10 Genius Ways Video Game Developers Outsmarted You

10. Game Secretly Restarts Your Xbox During Loading Screens - The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Morrowind may be fondly recalled as one of the greatest RPGs of its era, but those who played it on the original Xbox are just as likely to remember the game for its famously lengthy loading times.

But the loading screens were actually a devious smokescreen by Bethesda, who used the opportunity to literally reboot your Xbox console without you ever knowing in order to clear its memory cache, as the game's director Todd Howard confessed in a recent interview:

"There's been great tricks that [Xbox] taught us...My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can't tell. You can throw, like, a screen up. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That's us rebooting the Xbox. That was like a hail Mary."

Given that this trick went completely undetected for almost an entire 20 years, and is surely preferable to players having to literally reboot the console themselves and load the game back up, it clearly paid off dividends.