Steam A Dark Room (that Switch game which briefly included a full code editor) has been quietly added to Steam

[Krvavi Abadas]

i'm mainly bringing this up for the editor story, because it's a particularly wild incident if you haven't seen it before.

the game was originally a web browser title released back in 2013, with it's source code being made publicly available a month later. said release lead to the development studio getting contacted by a person named "Amir Rajan", who would end up porting the game to iOS.

but it's of course the Switch port (which also notably was assisted by legendary Linux port developer Ryan C Gordon) where things went off the rails.
the whole thing was rebuilt using the Ruby programming language, and seems to be the first game on the system to use it.
according to Amir, the idea behind including the code editor was a "a last second spark of inspiration." with their description suggesting it was inspired by the basic interpreters included in classic computers such as the Commodore 64.
Nintendo however, was not happy. and the game was delisted 2 weeks later. while it was eventually added back, the code editor naturally didn't survive.

as for the Steam version, it's not as spectacular. it is using the same code as the Switch version, and mainly seems to exist to test out the functionality (namely the ability to automatically upload builds to Steam) of DragonRuby. which is a game development environment using Ruby.

 

[Deleted member 887]

I played this on iOS - had no idea the story behind it on the Nintendo side. Neat

 

[Deleted member 1896]

So this game gave players full access to the Switch CPU? Was it a security concern from Nintendo's perspective?

 

[Hailinel]

So this game gave players full access to the Switch CPU? Was it a security concern from Nintendo's perspective?

The code editor was a potential major security issue and also included without Nintendo's knowledge or permission. Basically, imagine a dev for shits and giggles including an Easter egg in software sold on the eShop that could potentially be used for illicit purposes and then not telling anyone about it until it was already on sale.

 

[Pokemaniac]

So this game gave players full access to the Switch CPU? Was it a security concern from Nintendo's perspective?

There are Switch games with built in code editors (even from Nintendo themselves), the problem is that they tried to sneak it it without Nintendo's knowledge. Presumably it triggers special scrutiny in their certification process.

 

[Deleted member 1896]

There are Switch games with built in code editors (even from Nintendo themselves), the problem is that they tried to sneak it it without Nintendo's knowledge. Presumably it triggers special scrutiny in their certification process.

Yeah, I'm aware of those games, hence I wasn't sure what the problem was here.

 

[snesiscool]

Played the original web version waaaaay back in the day. I don't remember any details but the concept was cool. I'm actually trying it out again now.

Also, incredibly bold of them to sneak a code editor past Nintendo lotcheck/certification.

 

[Pokemaniac]

Yeah, I'm aware of those games, hence I wasn't sure what the problem was here.

Deliberately trying to sneak stuff past Nintendo is definitely something they would not take kindly to, regardless of what it was.

Hard to say if there were any specific issues with the feature otherwise, but it's likely that the way it was setup was at least at significant risk of exposing SDK internals, which are under NDA (and also that wouldn't be ideal from a security perspective, but probably wouldn't allow anything too damaging).