There are tons of small bugs around. Occasionally, there is a really big one. In the “oh my god, I can’t believe it” category, here’s a story of the game Yakuza 6.

A few months ahead of launch, in February 2018, Sega released a free playable demo of the game. The demo gave access to the first level, and then blocked the progress with a barrier:

Somewhat unusually, the demo actually contained the entire game in a hefty 35GB+ download. The idea was apparently that after the game release and player’s purchase, they could “unlock” the game with a code and resume as if nothing happened, instead of downloading it separately and likely losing their progress. However, that made this barrier a pretty load-bearing one, as finding a way to circumvent it would mean people could play the entire game for free.

But before speedrunning hackers laid their hands on this challenge, it turned out no circumvention was even necessary – a bug in the game code itself made the barrier simply not appear on American PlayStation consoles.

Sega realized it quickly, pulled the demo, and blocked the installed copies via DRM, but not before some players got access to the complete game and finished more than the expected first chapter.

Alas, there was no public post mortem or an explanation; I’d love to understand what happened on a technical level. Either way, it’s wild trying to imagine the moment people at the company realized what they’ve done.