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Game bugs that became features: Space Invaders, the Creeper and the Konami code

16 questions · by Quizbun

A slow processor gave Space Invaders one of the first difficulty curves. Minecraft's best-known monster is a broken pig. Fighting-game combos started as an accident, and the most famous cheat code shipped because someone forgot to delete it. Each Question tells you what the developers saw and asks what they did next. One famous bug in this Quiz never happened.

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Questions

  1. Not answered. In Space Invaders, the aliens march faster as you shoot them down. Why?
  2. Not answered. Suppose Tomohiro Nishikado had wanted the aliens to keep a steady speed. What is the usual fix for this kind of bug?
  3. Not answered. In what year was Space Invaders released in Japan?
  4. Not answered. Nishikado noticed the aliens speeding up during development. Why did he keep it?
  5. Not answered. In August 2009, Minecraft creator Markus Persson was making a pig. It loaded looking like the box labeled "As it loaded". What went wrong, and what did he do?
  6. Not answered. Where did the Creeper's mottled green skin come from?
  7. Not answered. Which of these are true about the Creeper's first weeks?
  8. Not answered. Street Fighter II (1991) made combos famous. How did its producer, Noritaka Funamizu, first notice them?
  9. Not answered. In 2013, Street Fighter II's lead designer, Akira Nishitani, explained canceling differently. What did he say it came from?
  10. Not answered. Why did Kazuhisa Hashimoto create the Konami code?
  11. Not answered. The code was meant to be removed before Gradius shipped. Why was it still in the game?
  12. Not answered. The code became famous through another NES game, Contra. How many lives did it give you there?
  13. Not answered. Which lessons from the Konami code apply to debug shortcuts in your own software?
  14. Not answered. In Starsiege: Tribes (1998), players found they could build up huge speed by tapping jump at the right moment while running downhill. What did the developer, Dynamix, do about it?
  15. Not answered. In Civilization V (2010), Gandhi is famously eager to use nuclear weapons. Which account of this "bug that became a feature" is accurate?
  16. Not answered. Fix it or ship it? Which of these glitches did the developers keep, or build into a later game?