There’s a lot of stuff you can do in MLB The Show 17. You can throw balls, swing bats, and up until recently, create unholy baseball abominations like the above.
Life was breathed into those demons when when a glitch with the game’s hair slider turned custom players into human wicker statues. Sony San Diego, the game’s developer, has been doing a series of streams on the upcoming game and revealed some of its darker undercurrents in a segment on “graphical improvements.”
Patrick Hager, the game’s lead graphics programmer, who introduced himself by dabbing at the start of the stream, brought up the glitch as an example of some things the team has been improving over the past year leading up to its release at the end of this month.
“We’ve had several bugs throughout the year that create these effects,” Hager said. “I don’t even remember what the bug was. It was just, some compute phase was out of sync...”
Sports games are no stranger to human deformity. As they strive for ever greater realism, they sometimes stumble under the weight of their own complex programming. For instance, NBA 2K15's face animator led to some especially weird shit. But perhaps nothing that screamed “please kill me” as much as Sony San Diego’s creation.