Evan Wells, co-president at Naughty Dog, disclosed to Game Informer why live demonstrations aren’t always fun and games. In the days leading up to E3 2009, a pesky bug found in Uncharted 2 forced Naughty Dog and Sony to think fast for the big show.

“Leading up to the E3 ( 2009) press conference we had a texture streaming bug in Uncharted 2 that would strike without warning, turning every texture on screen into a purplish mess. It was one of those insidious kind of bugs that happened rarely enough that it was very difficult to track down, but it happened frequently enough that  the idea of giving a live demo on stage in front of thousands of people had me scared s—less.”

“We did everything we could to fix the bug before the big day, but simply could not guarentee that it had been eliminated. Since the demonstration had to be live we needed some sort of  backup plan. While I was playing the game live on stage, we had our producer from Sony playing along back stage keeping perfect pace with my progress.”

“If the bug struck, we were going to switch the screen on stage to his feed so that the demo could continue without the corrupted textures.  Thankfully the demo went off without a hitch and we didn’t need to pull the trigger on the backup plan.”

June 2010 Game Informer magazine