then reflected on the advancement of AI right across gaming.

“I would love to see an AI do my job. I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.”

If it’s been a while since you last popped in to play Fallout 4, here’s our round-up of everything major added to Fallout 4 since launch. Don’t forget that a selection of Bethesda games are officially making the jump to Nintendo Switch 2, including Fallout 4. Its physical Switch 2 Anniversary Edition is available to preorder right now from a variety of retailers for $59.99 (see it here at Amazon), and its release date lands on April 28.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.