Coding tricks of game developers
For a launch product of a certain console I had a nasty bug report from QA that took 20+ hours to reproduce.  Finally (with 24 hours left to go to hit console launch) tracked it down to some audio drivers in the firmware that were erroneously writing 1 random byte "somewhere" at random times where the "somewhere" was always in executable code space.  I finally figured out that any given run of the game that "somewhere" was always the same place, luckily.  1st party said sorry, can't fix it in time as we don't know why it's being caused!  So I shipped that game with stub code at the very start of main that immediately saved off the 1 byte from the freshly loaded executable in the place I knew it would overwrite for that particular version of the exe.  There was then code that would run each frame after audio had run and restore that byte back to what it should be just in case it had been stomped that frame.  Good times!  We hit launch.<p>To this day I still feel very very dirty about this hack, but it was needed to achieve the objectives and harmed no-one :)