Bugs that were turned into features

David Amador https://twitter.com/DJ_Link posted some pretty cool bugs that were later essential features. I just wanted to collect them in one space with some others I’ve found.

GTA 1

Race ’n’ Chase, an early version of Grand Theft Auto, left future GTA developer Gary Penn feeling like a huge failure. The software always crashed and worse, the multiplayer racing game was boring. Due to a bug in the coding, when computer-controlled cops tried to pull over a human-controlled suspect, the police car would sometimes attempt to occupy the same space as the getaway car and a fiery wreck would be triggered. The testers hated the game and spent all of their time trying to trigger the bug that caused the violent crashes. Race ’n’ Chase disappeared into the trash and GTA was born.

Gmail

Yes, the undo feature that we see now on Gmail, actually was born out of a bug. Gmail went through 5 seconds delay while processing an email. Developers who were working on Gmail smartly turned that bug into the most useful feature of Gmail.

Hidden files in Linux

The feature that we use in Linux and Unix where we hide our files by simply putting a dot(.) before the filename. Well, it was a bug in Linux and Unix which wasn’t fixed.

World of Warcraft

In 2005, World of Warcraft developers introduced the Corrupted Blood Spell, which was meant to selectively curse the game’s avatars with ill health. The debilitating effect was intended to last a short time and stay contained in a controlled environment, but the infectious disease escaped and sowed death and destruction in the virtual world of WoW. Epidemiologists made ​​good use of the phenomenon by using it for research into methods for containing pandemics in the real, physical world.

CTRL + ALT + DEL

Control-Alt-Delete is the invention of David Bradley, the developer who worked on the first IBM PC. He invented the command to help programmers save time by booting without having to wait for shutdown so that the flow of their work would not be interrupted. It was never his intention for the three-finger salute to become so familiar to end users. In a panel discussion attended by Bill Gates, Bradley explained, saying, “I may have invented it, but Bill made ​​it famous.” And indeed, last week Bill Gates admitted in a Q&A on Harvard University that the triple-key combination should have been made easier. “We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.”

Devil May Cry

During dev of Onimusha Capcom noticed a bug in the combat physics. Enemies could be launched into the air, by attacking them quickly they could keep them airborne. It didn’t fit the game, so they tested in Resident Evil 4, but eventually simply created a new IP, Devil May Cry.

Lara Croft

Lara Croft’s bustiness in Tomb Raider was originally an error. This is the story:

“While making test adjustments to her girlish figure, a slip of his mouse turned an intended 50 per cent increase to her breast size into a 150 per cent gain. It met with instant approval from the team before he could correct it.”

Super Mario 3D World

In Super Mario 3D World while working with the placement tool/editor one of the devs made a mistake and left 2 Marios in a level. When the rest of the team saw that they decided to create a power-up for that purpose, the Double Cherry, allowing up to 4 clones.

Myspace

The ability to edit the html/css of Myspace profiles started as a bug, although it later turned into the strength of Myspace.

Crazy Taxi

A bug in the original Crazy Taxi allowed the players to jump their cars with with a gear changing technique. While only religious player knew this trick to jump parts of the level and shorten their routes, it was introduced as a full fledged feature in Crazy Taxi 2.

Mortal Kombat

Arcade version of Mortal Kombat had a hidden diagnostic screen showing some stats, one was “ERMACS” error macros. A rumor spread, including magazines that it was a hidden character. Became so popular that Midway created Ermac in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 as a red palette Scorpion.

ERMAC the character from Mortal Kombat was an alleged glitch. The original game was written in macro to catch coding errors also known as error macro. Hence every time there was an error during a game the “ermac” text would display, causing speculation that a new character would be introduced. Finally ERMAC was introduced in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

Street Fighter II

Combos, now present in all fighting games were introduced with Street Fighter II by accident. During dev the bug was found on the car bonus stage, allowing several attacks, but timing required to make it happen was considered too difficult to pull off so they left it

Minecraft

Minecraft Creepers were created by accident, dev was attempting to create a pig using only code (he had no 3D modeling tools), mistakenly used height instead of length and created a weird tall looking creature instead. it was kept as an enemy.

The BUD switch (Block update detector) in Minecraft.

When introducing the “Piston” in Minecraft, there was a bug introduced where specifically placed redstone would not activate a Piston. The only way the Piston would activate if a nearby block would change state, as a “changing” block will tell it’s nearby blocks to check their state, and if needed update it. A Piston in a “wrong” state would then activate.

This allowed players to effectively build contraptions that would respond to new blocks placed, blocks removed, or blocks changing state (eg: gras growing, oven activation and more).

The game creator stated that they have no intention of removing this bug.

Super Mario Bros

Super Mario Bros. multi-coin blocks were initially a bug, it was supposed to be always 1 coin. Programmer fixed it, but after designers saw that it added something to the game they decided to add it back in.

Quake

Quake had a bug where pressing a direction key would add a unit in that direction, but final sum was never normalized, a combination of movements would increase top speed. Devs decided to leave it in and this became a standard in many other FPS until today, called Strafe-jumping.

Space Invaders

Space Invaders was built at a time where microcomputers were slow for games. Tomohiro Nishikado noticed that as he killed aliens and remove them from screen the game ran faster, it felt like difficulty was increasing. that side effect was turn into a feature.

Team Fortress 1

Team Fortress 1 (a mod for Quake) had a glitch in which a player name would show in the wrong color, making it look like they were on the opposite team. An easy fix but devs decided to create the Spy class, based on deception and sabotage.

Wing Commander

This is from an anecdote by Ken Demarest, one of the original developers who worked on Wing Commander I on the PC…

… we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We’d clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like “EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah.” We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”

Super Smash Bros Melee

During a Super Smash Bros Melee tournament, one of the contestants tried to grab an item in the air, and accidentally slid across the screen without actually walking or running.

The technique, which is now known as a “wavedash” is an unintended physics exploit of the game that transfer the movement of the air dodge into a horizontal movement along the ground. It’s a required skill now to be competitive in the professional circuit.