Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?

Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"

Comments

Already Happened

[LeafOnTheWind]

See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.

Re:Already Happened

[odourpreventer]

I recommend "Thief - the Metal Age". Arguably the biggest modding community on the net. Hop over to Thief: The Circle for more info.

It was called TRIBES

[Piata]

There was a bug in the game that allowed you to "ski" by hitting the jump button repeatedly. Skiing let you gain a lot of momentum and using your jetpack to climb hills would let you maintain it.

That bug completely changed the way the game was played and made crossing large open environments effortless. The developers never fixed the bug and instead made it a feature of Tribes 2.

Re:Desert Combat

[vlm]

I remember back in the days of Desert Combat when I was in early high school, getting the idea of parking mobile AA on the hillside, allowing you to get the gun pointed down farther than being level and using the AA guns against people - was great stuff,

I mean, I doubt I was the first person to do it, but I'd never seen or heard of anybody else doing it before after playing it for months myself...

Oh for the lack of history education now a days ... I suspect the great desert fox himself might have invented the technique circa 1941...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_mm_gun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel

Counter Strike

[Yvanhoe]

Ha! People tend to forget that counter-strike is a mod for Half Life ! A game that notoriously sucked, in multiplayer mode...