10 Things That Were Accidentally Included in Games

Everyone knows that no game is born "finished." There's a huge difference between what's in the design document, concept art, planning, and what the gamer finally receives. Prototypes, discarded ideas, hardware limitations, bugs, and ideas that appear out of nowhere, sometimes because someone clicked the wrong place or because the hardware simply couldn't handle it, become the centerpiece of the game and redefine the entire game or its genre.

An enemy that shouldn't exist, a mechanic born from a wrong click, a visual effect invented to hide something that ended up becoming the game's signature. We'll find all of this in this list.

We'll talk about the mechanics that became part of the game, items, urban legends of gaming, and without them, it's impossible to imagine the games or some characters as they’d be today. Lara Croft without her exaggerated triangular @@@@? Silent Hill without fog? Unimaginable! We'll talk about these "accidents," and if you have any questions, leave a comment.

This is a classic case that the internet loves to remember. The story that circulated for years says that Toby Gard (one of the key names in Lara's initial design) jokingly increased the character's bust by 150% when he wanted to increase it by 50%, in a "mouse slip." And the team supposedly thought it was cool and kept it. But when you look into the origin of this story, it becomes a "lie told so many times that it became the truth."

However, when we look into the real story, it seems that the "legend" spread widely due to articles written in a joking tone and interviews with Gard himself, who supposedly treated the story as a joke. In the end, this "accident" may not have happened the way it's told, but it became part of the collective imagination and shaped how we see Lara to this day, helping to solidify her image in Tomb Raider.

The Creeper is practically the game's "poster boy" and was born by "accident". The most widely accepted story (and even told by the game's official communication) is that Markus "Notch" Persson, while trying to create/adjust a pig model, swapped dimension values and the result was "a standing pig that wouldn't get on all fours no matter what."

Tall, narrow, strange, and more frightening than anything else. Instead of being erased, he saw potential and repurposed the "mistake" as a new enemy. He gained this green skin that looks rotten, like an armless zombie.

But the "cherry on top" was the idea of ​​exploding. The monster arrives silently and self-destructs, damaging everything, including the player and the environment. He's not just a monster that can be dealt with through combat; he sabotages your construction and demands strategy to avoid destroying all your work.

Were the combos a "bug" or a "decision"? There are different versions of the story, but the idea of ​​canceling the recovery frame of a move to connect new moves in sequence, which appeared during development due to a glitch, seemed interesting and innovative for the time.

Akira Nishitani, a designer associated with SFII, spoke about this "cancelling bug" and how it became "a mechanic" when they realized it didn't break the game; on the contrary, it opened up a new level of depth and strategy.

From then on, what started as a frame recovery 'glitch' became one of the pillars of the genre: the player not only lands a hit, but chains them together, creating several new possibilities for dealing damage. This even became the main mechanic in some fighting games like Killer Instinct and its "Ultra Combos". If you have any doubts about how a fighting game works without combos, just play Street Fighter 1 and see how it was. Then you'll thank this bug!

One of the most famous games of all time, Space Invaders, has a behavior that many people may not know came from a programming accident: the acceleration of the aliens as you kill them. This originated from a limitation and became a design feature.

When there were many invaders on the screen, the processor needed to draw and update a lot of things, but as you eliminated enemies, the processor load decreased and the game could process each frame faster. With this extra processing power freed up, the invaders moved faster and descended faster, and you needed to react faster to avoid dying!

Tomohiro Nishikado noticed the effect and decided to keep it because it created a difficulty curve that made the game more interesting: you think you're doing well just because there are fewer enemies, but in reality, the game is getting harder. This was very good because it transformed a "flaw" into a mechanic and even a story: they see they are losing, so they become desperate and advance faster and faster with less caution. They become kamikazes!

Have you noticed that the police in GTA are very, very aggressive? Nowadays, we know that GTA police officers mimic the behavior of real police officers and that even drivers on the street are aggressive in order to 'stop' you and give the game time to load the rest of the game. But, in the beginning, it wasn't quite like that.

The origin of GTA as a franchise is often attributed to an earlier game/prototype/idea called "Race'n'Chase" and to an AI behavior in the game that didn't work as expected. Instead of pursuing the player in a "proper" way, the police cars became too aggressive, crashing, running off the road, doing everything to stop the player.

The game became so much more fun that the developers decided to keep the idea and let the police hit and attack the player without softening their behavior, transforming what should’ve been a simulator into one of the most played franchises of all time.

Here we can say that the "mistake" wasn't exactly a mistake, but rather a choice. During the game's development, the team used a simple, round sprite as a placeholder to test mechanics and present the game's concept. This temporary little character, provisionally called "Popopo" according to some accounts, looked so good during testing that they decided to keep it as the game's mascot.

Kirby was born there. He worked well on the Game Boy's small screen, conveyed emotions with few and simple pixels, and fit the idea of ​​a "family game" that Nintendo always wanted. In the end, instead of changing the placeholder to a more complex character, the HAL Laboratory team, especially Masahiro Sakurai, Kirby's creator, stuck with simplicity, and the character ended up becoming one of Nintendo's most famous mascots.

The fog in Silent Hill is as iconic as the game itself, its siren, and the "poster boy" Pyramid Head. It became so famous that many people think it was planned from the beginning. But that's not quite the truth. The fog is a "workaround" to disguise a limitation of the console.

"Draw Distance" is a game feature that, as the name suggests, "draws" what is far from the player. It creates the world in front of you and draws what the player sees in the distance. This feature depends on the PC or console's memory and, as you can imagine, the more, the better! This wasn't the case with the PlayStation.

The PlayStation's Draw Distance was short, and rendering the entire city with good performance was a problem. The solution was to compensate for the lack of hardware with fog, hiding the city that was gradually being "drawn" for the player.

Covering everything with fog, limiting what you can see and thus reducing what needs to be drawn at the same time, was a trick that not only solved a problem but created a specific type of fear: the fear of what is just a few meters away and you can't see. This "patch" became part of Silent Hill's identity.

This is one of the most fun mechanics that was created accidentally. According to reports from the game's development, co-director Kenta Motokura accidentally placed an extra Mario character model in a level and, instead of crashing the game, he ended up controlling both Marios at the same time.

They saw that this opened the way for a new item and a type of puzzle, so the team worked to turn it into an official item: the Double Cherry was born! A cherry that, when you pick it up, creates controllable clones of your character! Suddenly, the level becomes a mess where you need to think about the positioning and multiplication of the character to solve puzzles. This became one of the most interesting power-ups in the franchise, but it's a shame that it doesn't appear more often.

Metal Gear is one of the most famous stealth franchises, rivaling others like Hitman and Assassin's Creed. Although they shifted the focus from stealth to other things, such as cyborg and mech combat, the game was born and laid the foundations for what we know as stealth today. But not because it was planned, but rather due to hardware limitations.

The MSX2 wasn't the most powerful machine, and by no means ideal for an action shooter full of bullets and enemies on screen. The limitations on sprites/the number of simultaneous elements the console could generate led to a rethinking of the game's design.

Instead of insisting on frenetic combat (which the hardware couldn't handle), Hideo Kojima's team migrated to a "combat without combat," and instead of killing everyone, you had to avoid shots, avoid confrontation, and be clever enough to go unnoticed. Instead of thinking "it can't be done", the team thought, "let's do it another way", and that other way became the Metal Gear we know today.

Devil May Cry was supposed to be a game in the Resident Evil franchise, more focused on action and combat than survival horror, but it ended up becoming something else entirely with its own style and direction, because it strayed too far from the original to the point of being unrecognizable. During the development process, a bug they had seen in the game Onimusha: Warlords ended up becoming the main mechanic of this new franchise.

During testing, the developers noticed that enemies could become "suspended" in the air while you were hitting them. Hideki Kamiya, the game's director, saw this and understood that it wasn't just a glitch, it was fun. Performing huge combos and trapping the enemy in that loop, letting them fall only to lift them into the air and continue hitting them, was really cool.

He asked to incorporate this feeling into the new game, and that's how the idea of ​​"juggling" (keeping enemies in the air while hitting them) was born, which became the basis of DMC's combat.