What Even Is a Bug? We Turned It Into a Game

Everyone has said it at some point: "The computer is acting up." Most of the time there's no computer madness behind it, just a bug. And since hardly anyone can picture what that actually means, we turned it into a game.

What is a bug?

A bug is a mistake in software. Programs are made of thousands of instructions written by people. And wherever people work, mistakes creep in.

Imagine a cake recipe that says "salt" instead of "sugar." The oven does exactly what the recipe says, and the cake is inedible. A computer doesn't think along. It carries out the mistake obediently.

Why is it called a "bug"?

A team at Harvard University found a real moth inside a giant computer in 1947. It was stuck between two components and brought the machine to a halt. The moth was taped into the logbook, with the line "First actual case of bug being found."

The word existed before that, but this story made it famous. Today, bugs no longer sit between components. They sit in the code.

When does it get expensive?

Most bugs are just annoying: a button that doesn't respond, or a page that looks wrong. Some get very expensive. In 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter, worth around 125 million dollars. One team had calculated in metric units, another in imperial units. Nobody noticed the mistake in time.

Security holes are bugs, too. Whoever finds one may get access to data that is none of their business.

So what do we do?

We find and fix bugs before your customers notice them: test, check, repair. There's one golden rule: When you fix something, nothing that works may break.

BUG HUNT: The rule, playable

You can practice exactly that now. In BUG HUNT, you shoot bugs in the jungle while sparing the animals. Beetles, wasps and flies score points, and a rare golden bug is worth 50. Hit a parrot, a toucan or a butterfly and you lose points.

The game runs right in your browser, with no installation and no sign-up. You aim with the mouse and click to shoot. There's no end, just a high score, and the targets keep getting faster. A short in-game tutorial explains everything above in four quick pages. One heads-up: the game is in German, but aim and click work in any language.

Play BUG HUNT now

Built like our websites

The same principle applies here: no unnecessary building blocks. BUG HUNT is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and only the 3D weapon uses the three.js library. The graphics are drawn in code, and the sounds are generated right in the browser. There are no cookies and no tracking, and your high score stays on your device.

Sadly, you can't shoot the bugs on your own website. But we're happy to fix them for you, without breaking anything that works.