I was browsing cracked.com the other day (always a fun past time) and came across this article.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19262_6-glitches-that-accidentally-invented-modern-gaming.html
6 glitches that accidentally invented modern gaming. Hilarious! To think all these carefully planned 'features' were actually supposed to be bugs. I have to admit, Lara Croft's boobs was probably the biggest one of all of them that I expected to be deliberate. After all, it was made in the time when really, only males played and made games. Women were only supposed to be teachers or secretaries or other 'suitable' jobs. Thank goodness that's changed for my own sake. It's always fun when I say I like gaming to someone and their immediate response is, "But... you're a girl!" If only I was any good at first person shooters, I could show them what a girl could do.
Anyway, back to the article. My next favourite part was the Space Invaders one. I loved this when I was a kid. In fact I still love it and occasionally look up a web version of it. The glitch, how it gets faster the more you kill, was actually something that didn't surprise me when I read it. See I tried installing it on my parents' computer some time ago. I think I found it on a floppy disk or something and was curious if it would still work and figured my parents' computer was old enough that it just might. Well, surprisingly the floppy worked. The problem was that it was still too fast. As soon as I started it there was a quick "Brrrrrr" sound and then I was dead. Didn't manage to fire off a single shot. I played around a little but then gave up trying to get it to run properly and just found an online version and bookmarked it. Problem solved.
Finally, the konami code. That part of the article I thought was fantastic as I completely believed that this was deliberate, sort of like the easter eggs mentioned earlier. To hear that it was an accident, that it was cheat code that wasn't supposed to be left in there, was great. And now everything (PC at least) has cheat codes and if they don't players are disappointed. Truth be told it's rare that I ever use cheat codes, and no I'm not lying. I've used them to get around bugs (there was a really annoying one in Oblivion where a quest giver had fallen through the floor. I had to find where he fell through and fall through myself, talk to him about the quest, then turn my acrobatics skill to 500 so I could jump out of there). Sometimes, after I've completed the game once and am playing through a second (or third or fourth or fifth) time I'll play around with the various cheat codes just to see what they do but that's about it.
Oh except when I was young. Dad used to play Duke Nukem 3D and Quake and all the Dooms and for the most part I just enjoyed watching. I'm like that, I enjoy watching people play games as much as I enjoy playing them. And stuck to the side of the computer box was a note with a bunch of random letters and words on it. Cheat codes for the various games. Using them I was willing to play the shooting games and particularly loved Duke Nukem and Quake (I didn't like dying all the time as a kid).
On a side note, I joined LinkedIn today. If you know me you know my name and can look me up on it :)
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