Welcome back to "War Stories," our ongoing video series looking at game devs tackling complex programming challenges. Check out our previous chats with Looking Glass founder Paul Neurath and Ultima designer Richard Garriott.

Any fan of spacefaring turn-based strategy games should know the name Brad Wardell. For decades now, Wardell and his studio Stardock have been behind the well-loved Galactic Civilizations series, which started on the ill-fated OS/2 before finding success on Windows years later. The studio's space-RTS empire also includes Sins of a Solar Empire and Ashes of the Singularity, keeping alive a genre that has fallen into obscurity in recent years.

Around 2010, though, Wardell and Stardock took a turn away from sci-fi and toward high fantasy with the extremely ambitious Elemental: War of Magic. As Wardell recalls, the development plan called for units that could marry and have children that really aged, fully designable cities, and individual units that could each be fully outfitted with their own sets of clothes.

Many of those features had to be pulled, as two years into development, Wardell and his team started encountering mysterious memory errors in their testing. While the game looked like it was well under the 2GB memory limits of Windows PCs at the time, random memory errors kept popping up with no reliable way to fix them entirely.

In this video, Wardell reminisces on the "horror" of running into a seemingly unexplainable bug after years of development, explains the technical issues behind the actual problem, and recalls the crushing experience of shipping a game that didn't live up to expectations.