Bugs are errors in a system, and sometimes users manipulate them in unintended ways. Here are a few I find interesting:
1. Busty Lara Croft
I remember my yesteryears, spent guiding Lara Croft (originally named Lara Cruz) through Aztec temples, shooting everything in her path. Apparently, the size of her bust – which featured in many-a-teenager’s wet dream, was an accident, by designer, Toby Gard.
“While making test adjustments to her girlish figure, a slip of his mouse turned an intended 50 per cent increase to her breast size into a 150 per cent gain. It met with instant approval from the team before he could correct it.” Source
2. Gmail Undo Send
Originally, the Gmail server had a 5 second delay, meaning it didn’t immediately process the message and send to the intended recipient. This provided an opportunity for the Gmail team to turn it into a useful feature, for people who changed their minds about sending certain messages, to undo the action, and spare themselves some embarrassment. Source
3. Scratching (as done by DJs)
The turntable was built originally, just to play music, but a back and forth movement generates friction between the steel needle and the PVC (polyvinyl chloride) of the record. Since it was discovered by Grand Wizzard Theodore, a Hip-hop DJ, and perfected by Grandmaster Flash, his mentor, it has been used across a range of genres, and has inspired more special effects in music technology.
4. CTRL+ALT+DEL
There’s always the story of Ctrl-Alt-Delete, which wasn’t really a bug per se (it was something for devs to work with buggy software), but it was never intended to be used in production.
5. Civilisation
In Civilization, the turn based strategy game, all computer-controlled leaders have a certain personality associated with them–with variables for things like emphasis on the economy, cooperation, backstabbing tendency, etc. In the original Sid Meier’s Civilization, Gandhi was meant by the devs to be the most peaceful leader. Gandhi was, in fact, the only leader whose aggression variable was set to 0.
This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that in order to mirror real-world historical developments, the dev team decided that once a civilisation adopted democracy as its government, the value for its aggression variable should decrease by 1. For every other civilisation, this worked fine, but in Gandhi’s case setting aggression to -1 resulted in a variable overflow, causing it to reset to the highest possible value. Gandhi, as a result became a cruel despot in the game.
They found the bug so funny that they incorporated it into their codebase, as a feature in future releases.
Photo Credit: Sean McCann via Compfight cc
