7 Iconic Video Games That Were Created By Accident
4. Metal Gear's Stealth Was The Result Of The MSX2's Technical Limitations
Metal Gear Solid put stealth gaming on the map when Solid Snake crept onto PlayStation in 1998 and helped it become a sub-genre in its own right, but that may never have happened if the MSX2 was more powerful.
Series mastermind Hideo Kojima developed the first entry in the series for the rudimentary home computer in 1987, though the game he had in mind was an all-out military action affair which would have had players gunning down hordes of enemy soldiers and dodging storms of bullets.
This was the game Kojima set out to make, but the technical limitations of the MSX2 made it impossible. The machine was incapable of displaying a large number of sprites on screen at once, so a workaround solution was necessary.
Kojima got around this by reimagining Metal Gear as a stealth-em-up, where players crept around to avoid a small number of enemies, rather than gunning down vast swathes of them.
If the MSX2 was capable of supporting a larger number of sprites, the Metal Gear series, and indeed the stealth sub-genre, probably wouldn't exist in their current forms.