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The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder

There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.

That particular piece of C source code is responsible for displaying the white status bar at the top of the game screen, with the black text that shows the user what their current score is. It turns out that this Space Quest 2 game disk contains about 70% of the source code of Sierra On-Line’s AGI interpreter, complete with comments and change history. This is why the preparation of a master disk involved ensuring that it started out fully formatted before the game was copied on to it, and for the most part, Sierra On-Line got this step right.

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