10 Video Game Bugs That Became Features

1. Combos - Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

In our number one spot we have to honour another bug-turned-feature that revolutionised an entire genre of video games and that’s combos in fighting games.

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior arrived in arcades in 1991 and one of its largest contributions to the genre wasn’t even intentional. While Capcom did change the game in a bunch of entirely planned ways, one producer discovered it was possible to cancel animations of particular attacks by trying to initiate a new attack. The outcome here was that said character could land a handful of hits and their opponent wouldn’t have time to defend themselves.

These attacks were left in the game as it was determined the “combination attacks” would be too tricky to pull off, anyway, so they were left in as a hidden feature.

This would prove to be a wild underestimation of determined kids in arcades who made it their life's purpose to discover and learn to pull off these combo attacks. By the time Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting came along, Capcom solidified combos as an advertised feature and Super Street Fighter II would not only count hits in a combo but grant the player bonus points for their trouble.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine the vast majority of fighting games without combos so that’s a pretty darn impressive glitch.