8 Gaming Features That Started Life As Fan Hacks

Ever since the dawn of the gaming, players have been searching for ways to improve their pixelated experiences by making changes to hardware and software, hopefully resulting in their favourite titles being little bit better.

While some entirely new games have been created as a result of the hard work of dedicated fans, the ingenuity of gamers can be seen even in the most simplistic of avenues. After all, many of us have the shared experience of using a piece of cardboard to ensure our younger family members were denied the opportunity to gain an unfair advantage by screen-watching as we destroyed them on Halo.

With consumers being the lifeblood of the industry, developers have proved time and time again that they are not averse to listening to the gaming community, and taking fan feedback on board in order to create more fulfilling experiences for players.

After all, modders and developers exist in something of a symbiotic relationship, with both sides relying on the other to keep bringing new ideas to the table, leading to new and varied experiences and pushing the genre on as a whole.

Many of these innovations have humble beginnings, but it's hard to imagine what the gaming landscape would look like without them.

The Street Fighter series is one of the most revered franchises in the history of gaming.

Bursting onto the scene in 1987, the original was a revolution in the genre but failed to truly captivate the commercial masses. However, its sequel Street Fighter II in 1991 would catapult the series into an unprecedented level of popularity, with SF2 cabinets populating arcades the world over.

As an ever-growing fandom developed around the series, modders began creating bootleg versions of the game in order to push Street Fighter II to its absolute limits, with one of the most famous adaptations being known as Street Fighter II Rainbow Edition. Rainbow Edition took the already high-paced action and cranked it up to eleven, giving all playable characters expansive movesets and making Hadoukens more prevalent.

Though Capcom were reportedly unimpressed with the Rainbow Edition believing that it detracted from the skill of their original work, some of the improvements introduced in the game clearly left their mark on the developers.

A number of features included on the bootleg would eventually be canonised in the series such as Chun-Li getting her own fireball, with the release of Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting believed to be a direct response to the changes made in Rainbow Edition.