Summary
Sometimes, the true tell of a master artist is not their penchant for perfection but their recognition of which mistakes are beautiful in the overall work. The same principle is true for video games, in which innovation comes just as often through mistakes as it does through the necessity of overcoming adversity or technological limitations.
A surprising number of iconic video game mechanics, characters, and features came out of the developers not having drank enough coffee that morning to add the numbers up right, but some bugs simply managed to slip through QA to every player’s delight, and others immediately revealed themselves as giftsfrom the gaming godsduring early development, setting the game on a completely different path.
Before Rockstar was Rockstar, the Scottish company that went on to create the GTA franchise was operating under the name DMA. They were working on a quant little game calledRace N' Chase, in which players could relive their schoolyard dreams by playing as either cops or robbers in car chases. During a build review, some of the playtesters noticed that the AI aggression on the cops was way too high, but it also made the game a ton more fun.
The chases would get completely out of control as cards piled up and smashed into pedestrians and other cars on the road. The developers saw the potential in this mayhem, scrapped the part of the game about playing the cops, andGrand Theft Autowas born. Considering the fact thatthe series birthed a whole genre of games, it’s probably good that whoever was coding that day wasn’t on their A-game.
Giants inSkyrimare, it goes without saying, formidable opponents. For anyone still living under a Baar Dau-shaped rock, there’s a chance that getting hit by a giant (and their giant-sized club) will send the Dragonborn spinning across the outer rim of the sky until they lose consciousness (or they hit the loading screen).
This terrifying finishing move was not intentionally coded in by Bethesda, it was a happy accident. The bug was noticed early on, but the developers ultimately decided to keep it in, cementing giants asone of the scariest enemies in Tamriel. The launch happens because the game engine converts any excess damage (as in anything that goes over the player’s 0 death amount) into force. Since giants hit hard, it’s almost enough to make the Dovakin rip another star into the sky with the horns of their helmet.
Running at a wall at full speed will, in the hands of aSuper Mario Bros.expert, allows Mario to bounce off with another jump and land on a higher ledge. Although this might seem like a brilliant bit of game design for players who are skilled enough to learn and master every subtle trick, it’s actually the result of clipping and was a completely unintentional feature. The move requires precise timing and isn’t reliable in most situations, although it can be used to break out of levels.
More than a decade later, with the arrival ofSuper Mario 64, Nintendo acknowledged the power of this move by including it in Mario’s first foray into 3D. Thankfully, players don’t need to land a pixel-perfect maneuver to pull it off in that game or most Mario games since, and it actsmore like a finely-tuned parkour movethat anyone can pick up and play.
Once upon a time, there were only about as many moves in fighting games as there were attack buttons on the player’s joystick or controller. That all changed during the development ofStreet Fighter 2when the developers accidentally left a little feature that allowed combatants to cancel the animation of their last move after landing an attack, moving them into the next in rapid succession.
This move cutting allowed players to shift from hit to hit, and coincidentally, became a hit with fighting game fans. Combos, the art of blitzing the opponent with an uninterrupted string of moves, is now almost universal across all fighting games, and it’s hard to imagine fighting games evolving into the art form (or,depending on the company, the button-mashing fest) that it is without this happy accident.
Sometime after he was inspired byInfiniminerto make his own procedurally generated building game, Notch was adding a few of the familiar farm animals seen wandering the surface of the never-ending blocky horizon. He was modeling a pig, but since he was creating all the assets purely in code without an interface, he hadn’t noticed that the Y and Z axis were mixed up, and the rotation was slightly off.
When he booted up the game world, he was confronted by a lanky abomination with dead eyes staring back at him. He was creeped out and decided it would make a great enemy. After a friend commented that it would be funny if it simply exploded after getting too close,one of the most annoying (but easily the most iconic) Minecraft mob was born, and it’s all the fault of the pigs. No wonder they ended up in the Nether.
A good working memory might be needed to even recall this arcade shooter, but incidentally, a bad working memory is what made the experience of shooting pixel aliens out of the sky so thrilling back in the day. After players manage to take out a few of the descending invaders honing in on the player’s home city (or base? It’s unclear), a horror sets in as they realize that the fleet is speeding up.
This wasn’t by design, but rather a mistake in memory allocation. The aliens were originally meant to move at top speed, but the system just couldn’t handle it. When one ship disappeared from the screen, its memory would be reallocated, allowing the aliens to move at their intended speed. That’s the story of its early development, at least. According toSpace Invaderscreator Tomohiro Nishikado, this slow-to-fast creep was well-liked by the team, and so he hard-coded it into the release build.
This bug-born technique got its start in ID software’s smooth-moving, demon-shootin' classic,Doom,where explosives (such as those iconic red barrels) would act as propulsion and push the player in a certain direction. While Doom Guy certainly had an arsenal of explosives to play with, unfortunately, the originalDoomdidn’t have a true Z axis, meaning that everything technically took place on one level, despite some clever art design.
A year afterDoom’s debut,MarathonandRise of the Triadboth featured explosion-fueled rocket jumping (a tie as they released on the same day), but the concept only really took root in gamers' imaginations withQuake. Since then,some of the best hero or team shooters, fromHalotoTF2,feature the ability to blow up the ground to get a boost into the air.
