10 Video Game Bugs That Became Features

5. The Mist - Silent Hill

It’s hard to imagine Silent Hill without its iconic fear-inducing fog, and yet it largely eventuated due to issues with the hardware and its processing power.

While this one is more of a feature that blossomed out of hardware limitations than a true glitch, it achieved a whole lot more than solving a technical issue. The fog was largely used in order to take pressure off of the hardware so it would only have to render the area around the player. Though there may have been some intention for the fog to be mechanically and narratively important as its use in the Fog World was inspired by Stephen King’s novella The Mist, it ended up being positively crucial to the game’s cult favourite atmosphere.

The horror of not knowing what lay inside the fog and the constant dread of having to push ahead through it helped establish Silent Hill as a survival horror masterclass.