This story had to be published on 13th September, on Day of the Programmer. But I always forget about this holiday. So I did it again this year.

It happened about 15 years ago. I was a student and worked on a game with my friends. The game was multiplayer sci-fi turn-based strategy. There was no graphics, just text mode. And its gameplay was endless. The game was run on Turbo Pascal on PC with Intel 80386 processor. Golden times!

Once we had to implement a function that generates names for new weapons. Because of endless gameplay, upgrade process was endless too. So the function had to generate a new name for each call. The idea was to join a couple of random prefixes, random string, and random suffix. Prefixes and suffix had to be selected from predefined lists. The prefix list looked like this: hyper, mega, plasma, etc. And the suffix list was like this: gun, cannon, blaster, rifle, etc. The middle string was random combination of consonant syllables.

So the function had been done, and we ran a test. And in the first dozen of names, it printed out a name of probably the most powerful weapon in whole known universe: Super Megadick Launcher.

The test had been passed. The game unfortunately had not been finished.