10 Video Game “Mistakes” That Were Totally Intentional

Games are notoriously difficult to make. So many lines of code and so much programming goes into every title, and there are such a lot of variables, that it's only natural that even with thorough testing, many games end up launching with bugs and glitches that later have to be corrected or patched out.

The vast majority of the glitches and bugs we see are total accidents, and can act as a hindrance or detriment to the player's enjoyment, but others are put there intentionally by the developers for one reason or another. Some of them were "happy little accidents" that occurred during development and deemed fun enough to be left in, while others were fully planned out.

At first glance, you might have thought that some of these "mistakes" were just oversights on the part of the creators, but they were all included in the final versions of their games for very important reasons, coming complete with their own interesting backstories.

So the next time you see what seems to be a mistake in a game you love, just remember that it might have been put there intentionally after all.

There’s a sequence in Half-Life 2: Episode Two in which the player comes across a dumpster with a headcrab zombie seemingly hiding out inside. Some of the rubbish in the dumpster is moving around and we can hear banging noises coming from inside, so plenty of players decided to throw a grenade in there to kill the zombie.

However, with this particular dumpster, any time you throw a grenade in, it gets thrown right back out. Many players thought this was a glitch or mistake in the game’s programming, but it was intentional, coming about thanks to a freak accident.

During testing, a particularly unlucky player threw a grenade into the dumpster, only to see it bounce back out at them. This was a total accident and the grenade had a one-in-a-million chance of bouncing out like that. But it happened, and the development team thought it was so funny they decided to actually program it into the game’s code. Kerry Davis, one of the programmers who worked on the game, revealed this amusing anecdote during the in-game commentary.