Fatal Core Dump – a debugging murder mystery played with GDB

Debugging a crash can sometimes feel like a noir detective story: following faint clues, chasing red herrings, and eventually hitting the moment where the whole case finally makes sense. I leaned into that idea and built Fatal Core Dump, a small game where the investigation is real crash debugging.

The game gives you a Linux binary, its core dump, a source file, and some logs. You solve the mystery by debugging it.

The premise: an engineer dies when an airlock on an asteroid mining station opens unexpectedly. Your job is to determine whether it was a simple software bug or something more deliberate.

The investigation uses real debugging tools and techniques. You can use whatever debugging setup you prefer.

There’s also a spoiler-heavy blog post describing how the game was conceived and implemented, and the full code is available if you’re curious about how it works or want to experiment with the idea.

Blog post: https://www.robopenguins.com/core-dump-game/ Source: https://github.com/axlan/fatal_core_dump

If you enjoy debugging puzzles or low-level Linux tooling, I’d love to hear what you think.