Unrealistic

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Considering he was one of the oldest, if not THE oldest employee at the company, it makes sense that over the years he was either given access to or figured out how to "borrow" a dev kit and use it. Seriously, you guys are SO dense. Honestly.

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> The fact that it is hard to get a developer's kit for Xbox aside, the game he was working on would have taken a large team, not a single guy to pull off.

Actually, the homebrew XDK was out for a while before the movie came out. I was building simple games for use on my xbox in 2005, without getting anything from (or paying anything to) microsoft. Since he was simply developing a prototype, he could have easily been using this publicly available dev kit and flown under the radar (eg: microsoft and his company wouldn't have done anything to him).

Also, excellent 3d game engines have been readily available since at least the Wolfenstein 3D days (1994?). A lot of the popular games that came out around the time of Quake and Doom actually used the (Unreal?) Engine that was developed by and shared by either John Romero or John Carmack of id fame. They even wrote and sold programming books detailing their techniques, so even if you couldn't afford to license the binary engine from them, you could read the book and build it yourself in a few weeks or month.

So, without needing to write the low-level 3d-rendering engine, he could have written a pretty cool game by himself. Heck, in the movie, all we see is a couple of levels, not even a whole game...so that is totally do-able. The things that JP mentions (the texture-mapping,shading, I think) could have been unique improvements that he made during those 3 years in seclusion.

Really, it's not as unrealistic as you think.

The really unrealistic thing, though, is the idea that he didn't have the source code or a backup. That's just dumb.

I agree, but this is a case of it being advertised to gamers. I'm no game programmer, but have been into games long enough to know proper terms and what goes into them. I felt like it was marketed to me, but was a case of "gamers shouldn't watch gamer movies". Gamers should, when the movie is actually made on their level. Just so many people told me this movie made them think of me and how much I would probably love it. It also gave me the impression that it thought it knew what it was talking about. I'd rather them just have gone completely goofy than use real terms the wrong way. They could have asked a lot of gamers, for free, how to use the words right and it wouldn't have affected the lines or how the movie came across to those that aren't nitpicky at all. It could have appealed to both the nitpicky and the not with 10 minutes of research and question asking. I don't deny I'm nitpicky, but I am fine with complete fantasy, or realism. It is this sounding like we know what we are saying when we're just repeating words we heard that bugs me.

I have no problem with movies where the computers make a lot of beeps and have graphical interfaces for hacking that play more like a puzzle game or a virtual world than actual hacking. It is when they start talking IP addresses and hexadecimal values while hacking that I expect them to get it right.

Whislt Hastor raised some good points the original posters points are bollox I'm afraid.

Firstly if you've worked in an IT company for 10 years you can get whatever software you want tbh. Maybe not through the official channels but it's hardly difficult to rip some software or get a mate to get it for you.
Also he'd been working on the game for a 3 years I seem to remember. If he ripped the graphics engine and worked on it regularly it may be possible to come up with a full game in a that time. I don't know to be honest with you but I do know that the actual team who does the coding in games isn't a huge team generally.

The only thing that really bugged me was that he only had the game on a single DVD and no copies. I mean come on! The monkey and lion bit was supposed to be ridiculous and was damn funny but that bit was just contrived.

The annoying thing is it wouldn't have even been hard to simply make the DVD a removable hard disk with all the source code on it. I don't know why it annoyed me. I just think that it's so lazy even in a comedy to not spend 10 seconds making your subject matter slightly believable. I mean I wouldn't have cared either if it wasn't a film about gamers. If your gonna make a film about gamers and pot then at least spend a little time learning about gaming and pot.

The pot smoking bit at the end also kinda bugged me when he was completely stoned on the way to the office but then seemed miraculously 100% sober when he got there.