Throw It In / Video Games

• Many Good Bad Bugs that were eventually worked into the final version as an Ascended Glitch:
  • The Space Invaders gradually speeding up as their numbers drop was a Good Bad Bug resulting from the late-1970s hardware struggling to process so many moving graphics at once. It allowed the game to gradually get harder, creating the idea of a difficulty curve.
  • The Spy class from the original Team Fortress Quake mod, and his ability to disguise as members of the enemy team, arose from a glitch that sometimes caused players to show up as the wrong team color. The Soldier's ability to rocket jump also stems from this.
  • One such example that's not just an Ascended Glitch, but also a Shout-Out: I Wanna Be the Guy has a bug that makes it possible to skip Kraidgief's second phase before he fully rises up, which makes the rest of the battle a total pushover since he's at a much lower height and thus much easier to shoot. Word of God says it was kept in "since it works just like Kraid from Super Metroid", where it's possible to kill him before he rises up to his full height and breaks the ceiling if you shoot multiple Super Missiles in his mouth in rapid succession.
  • Tribes's uniqueness owes a lot to bugs discovered during development — in the first game, "skiing" was a glitch based on clever usage of the jetpack to go really damn fast. The bug was fixed, but then put back in due to fan outcry, and it became the series' calling card. In fact, in Tribes Ascend, it's not just a game mechanic, it's the game mechanic — the user guide demonstrates walking, shooting, jetpacking, and skiing. You only pass if you can ski moderately well.
  • The original Ninja Gaiden (NES) is incredibly infamous for the fact that if the player dies to any of the three Final Bosses, they are sent three stages back to the beginning of 6-1 instead of just one stage back to 6-3 like the rest of the game. According to the developers, this is in fact a glitch, but they kept it in because they liked how much more difficult it made the game.
• Deltarune:
  • There's a stray pixel in the fight against King. So of course, Toby Fox did the sensible thing and added one to Queen's battle as well... and added two more to the King fight during the Undertale anniversary Deltarune livestream, for good measure.
  • During the Chapter 2 superboss, Spamton NEO turns your SOUL yellow, marking the first time a SOUL color change occurs in Deltarune while also introducing a Charged Attack. A glitch was quickly discovered where players could rapid-fire this attack. Rather than patch it out, Toby instead had Spamton NEO progressively ramp up in difficulty the more you use it.
• When creating the character model for Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, creator Toby Gard was trying to make a minor adjustment to Lara's breast size. He selected all vertices in the breast to resize them, but the mouse slipped and they increased 150%. The team loved the new look and Lara's famous Buxom Beauty Standard physique was born.
• The ridiculously long scarf worn by Hotsuma in the PS2 Shinobi is a result of a programmer gag: originally it was a normal-length one, but someone made it a lot longer on a lark, everyone liked it and they proceeded to make it even longer.
• Metal Gear:
  • According to the director's commentary for Metal Gear Solid 3, a lot was improvised:
    • Ocelot's trademark hand gesture was an improv by the motion capture actor that made everyone laugh so hard, it became one of his signature traits.
    • To create a more realistic performance, Hideo Kojima had the motion capture actors for Naked Snake switched, so the one who specialized in action sequences did the dialogue scenes and vice versa. In one scene, EVA leans in to kiss Snake, and Snake's mo-cap actor, not used to doing romantic scenes, nervously edged away. They kept it in, since the response was cute and fit Snake's character perfectly.
    • When Snake is watching the altercation at Groznyj Grad through binoculars, the characters all storm off in different directions. There's no button prompt to indicate that you can do this, but using First Person View mode during this scene and looking to the far right shows Tatyana imitating Ocelot's signature hand-gesture and cracking up. Her motion capture actress was messing around, thinking she was out of frame when she did it. The team also liked the idea of other characters mocking Ocelot for his hand gesture so much that they added another secret first-person gag where The Boss imitates it in a later cutscene.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 4, Drebin's pet monkey was thrown in for two reasons. One, they realized that Raiden's motion capture actor did a pretty good imitation of a monkey. Two, Kojima felt that Drebin was too bland a character without some kind of gimmick.
• Wii Sports was originally set up to be a Mario title (similar to the later Mario Sports Mix and Mario Sports Superstars). The test audience, surprisingly, preferred the Miis.
• One level in Portal can be finished in mere seconds by using shortcuts to skip the entire level. When playtesters figured this out, the developers decided to keep it, since only advanced players would know how to utilize it. In fact, in the advanced versions of that chamber, the qualifications for gold medals require that you do this. The commentary put it like this: if the exploit takes more skill and ingenuity to perform than doing it the intended way, it's perfectly reasonable to keep it in.
• Portal 2:
  • For anyone wondering why the Space Core is the only corrupted core that continues to speak after being attached to Wheatley, it was thanks to an outburst by Stephen Merchant (the voice of Wheatley) after hearing Nolan North recording the lines for the Space Core. The developers thought it was hilarious and just had to find a place to put it in:
    Space Core: Gotta go to space! Yeah! Gotta go to space!
    Wheatley: NOBODY'S GOING TO SPACE, MATE!!!
  • The Incorrect Fact Sphere claims that the position of court jester was invented this way, when a vassal's epilepsy was mistaken for capering.
• Many of Raz's lines in Psychonauts were ad-libbed. They were so funny, the folks at Double Fine decided to keep them.
• Monkey Island: According to Dave Grossman, Guybrush Threepwood's first name came when the game was in development. Since he had no official name yet, his character art was simply named "Guy", and when Steve Purcell, the artist responsible for "Guy's" sprite, saved the file, he added "brush" to the end to indicate that it was the Deluxe Paint brush for Guy, creating a file called "guybrush.bbm". They eventually just went with that, and had a great deal of fun Lampshade Hanging his weird name.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • The name of the god Armok is taken from a variable used in the game's predecessor Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, standing for the number of available arms: "arm ok."
  • Working on the necromancy implementation for the 2012 update, Toady One discovered that he could accidentally cause necromancers to raise undead from skins, hair, and other waste tissue, in addition to more conventional undead. He decided this made as much sense as the walking skeletons did, and published it in his development log as one of the new features.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The "Prelude" (a.k.a. the "Crystal Theme") is one of the most iconic songs in the series, and the first one you'll ever hear if you're playing the games in order. It was thrown together by Nobuo Uematsu in ten minutes.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Kefka's infamous introduction scene (barring Terra's flashback) was not in the original script. Originally, he was intended to simply arrive at Figaro Castle and demand they hand over Terra. However, Yoshinori Kitase felt that the scene was too boring to play straight, especially when they had only Amano's artwork of Kefka to work with, so he added in a scene where Kefka grumbles to himself about Gestahl sending him on a recon mission to a kingdom in the middle of the desert, then demands his escorts wipe off the sand on his boots, and finally laughs maniacally before berating them as idiots, with the intention of giving the implication that Kefka may be missing a screw or two from his head. They kept it in, also resulting in Kefka's characterization that we know him by to this day.
    • Kefka's final battle theme "Dancing Mad", for which Laughing Mad was named. Nobuo Uematsu started writing it, and then just... didn't stop, as revealed here:
      Well, usually when you make a song it's two to three minutes in length, you have the introduction, the main part and the ending. But... for 'Dancing Mad' I didn't really put a stop on it, so I kept on working on it, working on it, working on it and that really let the song... you know... I got to play around with it for something like fourteen minutes, and it's really one of my favorites.
    • In-universe, Ultros decides to get his revenge on the party for his humiliating defeat earlier by dropping a four-ton anvil on top of Maria/Celes, but has a five minute delay due to miscalculating the amount of strength and time he needs to actually attempt to push it down from the rafters. This gives Locke and the rest of the Returners (who discover Ultros' plot due to a note in the dressing room for "Maria") enough time to halt his plan. Unfortunately, they also end up interrupting the play by knocking out two key actors in the opera production, resulting in Locke and the Returners (and the orchestra) having to fill in and improvise a hasty alternate ending for the play. The Impresario is appalled by their acting at first, but when he notices how excited the audience is getting, he rolls with it.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Famously, "Aerith's Theme" is played throughout the battle with Jenova-LIFE and the subsequent scene of the team paying their respects to Aerith before her body is submerged into a lake. According to the developers, it wasn't supposed to; the music was meant to only play during the scene where Jenova impales Aerith, but a bug caused the music to override Jenova's theme for the boss battle. It worked so well with the altready emotionally-charged scene that they decided to leave it as it is.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • One of the mounts players can earn in PVP is the ADS mount, a giant metallic sphere. The idea came from a fan during a fanfest, and the developers found it so hilarious that they threw it in.
    • The Paladin's Passage of Arms skill in has the player kneel down and emit a huge pair of magical wings to protect the party from incoming damage. The animation came about from a developer who was messing around during the animation process. The other developers saw it and loved how cool it looked, causing them to keep it in the game.
  • Most of Kefka's dialogue in Dissidia Final Fantasy was ad-libbed by his Japanese voice actor, Shigeru Chiba, as was his his tendency to change the tone of his voice mid-sentence.
• Kingdom Hearts II:
  • Demyx was written as a Satellite Character, but his Japanese voice actor threw in lines and quirks that gave a little more character to him. And the fans took it from there.
  • Before the production of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Sora's Japanese voice actor Miyu Irino jokingly complained to Tetsuya Nomura about having to voice The Hero all the time and asked if he couldn't give him a few more "evil" lines. And so Nomura created Vanitas, the Enemy Without of Ventus and The Dragon of Birth by Sleep — giving the actor plenty of "evil" lines to work with, considering Vanitas is the darkness of Ven's heart made manifest.
• Minecraft:
  • Prior to patch 1.8, if you went an extremely-far distance in your Minecraft world (12,550,820 in-game meters, or roughly 820 hours of straight walking), the terrain would suddenly become severely distorted and laggy due to a glitch in the way in-game worlds were generated. The fans dubbed the phenomenon "the Far Lands" and framed it as a mysterious place where reality is distorted. Notch said he liked the idea of this mysterious place, so instead of fixing it, he kept it in. However, patch 1.8 changed the world generation algorithm, accidentally removing the Far Lands. A somewhat different (this time intentional) implementation of the Far Lands also exists in the Bedrock Edition, and is even part of Telltale's Minecraft: Story Mode in the fourth episode.
  • While Notch was creating the model for the pigs, he accidentally stretched the cube representing its torso vertically rather than horizontally. He thought it looked creepy and cool, and eventually turned it into a new type of monster called a Creeper — and so a Mascot Mook was born.
• Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne's Pandaren were originally an April Fool's joke that people reacted positively to, so they were thrown into the game with a side mission and a hero in the orc campaign. Blizzard even gave their race a tidy backstory, and they're a playable race as of the World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria.
• In Quest for Glory IV, every evening in the Inn there are three villagers who convene. The voice actors had great fun ad-libbing lines for them, including a rant about how one of them used to be an elephant herder (the game is set in a country based on rural medieval Romania, filled with forests and swamps), but the elephants all started dying out. The ad-libs are quite apparent, as on many occasions their speech do not even match what's written in the dialogue boxes. At one point, the characters even speak out of order from what's being shown at the screen. The story passed around is that the floppy disk version, which had no voice acting, was finished before the CD version, which did. The developers loved the ad-libbing so much that they were not only allowed to continue, but were used in place of the conversations in the floppy version, which is why they don't match.
• In Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, there is a scene where the male protagonist flubs a line, leading the crew members off screen to laugh about it. They decided to leave it in anyway. The Angry Video Game Nerd points it out, although you may want to keep this link in mind.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • The very first game was originally envisioned as a fairly straight-laced street racer, until a bug in the cops' AI caused them to try and ram the player off the road instead of arresting them. The team liked it so much, the game was repeatedly tweaked to make it fit, with the final product being a crime simulator that birthed an entire genre.
  • In Grand Theft Auto III, the pedestrians have a strange habit of jumping in front of the vehicle you're driving - this was originally a glitch in the AI that the developers found quite funny.
  • San Andreas has planes that occasionally crash for no reason, a result of a less-than-airtight approach to random generation of flight paths that allows the possibility of planes' trajectories intersecting with the ground. It was kept because it added to the hilariously over-the-top nature of the game.
  • Grand Theft Auto V had many of its cutscenes performed by the characters' voice actors in motion capture. In one sequence, Trevor's acting Steven Ogg was supposed to vault over a low fence, but he goofed and tripped over instead, causing the actor playing Franklin, Shawn Fonteno, to break into laughter. Rather than cutting the scene, Steven Ogg proceeded to deliver an epic (and somewhat scary) in-character angry rant, which was considered so good that it was incorporated into the cutscene as it appeared in the game.^note Only a tiny part hints that it's improv; Trevor says "motherfucker", which he normally doesn't do, as he takes insults involving his mother very seriously. As a bonus, Trevor's ad-libbed rant actually works within the story of the game; at this point, Trevor had just left his friend Michael to (he thinks) be killed by Chinese mobsters, and his rant ties into the guilt the character is feeling about this. The scene ended up being one of the funniest in the game. Watch it here.
• Uncharted:
  • Many of Nathan Drake's one-liners were the result of Nolan North's improvisation while watching gameplay footage of his character. One of the more noticeable adlibs is on the Train level of Uncharted 2, when being chased by an attack helicopter and some more grunts show up:
    Nate: CAN'T YOU ASSHOLES SEE THE HELICOPTER?! I HAVE ENOUGH TROUBLE ALREADY!!
  • According to North, Charlie Cutter's claustrophobia in Drake's Deception was ad-libbed by his voice actor Graham McTavish, who thought it'd be funny as Charlie freaks out while making his way between a very narrow passage.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Onyxia encounter was intended to have her Deep Breath ability used as a finisher on groups that had a significant number of players already dead. Due to a programming bug, it was used much more frequently, and was only left in because it didn't stop people from killing her.
  • Early concept art for the Draenor version of Shadowmoon Valley depicted the zone at night. The visual was so striking, the team decided to make the entire zone permanently nighttime.
• Most of the swearing in Brütal Legend (especially on the part of Ozzy Osbourne's character) wasn't in the original script. Tim Schafer decided to keep it because it fit.
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: Apparently, when Fawful's dialogue was being translated for the English release, several translation errors were noticed. They were kept in the game anyway, since Nintendo of America figured it would still be in character for someone like Fawful to say.
• The Bionic Commando (2009) game features an Easter Egg where you can listen to one of Super Joe's flubbed lines. If you die on a certain boss in the game and try again, instead of telling Nathan to fight the boss, he tells him "You'll just have to fuck it".
  Rad Spencer: Uhm...
• Pokémon: Prior to the release of Red & Green, one of the developers realized that after removing the debug tools, there was room for one more Pokémon in the code. Since there were in-game references to a creature called Mew (from which Mewtwo was cloned), he decided to give it actual stats and a bare-bones moveset, but without a way to access it in-game. No official information was released about it for some time, because except for the higher-ups at Game Freak, no one knew you could get Mew. He figured they could give it away later through special events, and a series tradition was born.
• Half-Life:
  • Half-Life 2:
    • In Episode One, as Dog is about to throw a car containing you and Alyx across a pit to the destroyed Citadel, the following exchange takes place:
      Alyx Vance: Well, Gordon... unless you have a better suggestion... He is a robot. He's done the math. [to Dog] You, uh, did do the math, right?
      [Dog sheepishly shakes his head]

    The head shaking originally was just a random Idle Animation, but during a playtest it managed to sync up perfectly with the dialogue, and the playtester thought it was both intentional and hilarious; the devs agreed and made it an intentional part of the scene.

    • Gunships firing at RPGs launched towards them, as opposed to the player, was originally an unintended consequence of the simple way Gunships determine what to shoot at (they're told to attack the "most dangerous target", which is supposed to be the player, but an RPG getting close to it is flagged as an even bigger threat than the player). Valve realized it added an extra challenge to the Gunships and left it in.
    • At one point in Episode Two, you're gently prompted into throwing a grenade into a dumpster full of boxes. Do this the first time, and the Fast Zombie hiding in there will toss it back out. It was originally a physics glitch caused by the boxes that would fly out when the Fast Zombie emerged, but like Dog's Indy Ploy, it was well-received by playtesters and left in.
    • Yet another random mistake ended up becoming a gameplay element: the Combine helicopter's infamous "mine spam" attack was originally inspired by one of the programmers accidentally making the helicopter shoot mines instead of bullets out of its machine gun, which slowed the game to a crawl. For the release version, they added a toned-down version of this as a Desperation Attack.
  • Half-Life: Alyx: The ability to cover your mouth to stop Alyx from coughing was inspired by playtesters. "Jeff" is a level where you must navigate around the eponymous mutant Plant Person, who is blind but attracted to sound. The addition of spore clouds that make Alyx uncontrollably cough was a relatively late addition, as a means of introducing another environmental hazard to the level to increase its challenge. The developers then observed players trying to cover their mouths to protect Alyx, and this was made an actual feature shortly afterwards. This turned out to be an excellent addition to the level's tense atmosphere; as covering your mouth requires using one of your hands, carrying items becomes much more dangerous as a result.
• Metroid:
  • Samus Aran was originally going to be a man, and is even referred to as such in the original instruction manual. (Contrary to popular belief, this is not a mistranslation; the Japanese manual uses male pronouns for her, which is somewhat unusual for the language.) One of the developers thought it would be funny if the player found out she was a woman at the game's end. Somebody agreed, and the rest is history.
  • The manual for the original Metroid lists an item called the Barrier Suit, which simply decreases enemy damage. An item called the Barrier Suit does not exist in the game; however, an item called the Varia Suit is, which does the same thing. The name actually came from a translation error: the Japanese version called it the バリアスーツ, baria su-tsu, which could be translated phonetically to varia su-tsu. The name, however, stuck with fans, and when Metroid II: Return of Samus came out, the manual says that an item called the "Varia" allows the activation of the Barrier Suit. When Super Metroid came out, they just did away with all the rejustification, and from then on, the item was just called the Varia Suit.
• In Sam & Max: Freelance Police: The Devil's Playhouse, one part in the script called for some characters controlling the body of a Kaiju to make it do an "anime pose", intended as an homage to Voltron-type anime. The animator in charge of making the pose innocently asked the writer, "You mean like Power Rangers or like Sailor Moon?", to which the eavesdropping person in the neighboring cubicle immediately popped his head over the side and said "Oh my god, make him do 'Sailor Moon'". As a result, instead of doing a Voltron pose, the monster does a version of Sailor Moon's Transformation Sequence, which is a total non-sequitur but much funnier.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The multi-coin blocks from Super Mario Bros. started off as a glitch for what were intended to be single-coin blocks. They were fixed as development went on, but they were apparently so popular with the programmers that they were put back in as an actual feature.
  • The concept for the Double Cherry in Super Mario 3D World originally came about as the result of a level designer accidentally placing two "player 1 spawn point" objects in one stage, which resulted in two Marios that moved simultaneously. The development team liked the potential it had for challenging puzzles, and it was reworked into a power-up.
• In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the wavedashing technique, a result of the momentum from angled air dodges carrying over into the player's landing animation, was noticed early on. It wasn't so much thrown in as it was ignored, because it was seen as harmless and the team was already struggling to finish the game in the tight deadline they had. Then Tournament Play realized the applications it had for giving characters quicker, more fluid movements and the applications it had for positioning ground-based attacks. All of a sudden, this "harmless oversight" had evolved into something that drove a firm wedge between the casual and competitive scenes, which creator Masahiro Sakurai was very unhappy about. Wavedashing was ripped out of Brawl as soon as possible, and Smash 4 doesn't have it either despite greater efforts to appeal to the game's tournament scene. Tellingly, when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate finally brought wavedashing back (likely intentionally this time), it was hit so hard by the game's physics changes that it sees very little use in competitive environments.
• During the development of BioShock, the developers were surprised to find that the telekinesis power allowed the player to move the anchor points of trip wires as if they were regular objects. The devs then decided to tweak that behavior and have it be an actual feature of the power.
• BioShock 2: Apparently, Sheryl Lee of Laura Palmer fame ended up in the recording studio due to a scheduling mishap (likely due to confusion with Sheryl Lee Ralph, the voice of Grace Holloway). She was given a role as a Baby Jane splicer in the Atlantic Express, discussing Jack's whereabouts.
• Super Robot Wars: Elzam's Leitmotif always being played when he's in combat was initially a programming bug. He's a boss who eventually undergoes a Heel–Face Turn, and boss themes have higher priority than player themes; when he switches sides, player theme priority is added onto his boss priority rather than replacing it. Since then, it seems both fans and developers loved it, making nothing able to override "Trombe!", save for music actually playing in-universe.
  • In Super Robot Wars 30, there are some times where Lelouch will scream out "SHIN ZERO BEAM!" when he uses the Gekkouei-Sui's Absolute Zero Beam, as if he's a Super Robot pilot. This is because his voice actor Jun Fukuyama ad-libbed it for kicks, and the creator of the series loved it so much he allowed it to stay.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Link's upgrade to Bishōnen status between Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time was the result of an offhand comment made by the wife of one of the developers.
  • Link's pink hair in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was originally a coloring error that the developers decided to keep.
  • The Fishing Hole in Ocarina of Time originally came from someone goofing off while coding the Water Temple, making a fish in an isolated room and trying out a coded fishing rod. It was later put in to the actual game as a sidequest, and even got a massive expansion in the Nintendo 3DS remake of Majora's Mask.
  • Ordon Village was developed for the E3 2006 demo of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and wasn't originally meant to be in the actual game, but Shigeru Miyamoto felt it would work well as a prologue section to introduce the game's mechanics (similar to Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, with which the game shares many parallels) and told the team to include it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has Green Chu Jelly, which was planned to replenish a magic meter that never made it into the final game. You can still get Green Chu Jelly in the Wii version by letting a Yellow Chu and Blue Chu merge in the Cave of Ordeals, but it has no text and does nothing when drank. This was removed from the GameCube version, where Yellow and Blue Chus merge into a Purple Chu, but the existence of Green Chu Jelly became popular enough trivia among fans that the HD remake made Green Chu Jelly available again via the same trick as the Wii version... as a Useless Item, with a description remarking how "it doesn't look all that tasty..."
• Bulletstorm is best known for having an oversaturation of swear words. This wasn't intentional by any stretch; because the swearing was in English and the developers of the game were Polish, they believed were using more mild, muttered swears like "damn" or "crap". Seeing as how one-half of the game is about making demeaning, violent kills, this plethora of demeaning, violent swearing ended up complementing the other half perfectly. (The devs were reportedly horrified when the dialogue was translated back into Polish.)
• The gauge screen in B-17 Bomber was originally meant to be a debugging tool to be removed in the final product, but ultimately was left in because developers liked it so much.
• EarthBound Beginnings: The running feature in the English version of the game was originally added in for debugging purposes, hence why it simply doubles the game's overworld speed (causing NPCs to move faster too). Localization director and English scriptwriter Phil Sandhop convinced the development team to leave it in the final game, due to how slow and plodding it was otherwise. A more conventional run feature that only affects the player's overworld speed was included in both the MOTHER 1 half of MOTHER 1+2 and Mother 3.
• Touhou:
  • Reimu Hakurei, the iconic Miko heroine of the series, is an expy of Sayo/Pocky from Pocky & Rocky. ZUN admits in the manual for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil that he hadn't intended for her to stay that way — the popularity of Touhou as "the shrine maiden shooter series" convinced him otherwise.
  • In interviews, ZUN occasionally pays lip service to fanon ideas, such as the Fan Nicknames for Daiyousei and Koakuma, elevating them to canon status. Still other fanon ideas have shown up in the official spinoff manga, making them Word of Dante.
  • In Undefined Fantastic Object, Minamitsu Murasa's stage theme contains a sudden pop, caused by a Windows notification appearing while ZUN was recording it.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Fighters exists because a bored programmer at Sega AM2 snuck Sonic and Tails into a prototype of Fighting Vipers as playable characters. Yu Suzuki found this amusing and showed it to Yuji Naka, who also loved it, and a collaboration was born. Consequently, Sonic the Fighters runs on a modified version of the Fighting Vipers engine. The same programmer threw in a Funny Animal version of Honey from Fighting Vipers, who was Dummied Out in the original arcade release. For the HD re-release, they put the finishing touches on her and threw her in as a hidden fighter.
  • While the developers of Sonic Mania were programming the ending cutscene, there was a glitch that caused there to be three Knuckles. They took this idea and ran with it, ending up with the "& Knuckles" mode that lets you pair any character with Knuckles, including himself. If you beat the game this way, you even get a special ending.
• Devil May Cry 4: Reuben Langdon apparently improvised the innuendos Dante says when he acquires Lucifer.
• Borderlands 2:
  • Tiny Tina features a lazy eye that supposedly was a result of an animation glitch, but which the developers decided to keep. It definitely helps sell her maniacal Creepy Child vibe.
  • According to Word of God, Handsome Jack's line about his pretzels, just before he speaks about his diamond horse Butt Stallion, was wholly improvised by his voice actor Dameon Clarke. Lead write Anthony Burch has joked that he's somewhat jealous that Jack's most famous line was something he didn't write.
  • Axton was initially programmed to occasionally flirt with Maya when reviving her ("Wow. Do you work out, or..."), but the voice clip ended up triggering regardless of which character he was reviving. According to Anthony Burch, the writers took this glitch and ran with it in the DLCs, making Axton canonically bisexual.
  • According to Chris Rager, he was originally only cast as Mr. Torgue to voice the Torgue vending machines, but he and the aforementioned Anthony Burch were having so much in the studio that he was writing lines for Rager to perform during the session, laying the foundation for Mr. Torgue being the centerpiece of an entire expansion.
• Simon Viklund, music composer for PAYDAY: The Heist, has several pieces of party music that he composed during his spare time. One of the levels in the game has a party going on, and the game needed music for the event during the heist. Simon saw he had leftover music lying around and threw it in.
• The mouselook feature in Duke Nukem 3D was originally just something you could do in the map editor to help the design process. The developers thought that it would make for a useful gameplay feature as well, and decided to implement it thus. It became a cornerstone of modern First-Person Shooter controls.
• The intro sequence for the Final Boss of zOMG! includes a random player character scripted shouting "Look out! It's huge!" Enough players actually responded with "That's What She Said" that the developers eventually added it as another scripted line.
• The infamous "bucket trick" in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in which you can rob people without consequence so long as you put a bucket or pot on their head. The developers discovered this trick a few days before the game was released, but decided not to patch it out because they thought it was funny. In fact, the developers of Skyrim and its many Updated Rereleases have a philosophy that they will not fix bugs as long as they don't break the game or make it less fun to play (such as the bug that caused chickens to report crimes they witness the player committing, which was incredibly funny but wouldn't be fun to deal with for players who aren't aware of it).
• Goat Simulator is built around this trope: any bug that doesn't crash the game was deliberately kept in for the player's amusement. There's even an achievement for finding a way to crash the game anyway.
• Nier has "boar drifting." You can ride around some of the giant (giant) boars, and a bug makes it possible to drift at high speeds like a car. When it was discovered, the creators decided it was hilarious and left it in. Many players agreed with the decision.
• The Last of Us: Left Behind has an improvised line by Ellie's voice actress Ashley Johnson:
  Ellie: Well, Skeleseer can suck my dick.
• The setting of the Dragon Age series gets its name from this; in development notes and forums, the continent that the game takes place on was called "The Dragon Age Setting", which was often abbreviated to TheDAS. Eventually, the producers stuck with this and officially named the continent Thedas.
• Danny Skurge's sudden coughing fit in Limbo of the Lost sounds rather genuine. Considering the poor quality of the script and voice acting otherwise, it's hard to believe it was intentional.
• Homeworld Cataclysm adds Bentusi Super Acolytes'' late in the game, borrowed from a simple cheat/mod of the original game: adding capital-ship lasers to fighters by editing a ship's data file.
• The ending of Journey arose from a glitch making it seem like the game had finished after you die in the storm during one playtester's test. The playtester was apparently moved to tears by how profoundly moving it was, and as a result, thatgamecompany went almost a year and a half over budget and into bankruptcy just to achieve a similarly emotional ending.
• In Yandere Simulator, one of the "Easter eggs" is Titan Mode, which turns everyone in the game but the PC into giants. The giants can be killed just as if they were normal sized, but due to the Unity engine's problems with ragdoll physics, the bodies curl up into balls and then bounce around the map. The dev apparently enjoys these 'Titan meatballs' as much as the players, given that he's preemptively stated that he's not going to do anything about it.
• The notorious "DK Rap" in Donkey Kong 64 was originally written by Grant Kirkhope as a joke, but the development team liked it so much that they put as the intro of the game.
• Mass Effect: It is mentioned multiple times in the story and Codex that all weapons are mass drivers; lasers are only used as starship point defense, since their range is abysmal (and even worse in an atmosphere). Cutscenes, however, show Sovereign as using a giant, completely unrealistic laser as his main weapon. This was due to a lack of communication between the story and cinematics teams. However, the laser looked and sounded so awesome that no one could bear to get rid of it. Instead, it was retconned into molten ferrofluids fired at relativistic speeds (a weapon the turians adapted as the Thanix cannon in Mass Effect 2).
• In Overwatch, Mei's "Sorry" voice line was actually an unscripted reaction of her voice actress, Zhang Yu, flubbing an entirely different voice line. The line worked so well for Mei's character that they left it in.
• Left 4 Dead 2:
  • During development, Valve monitored player behavior from the original Left 4 Dead and noticed how they loved to make everything explode (using pipe bombs, shooting propane tanks and oxygen tanks). In response to this, they created the grenade launcher specifically to facilitate Stuff Blowing Up.
  • "The Sugar Mill" is infamous for containing many more Witches than any other level (most levels contain one, maybe two, but this contains seven or eight at minimum). While this was originally the result of a glitch, the developers ended up taking a liking to it, and the outside lore for the game now includes the fact that Witches crave sugar due to their malnutrition. (To explain why there aren't as many Witches during the next level, they also have a heavy dislike for rain.)
• The famous Nuketown map from Call of Duty: Black Ops started as an unofficial project by level designer Adam Hoggatt, who had a working design for it in just two days. The staff at Treyarch liked the map so much, they decided to add it to the game.
• In Detroit: Become Human, according to Connor's actor Brian Dechart, much of Connor and Hank's interactions were improvised against the wishes of director David Cage.
• Oddjob in GoldenEye (1997) has an infamous case of Hitbox Dissonance; because he's so short, the game's auto-aim will cause bullets to fly harmlessly over his head, meaning players need to manually angle their guns down to hit him. This issue was known to the developers during testing, but they considered it so funny they left it in.
• In the very early WipEout games, "Piranha" was misspelled as "Pirhana". The fluff decided to roll with it, explaining in the next games that the merger between the companies Pir and Hana had rebranded themselves Piranha between seasons. Indeed, Wipeout 2048 - the latest release, but first chronologically - has the team racing as Pir-Hana.
• Fukua from Skullgirls was initially designed as an April Fool's joke character to make fun of the Moveset Clone trope in fighting games, partly as a Take That! against the infamous reveal of Decapre in Street Fighter IV^ContextCapcom had acted like they were going to add an entirely new DLC fighter, speculation about possible fighters abounded in the Street Fighter community... and then announced, as the SF community put it, "Cammy with a mask". The massive positive response from fans led to Fukua being a permanent addition. Her name is also derived from a common misspelling of the protagonist Filia (U/I and K/L are right next to each other on most keyboards), which likely went on to influence her personality.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, there’s a treasure chest in The Spire that dispenses salt every time you open it. According to an NPC in the Developer's Room, this started out as a glitch, but was kept in for being funny.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • In development, Obsidian discovered that if you kill Orion Moreno as part of his fight but still get the Enclave Remnants to fight for you, then their Big Damn Heroes moment when they all drop out of the vertibird into battle will spawn Orion's dead body as well, due to the game still tagging him as part of the quest. J. E. Sawyer loved the idea, and theorized that his teammates were so pissed at his attitude that they went "no, you're coming on our last mission whether you like it or not", took his corpse with them, and dumped it out of the vertibird.
  • Ambassador Dennis Crocker was meant to be Caucasian as seen on his Collector's Edition card, but he was made African-American after a recording mix-up led to the African-American Emerson Brooks recording his lines.
  • Posters advertising the singer Dean Domino were made to be used as generic clutter in the base game before the design for the Dead Money DLC was locked down. When the devs noted the similarity to what they were already planning for the ghoul character, they decided to name him Dean Domino.
• BlazBlue: Chronophantasma: During Bang's encounter with Litchi in his Arcade mode, he declares that for her 'I shall face the wrath of a thousand arrows, and gladly throw myself into a body of sethir. You need but ask!'. At least, that's the on-screen text - his voice actor apparently had free rein to deliver it as 'And gladly throw myself into a body of... something or other. Sethir!' Given Bang's personality, it works just as well.
• In Fate/Grand Order, Arash-e-kamangir is one of the Servants you can summon. During one of the official livestreams promoting the Agartha sub-singularity, Tsuruoka Satoshi (the voice of Arash, Gilles de Rais, Spartacus, and other characters) was a guest. The fans voted for him to do the voice of Arash's Noble Phantasm. He did, and threw in the lengthy chant (which you only see the text of in the Camelot singularity) as well — and he's done this multiple times, most notably at AX 2018.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: During a support conversation where Claude is teasing Lysithea, he audibly chuckles at the end of a line. According to Joe Zieja, this wasn't scripted, but it was so in-character for Claude and fit the scene so well it made it in.
• When the heroine of Drakengard 3 was being conceived, the artist drew a flower in her eye (literally growing out of its socket) to give her a more feminine appearance. The director said 'okay', and wrote an entire plot thread around what the flower was and why it was growing out of her eye.
• WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition: Eagles are programed to fly away with fish snatched from rivers. For some reason, they are able to glitch and drop fish, even though this was never intended. The team decided to make this into a feature, and now the player can carry and eat said fish. It doesn't fill your wolf up very much though; it has less food value than a snowshoe hare, the second smallest prey in the game.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: At the beginning of "Polite Society, Valentine Style" in Chapter 2, during the ride to Valentine, Mary-Beth, Tilly, and Karen sing a joke song about meeting "a friend in Valentine/Strawberry/etc." At one point, Karen gets the lyrics mixed up, and the others chide her for screwing up before they all laugh about it. This was a genuine moment made during the recording that was left in the final game.
• Tales from the Borderlands: The scene in "Vault of the Traveler" where Rhys gives Holo-Jack the double-deuce while escaping from Helios was apparently caused by a miscommunication between the writers and the animation team. The script had Rhys "flip off the monitors as he runs by", as in turn off the monitors. When the animators showed Rhys giving Holo-Jack the finger with both hands, director Nick Herman decided to keep it that way.
• In Hypnospace Outlaw, there's a point in the game where somebody insults the Chowder Man by calling him 'Choder Man'. According to Jay Tholen, this was a legitimate typo, but it worked way too well in context for him to take it out.
• Life Is Strange 2: Gonzalo Martin, who voices main character Sean Diaz, is a native Spanish speaker. The voice director allowed him to improvise any Spanish lines Sean speaks, in order to make it sound more natural to anyone who is fluent in Spanish.
• Done In-Universe in Alien: Isolation with the Working Joes, which are effectively Target brand versions of the convincingly human-like androids produced by Weyland-Yutani or Hyperdine Systems. Since their creator Seegson lacks the technology and manufacturing capabilities to make a decent android, these things live at the absolute bottom of the Uncanny Valley, with bald rubber skin, glowing LED eyes, monotone robotic voices, laughably poor AI, and no facial movements. Seegson acts like this is intentional and markets them toward people who are prejudiced toward synthetics, as these things "can't pass themselves off as real people." They even use the tagline "You always know a Working Joe." Nobody's fooled.
  Amanda (After meeting one): Jesus, no wonder Seegson's losing the tech race!
• Power Bomberman originally had the Path of Glory stage and the Item Help area look the same, but when the former was given a visual revamp on version 0.7.5, the latter wasn't changed to match due to an oversight. The devs thought that having the old design be exclusive to the Item Help area looked nice, so they kept it around for a while. (A later update would retool the Item Help area so it no longer resembles Path of Glory in any of its designs.)
• Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: After beating the final boss, you gain access to a first-person gameplay mode in the Specials menu. If you jump and throw the wrench in this mode, you'll bounce upwards a bit. If you do this next to a wall, the wrench immediately returns, allowing you to climb most walls in the game by spamming wrench throws. According to an interview, this glitch was actually discovered by Insomniac Games during the game's development, but since you can't do it until you beat the game, they decided to leave it in as a sort of Earn Your Fun secret. Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which has first-person view available from the start, does not have this glitch.
• Love of Magic: Lord Jerkow was originally going to be called Lord Jarkow, but Droid kept mistyping it and decided to just run with it.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • While the creators of Mortal Kombat (1992) were already well-prepared for the video shoots to create their digitized sprites and knew what they'd be filming, they would also come up with ideas during the shoot that would then be filmed and added to the game. To take just the most notable example, Scorpion's iconic spear attack originated as a "cool-ass move" that Ed Boon came up with on the spot while the ninja characters' sprites were being filmed.
  • Reptile was added to the first game and became a mainstay in the franchise entirely because of some surreptitious mischief from series co-creator Ed Boon: when the game was released to surprise success, Boon made note of the success of the Palette Swap method to create individual characters like Scorpion and Sub-Zero. One day, he decided to sneak in a third ninja as a Secret Character (more specifically "a cooler version of Scorpion"), finishing the code and visuals that same night and shipping him out for the third arcade revision of the game. This green ninja's inclusion was so stealthy that no one else knew about his existence until he was already out in arcades. Co-designer John Tobias was not pleased, leading the development of Mortal Kombat II to be more stringent on everyone in the development team being aware of any hidden characters... so naturally, Boon pulled the exact same stunt. While the entire team of II was aware of two other secret characters, Smoke and Jade, Boon secretly added another, all-black ninja named Noob Saibot (whose name was Boon and Tobias' spelled backwards as a cheeky nod to the previous scuffle). No one on the development team other than Boon was aware of Noob Saibot's existence until midway during development of Mortal Kombat 3.
• In The Binding of Isaac Repentance, picking up Lazarus's Rags as Tainted Forgotten and dying will cause him to respawn as a grotesque pile of flesh-colored bones with Lazarus's head on top. According to a Discord AMA with developer _Kilburn, this was originally a glitch, but the developers found it so amusing that they left it in the game.
• The ZZT game Window Fragments was made entirely on a flight from Minnesota to Washington in about two hours in a "stream of consciousness" fashion. While the author was creating the last section of the game, the passenger in front of him reclined their seat, cramping up his space, and so he wrote a complaint about it on the top of the screen, where it would remain in the completed game.
• The narration of BattleBlock Theater contains a lot of misreads and lines where the narrator (voice of Will Stamper) clearly accidentally stumbled, got tongue-tied, blurted out the wrong word, or cut himself short of swearing. They were all left in, as these perfectly fit both the tone of the game and Stamper's comedic style. In fact, the two trailers wholly embraced Stamper's gaffes and basically just let him run wild.
  I hope you're down, because things are about to get... Steamy... in here— that was weird, sorry. Should have said... let's just see... let's just say, Behemoth is about to release some Steam! Oh man, that was way better. (footsteps stomping away) God!
• In Assassin's Creed Origins, protagonist Bayek starts off with long hair and a beard. After a few missions, you reunite with your wife, who cuts them for you. Players using a controller managed to find that pressing certain button combinations on the gear screen would make your hair and beard alternate between long and short. This was later confirmed to be a developer function that was accidentally left in. Since some fans liked mixing the long and short styles together, later updates added a visible hair and beard toggle to the gear screen, and some promotional screenshots for expansions have Bayek with mixed styles. This is likely what led to Assassin's Creed: Valhalla having multiple different hair and beard styles.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Riki was originally going to have the lowest HP of the party, to match how he's a Nopon (a Ridiculously Cute Critter) and a Squishy Wizard. According to the Monado Archives, he was given the highest HP for a bit as a joke. Everyone liked it so much that it stuck, to the point where Xenoblade Chronicles 2's main sponge tank character is a Nopon.
• Star Trek Online: The minor Klingon character B'Eler was reportedly scripted as male, but a miscommunication led to her getting a female character model while talking about having a female mate. The playerbase approved of the accidental lesbian Klingon, and Cryptic later brought her back for "House Pegh", this time with her aforementioned mate also present to make a Battle Couple.

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