I’ve started gaining a lot of interest in the stories you hear about how certain game features were made by accident, or added as an afterthought and now they are an integral part to the game.
One of my favorites is one that is probably well known in these parts about Space Invaders. Tomohiro Nishikado developed the game on custom hardware back in the 70’s. While he was programming the game he found out that the processor could render each frame of the aliens animations faster when there were fewer aliens on the screen. The aliens positions were updated after each frame making it so they moved across the screen at increasing speeds as more of them were destroyed. Instead of coding in some sort of compensation for the speed increase he left it in the game as an example of maybe on of the earliest “it’s a feature not a bug” moments in gaming.
Another that comes to mind is the long fall boots seen in Portal 2. They are the natural successors to the “Knee Replacements” that valve gave …