14 'Genius' Video Game Features That Were Total Accidents

1. The Idea Of The Difficulty Curve (Space Invaders)

What you think: Games need an inherent reason to be replayed, and especially in the coin-operated arcade days of yore, if you could master the difficulty of something right away, what else was there to take in?

What actually happened: Developer - and sole creator of Space Invaders - Tomohiro Nishikado, created the framework for his game from scratch, designing everything from the timeless look of the ships to the immediately iconic sound of both their movement and your laser blaster.

Following testing though, the game couldn't handle the amount of enemies he wanted to have on screen to shoot down, resulting in him programming it to display them in rows that would descend down the screen towards you.

As you took them out it freed up processor speed, the program would lurch up to its optimised performance and slowly the enemy ships would speed up again, resulting in a far more intense game the longer you played. Nishikado accidentally invented the very notion of the difficulty curve; the idea a game could get harder over time - and that's something you can apply to every single game since.

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Are there any awesome game features that actually happened by accident? Which of these did you already know? Let us know in the comments!