10 Iconic Video Game Features That Were Invented By Accident

1978 were simpler times! Back when games like Space Invaders were the height of technological advancement. No, really. The technology that developer Tomohiro Nishikado wanted to push into his game Space Invaders was actually too advanced for the game to handle.

Nishikado wanted the aliens in the beloved arcade game to move at a decent speed: quick enough to be tricky, but not patronisingly slow. Instead, he found that when more aliens appeared on-screen at once, the slower the game ran. The infrastructure of the game’s hardware simply wasn’t powerful enough to move such a large amount of aliens at a steady pace.

Luckily, this issue was resolved when the aliens were destroyed; the fewer aliens on-screen, the speedier they became! With this resolution came one of the most famous features of any video game: difficulty curves. The more the player advanced in the game, the quicker the aliens moved, and the harder it became to complete. The more players got frustrated at their losses, the more they wanted to play the game. Seems genius, right? But it was all a total accident.