10 GENIUS Ways Players Outsmarted Video Games

10. Sequence Breaking - Super Metroid

Perhaps the earliest known example of players outsmarting video games came with the release of the highly anticipated and utterly fantastic Super Metroid. A groundbreaking title in every sense of the word, it greatly expanded upon the original's non-linear approach to gameplay and implemented many key features that would become series staples.

Throughout the game, players must traverse an open-ended landscape and recover each of Samus' lost abilities in order to unlock new areas. For the most part, players follow a linear path, encountering particular enemy types, bosses and additional upgrades at predetermined intervals.

Dedicated fans soon realised that there are ways to obtain Samus' power-ups far earlier than intended, meaning that large stretches of the map could be traversed in mere seconds and boss encounters were far easier to deal with due to the increase in firepower and energy reserves.

In some instances, entire sections of the game could be skipped, cutting down completion times by a substantial amount. The combined efforts of these early pioneers lead to the rise of speedrunning, a practice that remains incredibly popular to this day.

We can say with certainty that without Super Metroid, gaming culture wouldn't quite be the same.