14 'Genius' Video Game Features That Were Total Accidents

11. Metal Gear Solid's Legendary Stealth

What you think: Creator Hideo Kojima was always an out n' out genius, parping out industry-rupturing ideas left, right and centre, before blowing his nose with $50 bills and travelling home in a gold-plated nanomachine-powered Gundam mech.

He came up with the idea for stealth-based gameplay and took to it to the programming team to see how best to implement it.

What actually happened: 1987's original Metal Gear was intended to be full-on action game - something you can see through the character's initial sketch resembling The Terminator's Michael Biehn.

When it came time to program enemies firing at you alongside the need to evade and counter-attack, the woefully inadequate MSX hardware literally couldn't handle it. Facing a crisis as they couldn't deliver the game they'd initially pitched, Kojima's genius moment came in the form of then suggesting the idea of evading guards, rather than tackling them, as a workaround.

The stealth genre was born, Solid Snake became a super-sleuth superhero for the ages, its plot became the basis for every game that would follow - and the stealth genre went on to become a staple of the industry itself.