For some people being a professional video game tester might sound like a dream come true. I personally like to play games and I am a bit afraid of the fast food effect. How many times have you heard of a friend who used to work at a fast food restaurant or a chain of restaurants only to swear off ever eating anything from that chain as long as they live. Recently I met someone who worked for a Japanese console company who told me about his latest business trip.
It seems that his boss was looking for volunteers to go to their French office to do a firmware patch a few of their consoles where were being used for other purposes in a famous institution. Needless to say that there were a lot of volunteers to fly there stay overnight on the company’s tab and then come home. The task is really not very different than a BIOS update on your personal computer. Simply slip in a floppy or a USB stick with the software and type a few commands and you are done.
Our guys were up to the task. They flew over, installed the firmware patch and went on an after hours tour not open to the general public. The tech guys went out and basically really enjoyed their stay. It turns out that this group was actually the backup plan. The initial plan was to fly some people out of Japan to update the firmware, but this plan was later rejected due to it’s costs.
Funnily enough, there was another possibility that was apparently never was given any serious consideration. It seems that there was one more office and it was also in that same city as the client who could have performed this update task. Yup, across town was another office for this Japanese console company that could have also performed the firmware update. Nobody will really know for certain but it seems that the headquarters didn’t trust their Paris office to perform such a “complicated” task ….