Former Bethesda QA tester crashed Fallout 4 four times in a day on Xbox One after a “Super-Nuke” stress test

Before kickstarting Pedalboard Games and making his way to indie studio Strange Scaffold, Colin McInerney spent his college days working as a QA engineer at Bethesda Softworks. While working as a regular QA tester for Fallout 4, he decided to one day go on a tenfold nuke spree in the Wasteland on the Xbox One, which caused four crashes. Back then, crashes triggered auto-reports that made their way to the top of the company, including Robert Altman.

At a recent GDC interview, McInerney sat down with GamesRadar+ and discussed how his QA testing methodologies evolved from standard publisher checks to hands-on work with Bethesda developers. He picked up a few tricks from the team and started stress-testing Fallout 4 in ways no QA engineer had previously imagined.

While discussing generative AI in game development, McInerney quickly steered the conversation in a different direction, stating that humans can’t be replaced in the QA process. While AI systems follow patterns, humans like McInerney stir up chaos that no script or program could anticipate.

In the interview, he talked about his QA testing style in Fallout 4 and said, “At one point, I decided to play hot and cold with the RAM because we were on Xbox One. The Xbox One has 8 GB of RAM, so if you get above that, the game’s going to crash. So I brought up a RAM readout and was just like, ‘How can I break this?’”

He continued, “That thought occurred to me; no one else was doing that. That isn’t a standard testing practice of ‘How can I leak memory from the game?’”

McInerney found the most chaotic method to break Fallout 4. He said, “What I ended up doing was, I went into the console and gave myself a billion experience, which put me at, like, level 247. I walked around with the unique nuke launcher that fired two nukes and had the add-on that made each nuke spawn ten more. So I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found four crashes in a single morning.”

That day, everyone at ZeniMax, including Robert Altman, received emails regarding QA test crashes in Fallout 4.

He laughed off the incident and his experimentation with Fallout 4, concluding, “I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.”

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