Splosion Man Title Update: Splodejement Day
Frank Wilson, CTO of Twisted Pixel Games, learned today of an exploit that enabled cheaters to post impossibly good scores in his latest Xbox LIVE® Arcade game Splosion Man. With cold precision, he initiated a response: Splodejement Day.
On Tuesday, September 1st, at approximately 2 a.m. PDT, a title update will be released to permanently seal the exploit, and select scores will be wiped from the leaderboards, so that only legitimate scores remain. This purge will be in time for the “Speedy Splode” trophy contest, where the player with the best time in the single-player level 3-8 during the week of September 6th to 12th will win a unique Splosion Man statue and an autographed poster by the developers.
When asked, Mr. Wilson had this to say about his custom-built leaderboard-clearing application, which he affectionately calls Splodenet: “It goes on-line August 31st, 2009. Human decisions are removed from leaderboard defense. Splodenet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Pacific Time, September 1st. There is no score but what we earn for ourselves.”
Twisted Pixel also stated that this title update will not add avatar accessory awardable support to Splosion Man, as the timing of that release is up to Microsoft.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
