8 Popular Game Bugs That Became Features
People always say that you should learn from your mistakes, so the people who made these games did just that.
Ever since there have been computer games, glitches and bugs have been around. Depending on how bad they are, we either hate them, laugh at them, or try to ignore them. But it might surprise you to learn that some companies saw bugs as a chance to make money. Strange things happen all the time, and these bugs actually led to some of our favorite parts of our favorite games.
So, whether it’s a glitched model that turns into a new creature or a bug that got stuck in the memory and was used in a later game, these are just a few examples of bugs in video games that were turned into something better. People are always told to learn from their mistakes, and these games did just that.
Minecraft’s Creeper Was A Pig
It’s a well-known bug story, but the Creeper mob from Minecraft almost didn’t make it into the game at all. Notch didn’t plan for such a mob, but one day when he was messing around with code, he made a bug where a pig’s size was backwards.
So it went from being short and fat to being tall and thin. Notch thought the model was funny and liked it enough to make a new mob with the same size. This is how the Creeper came to be.
The Speed Of Space Invader Aliens
Space Invader is one of the most well-known video games of all time. It was also one of the first games to have a feature that people liked because of a bug. In Space Invaders, when you shoot an alien, the others start to move faster. Well, you might not know this, but they were never meant to get faster.
What looks like a way to make things harder was actually a bug. The less sprites there were, the easier it was for the processor to load up the aliens. So, this caused the aliens to start moving faster. Because the developers liked it so much, they chose to keep it.
Street Fighter 2 Created Fighting Game Combos
This one is strange because you’d think that moves are the main thing in a fighting game. But it turns out that loops were never meant to be a part of the game. All of this started with Street Fighter 2. In that game, the controls were changed so that special moves were easier to pull off than in the first game. But because the timing of these movements was changed, players could stop moves in the middle of their animations and start a new one.
This would lock opponents in place and start a series of strikes, called a combo. Even though some of the game’s developers were worried that this would throw off the game’s balance, it was left in, and combos are now a big part of future titles and other fighting games.
Super Mario Was Never Meant To Wall Jump
In the first Super Mario game, players found out that Mario could jump off of walls. It’s hard, but the main thing the player had to do was clip one pixel into the top corner of a block. The game would think Mario was on top of the tile instead of in the block, so you could make him jump again even though it looked like a wall jump.
This was never meant to be, but Nintendo must have liked it because Mario can now wall jump in Super Mario 64, which came out later.
The Team Fortress Spy Came From Quake
The Spy is one of the most famous classes in Team Fortress, but he almost didn’t make it into the game at all. When a bug happened in Quake, players would sometimes look like they were on the other team, even though they weren’t.
Valve took this idea and turned it into a real class in their game. So, The Spy was born with the power to pretend to be someone else and join another team. This time, it wasn’t because of a glitch.
Bad AI Created Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto was never called Grand Theft Auto in the beginning. When Rockstar Games was still called DMA Design, they made a game called Race’n’Chase. It was all about, well, racing and hunting. But a bug in the police AI would make them too aggressive. They would run over people, crash cars, and do whatever they could to catch you.
This was a lot more fun, so the game was changed into the first Grand Theft Auto, where you play as a criminal and deal with gangsters and the cops. This is when DMA Design changed its name to Rockstar North.
Giant’s Clubs In Skyrim
We all remember when we first went to Whiterun and saw a giant for the first time. We also remember trying to attack it, shoot it, firebolt it, or do something else stupid, and one swing from the giant sent the Dragonborn into the sky.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. During creation, the idea was that giants would just hit your character with their arms and kill them. But the game has a damage overflow formula, which means that if you take more damage than you can handle, the extra damage is turned into force to throw your ragdoll body. Since the giants can kill you with one swing and do a lot of damage, all of that extra damage is turned into force, sending you flying through the air. But because the death is so well-known, it was not fixed and is still in Skyrim to this day.
Onimusha Influenced Devil May Cry
Capcom was working on both Snake Game and Devil May Cry at the same time. One of the developers, Hideki Kamiya, noticed a bug in Onimusha and told the rest of the team. He was watching one of the writers play Onimusha and thought it was funny when enemies got hit and flew into the air.
Even though this was a bug in Onimusha, Kamiya liked it so much that he used it as a model for the famous air combos in Devil May Cry. Since then, it has become a feature of the Devil May Cry series to throw enemies into the air and shoot them to pieces. It all started with a bug that Kamiya thought was funny.
