
Bugs That Became Features - xwenf
https://birdeatsbug.com/5-bugs-that-became-features
======
liquidgecka
1 is not even close to true. I was a Gmail SRE at the time. Sends did not take
5 seconds at the time, they were handed off to the MTA right away. The MTA had
the ability to delay delivery due to other projects and Gmail decided to use
that feature to build undo send.

~~~
batuhanw
What is MTA?

~~~
k-ian
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_transfer_agent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_transfer_agent)

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doctoboggan
One of my favorite bug to feature stories is hidden files in unix starting
with a period. In unix the current directory is . and the previous directory
is .. Early on those directories where simply hidden by not showing anything
that started with a period. Quickly though people realized they could not show
their own files simply by starting the filename with a period.

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cavanasm
Really should have had skiing in Tribes on there. Holding down the jump button
reduced friction to zero, so players could slide down hillsides at high speeds
and launch themselves into the air by going over bumps. Every attempt at
reviving the franchise has struggled with implenting skiing as a properly
intentional feature, and not quite recaptured the magic.

~~~
ru552
Former comp tribes player reporting in.

Skiing didn’t work by holding the jump button though. You had to continuously
jump while going down a hill to “ski”. This lead to players writing a script
that continuously jumped and binding that to a button that was held to “ski”.

51504lyfe

~~~
stronglikedan
OP may have been thinking of Tribes 2, where you could just hold the jump
button with no additional scripts.

~~~
cavanasm
That is indeed the case.

------
ollybee
They should add Nuclear Gandhi from the Civilization games as one of the most
amusing examples of this.

~~~
kabdib
There was a similar bug in the Robotron 2084 arcade game; rather than rushing
you, an arithmetic overflow would send some enemies to the far side of the
screen, where they would continue to fire at you (and were much harder to
hit). It was a bug that the developers liked so much that they kept it in.

Then there's the game Goat Simulator, where the developers promised to
intentionally keep many bugs in the game, for amusement value. I think it
worked well.

------
directionless
The Fog of War video game idiom predates both Silent Hill, and every platform
it runs on.

I'm not really sure we should be touting the sexism in bust size as bug or
feature here. It's mostly just sickening.

Deep Blue making a random move doesn't sound like a bug to me. Certainly not
in the usual sense. It seems like a fairly reasonable choice, if no better one
is presented.

~~~
thanatropism
> sickening

Game boobs are certainly _cringeworthy_ and maybe symptomatic of a sexist
worldview that's _unfair_ and therefore, to use a trumpism, _sad_.

But if commercially-driven fanservice made out of pixels is _sickening_ , what
word have we got left for clitoris mutilation and burqas and other such
_uncomfortably extreme instances of oppression_?

~~~
gizmo686
"Wrong", "bad", "abhorent", etc.

Sickening is not a moral judgement, it is an observation about what emotions
get invoked.

~~~
thanatropism
I ambiguously said “words”, it’s true — but what I was referring to is
precisely the moral deadening that this state of constant heightened emotion
must bring about.

------
stinos
_a software bug - when the machine did not know what to do, it made a random
move_

Depending on the specs that's not really a bug. I mean, it's not like "when
the machine did not know what to do, it invoked undefined behavior"

~~~
wodenokoto
If the random move was invoked when an exception was caught, I think I can
defend saying a bug saved the game, but the wording makes it sound like the
machine did what it was supposed to and the Deep Blue team just godt lucky.

------
sorryitstrue
Street fighter 2's combo system was a bug:
[https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/203382/Street_Fighter_II...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/203382/Street_Fighter_II_designer_opens_up_about_the_cancelling_bug.php)

~~~
pftmclub
"It's not a bug, It's a feature !"

~~~
jrh206
Yes that is what this thread is about

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growt
My favourite story about a bug in a game is GTA. The police cars were supposed
to stop you nicely by braking right in front of you. But a small bug cause the
cops to crash into the players car at full speed. End of the story: they
decided to keep the psycho cops.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I think maybe a few additional details should be mentioned.

1) GTA was originally envisioned as a _racing_ game.[0] You would race against
other players in inner-city settings, but this meant you could end up ramming
other cars, running over pedestrians, etc. If that happened too many times,
cops would pursue you.

2) The cops were supposed to come out and pursue you if you did too many bad
things and, as you said, do it "gently". The bug in the cop AI, however, made
them insanely aggressive to the point that they would also hit other cars, run
over pedestrians, and cause just as much damage as the player in pursuit of
pulling them over.

3) The devs thought the "psycho cops" were so hilarious that they didn't just
keep them in--they reoriented the entire game around the concept of causing
mayhem (rather than racing).

[0] [https://www.engadget.com/2011/03/22/race-n-chase-original-
gt...](https://www.engadget.com/2011/03/22/race-n-chase-original-gta-design-
docs-posted/)

------
everdev
A surprising amount of CSS development would probably fit the bill as well. So
many times I've produced unexpected results that looked just as good or better
than my original intent.

~~~
asdfman123
That's the whole artistic process though.

"Hey, wait a minute, that wrong note actually sounds really cool there. Let me
try to build upon it."

~~~
hoorayimhelping
John Lennon famously loaded a tape reel backwards while stoned and discovered
how cool backwards music sounded. This led directly to the recording of Rain.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK5G8fPmWeA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK5G8fPmWeA&feature=youtu.be&t=149)

------
teilo
Not a single one of these things is a bug. Design decisions, workarounds for
hardware limitations, etc. But not bugs.

~~~
pflenker
I disagree. Without knowing the details, there is no way to know for sure if
the source of the 5 second delay was an actual bug. And the way programs where
written back then, the space invaders issue looks like an unintended bug which
was then simply kept in.

~~~
teilo
Without looking at the GMail details, you don't know period, so you should
neither agree nor disagree.

Others who _do_ know have chimed in. For example: "1 is not even close to
true. I was a Gmail SRE at the time. Sends did not take 5 seconds at the time,
they were handed off to the MTA right away. The MTA had the ability to delay
delivery due to other projects and Gmail decided to use that feature to build
undo send."

So, not a bug.

As for Space Invaders, the game designer, Tomohiro Nishikado, knew about the
issue from the beginning, and specifically chose not to compensate for the
change in rendering speed. He could have easily done so. He liked the way it
played. When you intentionally design a thing a certain way, it's not a bug.

~~~
pflenker
When I left my comment, the others who do know have not yet commented. I
wanted to express what you said in your first sentence, that without knowing
or providing more context, it's not sensible to say that none of them where
real bugs. So I disagreed with the parent comment based on the information I
had at this time.

------
hiena03
I believe Bunny Hopping in the quake series is a good example

[https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping](https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping)

~~~
billyc74
it's quite incredible how much has come out of this glitch. There are many
servers up on CS:GO dedicated to bhopping, as well as whole games built around
it.

~~~
rmilejczz
This reminds me of Gunz, an early aughts PvP game whose dedicated community
formed itself around several of the games broken mechanics and bugs. To play
Gunz you basically have to master glitches, it really could have its own
article dedicated to it

~~~
NikolaeVarius
[https://gunz.fandom.com/wiki/K-Style](https://gunz.fandom.com/wiki/K-Style)

------
codezero
My two favorite bugs that became features:

1\. "true black" dyes in Ultima Online [0]

2\. Skiing in the game Tribe [1]

[0] [https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/11/24/how-uo-rares-were-
born...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/11/24/how-uo-rares-were-born/)

[1]
[https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Skiing](https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Skiing)

[*] wow, the numbering here is real confusing!

~~~
mikorym
Not to be prescriptive, but that is why I don't do the "hip" thing of
numbering from 0.

The question of whether 0 is a natural number or not, is from a category
theorist's point of view, rather quixotic. The category theorist in question
would either say: "of course it is a natural number" or "of course it is
immaterial".

The only situation in which one should panic, I think, is if the answer is "of
course it is not a natural number". In this latter instance I think that you
have a problem and that the ring theorist from the office next door has taken
polyjuice potion and tied your professor up in the magical trunk, frow which
you can probably by now hear feint moaning.

~~~
elliekelly
> Not to be prescriptive, but that is why I don't do the "hip" thing of
> numbering from 0.

Are there any old HN threads discussing/debating this? I’d be interested in
hearing both perspectives. Any idea who started this trend and how long it’s
been around? I once looked at some super old threads to see if it’s been a
thing from the beginning and I didn’t see anyone doing it.

~~~
mikorym
Personally, I think it stems from HN readers having a chronic inclination to
try to be clever (myself included and no judgment intended).

------
kobbe
1\. Not necessarily a bug. Just slow software. 2\. Not a bug. 3\. A real
stretch to call this a bug. 4\. Seems lika a real bug without researching
more. 5\. Not a bug.

~~~
johnmaguire2013
I'm not exactly sure I'd call 4 a feature though either -- just dumb luck.

And from the reading, it sounds like this was intentional behavior: Make a
random move if there is no clear good move.

------
fitzroy
When using ScreenSharing on the Mac, CMD + Tab used to switch between apps on
the local Mac (like using any other app). Which means, to switch apps on the
remote Mac, you needed to use the Dock or some other method.

Then at some point a few years ago, CMD + Tab changed to switching between
apps on the remote Mac, which also makes sense since you're working on the
remote computer. But then you need another way to switch out of ScreenSharing
on the local Mac.

Then for a year or two, it seemed random which computer's app switcher you'd
yet.

Now it seems to take into account whether an actual window on the remote
computer has been given focus since switching over to ScreenSharing or not. I
can't quite place the logic, but it seems to do what I expect most of the time
now.

I have no idea which of these scenarios was actually the bug and which is/was
the feature.

------
weberc2
Halo 2 had the bxr bug (sequence of the “b” button, the “x” button, and the
right-trigger). If you executed the sequence with the right timing, aim, and
proximity, it would immediately kill a nearby opponent (“b” triggered a melee
which took down enemy shields, “x” cancelled the cooldown animation of the
melee to begin the “reload” animation, and the right trigger would cancel the
reload animation and shoot the opponent. Headshots on does with no shields
were one-hit kills. This was a great bug because anyone could do it, but it
required a lot of skill to execute.
[https://youtu.be/H8HtTQOXKA4](https://youtu.be/H8HtTQOXKA4)

Superbouncing on the other hand was just annoying.

~~~
sgarman
The problem with bxr is the rest of the game, maps, modes, weapons etc were
not balanced around the br one shotting people. As someone who used it
frequently I was not a fan and it only felt fun when other people didn't know
how to do it yet which is bad game design.

~~~
weberc2
Disagree. It brought balance to the game; otherwise it was about getting to
the power weapons the fastest. This meant you had meaningful fights all over
the map instead of the just clustering around rocket launcher spawn. I also
played mostly MLG game modes where you started with battle rifles instead of
SMGs, so that might explain some of our disagreement.

------
mikorym
I am glad Kasparov and Deep Blue is mentioned here. Kasparov still does active
research in chess (and especially computer aided human chess). And all the
while I was under the impression that chess had been "solved" in the 90's...

------
wodenokoto
Zelda 3, a link to the past on SNES has a coin room, known as Chris Houlihan's
Room.

Basically what happens is if an exception is caught during a screen
transition, instead of crashing the game, it will load this room.

I believe a lot of older games had something like this, in order to run for a
very long time, which was usually demanded by console publishers.

[https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Top_Secret_Room](https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Top_Secret_Room)

------
ASalazarMX
A list of FIVE random, questionable bugs, I thought it was something more
serious.

Well, speaking of bugs, the Skyrim Giant Space Program[1] is my favorite so
far, probably because it caught me by surprise the first time. Your first
giant encounter usually happens after you killed an actual dragon, the top
predator. How tough could these guys be?

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWV9hSDXTkg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWV9hSDXTkg)

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arthurjj
The DeepBlue one doesn't seem to be a bug to me. If multiple moves seem
equally good then choosing one at random seems like a fine decision making
process

------
aledalgrande
Add the PostIt by 3M to the list. Failed glue project.

------
kache_
Super smash bros melee's wave dashing and l canceling were bugs that super
charged the competitive scene

~~~
piti166
L cancelling is not a bug, it is an altered feature from smash 64, where it
was called Z-cancelling and removed all of the lag from aerial attacks. I also
have a hard time to believe, that wavedashing is a bug, as they specificlly
implemented a state transition for wavelanding (hitting the ground while in
the airdodge animation), it is more a clever exploitation of this mechanic by
jumping and immediatly airdodging into the ground, thus carrying over a whole
lot of momentum.

------
ypeterholmes
"a slip of his mouse turned an intended 50% increase to her breast size into a
150% gain."

A slip of the mouse? lol

------
caustic
In JavaScript: typeof null == "object" As described in
[https://2ality.com/2013/10/typeof-
null.html](https://2ality.com/2013/10/typeof-null.html)

