10 Video Games That Are Better When You Break Them

In 1994, Samus Aran returned to our screens in Super Metroid. This tightly-controlled, atmospheric adventure game has gone down in history as a masterpiece that has influenced an entire genre.

It's one of those games that after beating it for the first time, players will want to return to it again. But, being a Super Nintendo game that's nearly 30 years old, you might think that it wouldn't offer a lot of variation on repeat playthroughs.

But the title is hugely important when it comes to breaking games, in a number of ways.

Super Metroid is credited with being an early inspiration in the rise of speed-runs. The game's responsive and rewarding controls and unfolding set of objectives made it a welcoming challenge for gamers who wanted to beat it as quickly as possible, and to sequence break objectives to outsmart the game and do so even faster.

It's also been the basis for many fan experiments that have used Super Metroid as a base to create entirely new fan games and wild crossovers.

Whilst there's nothing wrong with playing Super Metroid in a "pure" fashion, there's a certain joy that comes from re-experiencing it in new ways. That's what speed-runs and rom-hacks are all about, after all. And Super Metroid deserves the crown, throne and sceptre as the game that people have made a sport out of breaking.