now that's a good simulation

From this month's game magazine, there's a story about odd game glitches that I want to believe:

"Way back in the day when Vicarious Visions was developing the PC game Terminus, we ran into some very strange bugs. In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we could just not figure out why the ships were exploding. It took a long time to figure out the root cause -- it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the player's ship with it.

Also in Terminus, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all the controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn't work, no keyboard input, etc. It turned out that we had modeled inefficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the ship took off, the radiation from the ship's engine would kill the pilot."