Many players believe that the classic operations in “Super Mario Bros.” are the result of careful design by Nintendo. But in fact, one of the signature moves that has accompanied players for nearly 40 years turned out to be just a program bug. What’s even more amazing is that when the development team discovered it, Shigeru Miyamoto not only did not ask for corrections, but only said: “It’s fun, just keep it.” As a result, once this bug remained, it became a classic gameplay in the “Super Mario” series.
The classic “wall jump” is actually a bug? !
According to Shigeru Miyamoto’s memories, during the development of the original “Super Mario Bros.”, the team discovered that characters could occasionally slide along walls or even complete special jumps due to collision determination issues. Originally, this behavior was supposed to be a bug that needed to be corrected, but after actually playing it, Shigeru Miyamoto thought that this operation added to the fun and depth of the game, so he decided not to fix it, but to keep it. Later, related concepts evolved along the way, and eventually became one of the well-known classic actions in the series.
Being interesting is more important than being correct
Miyamoto said not all bugs have to be eliminated when developing a game. A surprise isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it makes the player have more fun. He believes that rather than blindly pursuing 100% accuracy of the program, whether the game is interesting is a more important criterion, and this kind of thinking has always influenced Nintendo’s subsequent game design concepts.
Players: One of the greatest bugs
After the news was exposed, many players joked that the classic operation they had played for decades turned out to be an “ancestral bug.” Some people also mentioned that many classic designs in the history of games came from accidents, such as the rocket jump of “Quake” and the combo system of “Street Fighter II”. In the end, they were retained and became part of the game because they were interesting enough.