Games are kinda weird as a creative medium because it’s one of the few where it’s possible to be incredibly incompetent at one of the major parts of it (the programming) and it not be noticeable in the end product.
Like, if you’re a musician who can’t sing or play your instruments worth a damn, that definitely comes across in the final product, no matter how good you are at lyrics or composing.
Making a movie? It doesn’t matter how great the script is, if your performers can’t act and your cameraman doesn’t know which end points towards the action, your movie is going to be noticeably bad.
But games? There are games that have sold a bunch of copies, developed by one person, with brilliant game design, highly playable, not noticeably buggy, but if you look inside them it’ll turn out it’s just absolute dogshit. They barely are holding up against the strain of just existing.
The kind of game that when the sequel comes out, they just throw it all out instead of reusing any code, because it’s all so terrible that it’d be more work to adapt any of it than to just burn it.
That happens so often. But you would never guess it from just playing it. Like, if you think about “badly programmed games” you get things like “skyrim”, which is just… Not exactly right.
Skyrim has lots of bugs but that’s because it’s trying to do so much. It’s simulating a huge world with so much interactivity and so many complex interacting systems, that it’s almost inevitable that it’ll have weird glitches. It’d take so much playtesting and careful bug fixing to make that game glitchless, and they clearly did not do that. The game is known for glitches, but not crashing (unless modded), suggesting their QA approach was “weird unexpected stuff can happen, but the game must continue working”.
Or Pokémon red/blue! That game is so glitchy, with so many bugs, but a lot of that is that it is just stuffing way too much game on a tiny cartridge. Its only failing is that of Icarus: it flew too high, too close to the sun, it did too much.
Skyrim and Pokémon gen1 are examples of amazingly coded games, even if they have their glitches.
But there’s games that seem to work just fine that are held together with toothpicks and duct tape, at best. They’re immensely fragile, and they only work at all because the crash bugs were fixed, painfully and slowly, far more painfully than they would have been if the program had just been designed correctly in the first place.
Just absolute disasters of game programming, but then those games go on to be critically acclaimed and start entire mini-genres because of how influential they were on certain gaming niches.
But you’d never know! That’s the weird thing to me.