Gold-plating means adding unnecessary, frivolous features or requirements. This is covered in the book Rapid Development. Gold-plating is a great metaphor for adding artificial value, like cheaply manufactured jewelry.

Having spent a few years programming, these words from Jeff Atwood ring true. When designing a project, you have to be careful to not have too much feature-creep, even if the ideas are ok. Otherwise valuable resources of time and money are wasted and the project might never be finished.

Jeff goes on to say in another post that not all gold-plating is bad and brings out an example found by Blake Patterson in the Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000:

Not long ago I purchased a new-in-box Atari Jaguar, complete with Jeff Minter’s psychedelic sequel to Tempest, Tempest 2000. It’s an amazing game that’s been ported to many other platforms, but the consensus is that none are as solid as the Jaguar original.

An interesting thing about “the world’s first 64-bit console” — its controller was, as the Brits would say, fairly pants. It was large, sported a calculator-button array for game overlays (like the Intellivision controller), had no shoulder buttons, and featured only a D-pad for directional control.

As the arcade original is controlled with a rotary spinner knob, the D-pad falls rather short of providing ideal game control.

But, of course, being such a savvy chap, Jeff Minter realized this.

Jeff wrote in support for an analog rotary controller … that did not exist. Neither Atari nor third party manufacturers produced such a controller in the Jaguar’s heyday. Jeff, as I understand it, hacked his own together by wiring an Atari paddle controller into a Jaguar controller. In the years since the Jaguar’s passing, a few small operations have offered modified Jaguar controllers with spinners wired into them for purchase.

I need to pick up a Jaguar sometime with Tempest 2000. I remember playing it and Cybermorph with a VR helmet at a movie special effects expo in the mid 90s. Both were a lot of fun!