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The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything
Some games keep a tight rein on the player's capacities. Others never realise in time the full scope of the Combinatorial Explosion and break like a fragile twig the first time a creative player gets a grip on them. Only a brave few dare try and respond wittily and internally-consistently to absolutely everything a player could try.

The point at which we can say The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything is when there are strange circumstances, tricks, combos, Sequence Breakers, etc. and not only has the Dev team anticipated them, but they put in special content just in case. Stopping players from Sequence Breaking with Invisible Walls, convenient blockades, a guard NPC that doesn't let you pass, etc., for instance, doesn't qualify because even though they anticipated you would try this, they didn't exactly give you special content for trying. On the other hand, if entering the castle you weren't supposed to reach yet awards you a brand new cutscene where you are told "Congratulations, you have broken the game's script! Now back to where you belong!", that DOES qualify. It also doesn't count as The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything if the content is set up in a way they are clearly baiting you to try this, such as leaving a severed head lying on the ground and a basketball hoop nearby. It might count, however, if they let you carry the severed head and there is a basketball court several levels later. Similarly, content that is merely hidden wouldn't be The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything either - that's just an Easter Egg, Secret Level, etc.

To truly qualify as The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything, however, this shouldn't just happen in one or two occasions in the game, but instead happen so often that you really would think "the Dev team thinks of EVERYTHING."

Coined by the Net Hack community, due to the game's open-source design and long turnover between versions encouraging the proliferation of Easter Eggs — maybe half the game's source code, by weight.

Compare The Producer Thinks Of Everything, where the creators of a TV show seem to have planned out very, very far ahead.

Examples:

  • The Trope Namer is, of course, Net Hack. An emblematic example is the 'stoning grenades' trick. It goes like this:
    1. Touching a cockatrice with bare flesh causes instant petrification.
    2. The player can polymorph briefly into a random monster, gaining all its abilities.
    3. There are magical items that let you control your transformation, change gender or remain in a form indefinitely.
    4. Female snakes, birds and dragons can lay eggs.
    • Conclusion: whilst playing as a female character, polymorph into a cockatrice, lay dozens of eggs, revert to human, and throw the eggs at enemies to petrify them instantly!
    • And the DevTeam has even thought of that, as causing your own eggs to break carries a significant guilt (luck) penalty.
    • Also, if one falls down a staircase while wielding a cockatrice corpse, bad things tend to happen...
    • Perhaps the best example of this involving cockatrices is this. When you are blind and walk over an item, the game states "you try to feel what is lying on the floor. It is a [item]." This is literal, as I found when walking over a cockatrice corpse, blind, with bare hands. "You turn to stone..."
    • As another example, reading a cursed scroll of amnesia causes you to forget everything with the phrase "Thinking of Maud causes you to forget everything." If your character is named Maud, the phrase is instead "Your thoughts turn inward."
    • Try to dip a potion into itself and you get told "This is a potion bottle, not a Klein bottle!"
    • If you try to flash a camera underwater, you're told you can't do that because it would void the warranty.
    • Listing all the Net Hack examples would take several pages. Let's just leave it as "Trust us on this one." Or even better, "Go get killed by it yourself."
  • If you use a hacking tool to alter a Pokémon ROM, you can go into the tall grass near your home town before you get your first pokemon. If you get attacked by a wild pokemon, a question mark shows up instead of the pokemon you should have. The question mark is at level zero, zero HP, and it can attack. When you white out, you come to in your house and your mom makes you rest and explains how pokemon centers work. How did they plan for this?
  • The Roguelike ADOM has some elements of this as well.
    • For example: The regular use of the blanket is to automatically wrap up objects you are carrying (so a waterproof blanket protects them from rust, a fireproof blanket protects them from melting, etc.) but if you dig a hole in the ground you can put the blanket over it to create your own pit trap.
    • If you try and fire a projectile at the spot you're standing in the message, "Try to find a more creative way to commit suicide" appears.
    • You know that "Useless Potion" item? Turns out that if you find a use for it, not only does the game commend you for it, it gives you a random artifact as a reward. It involves propelling yourself by throwing it in the Caverns of Chaos's slippery ice level.
      • Similarly, you can use the talk option to talk to yourself by aiming it at your square.
  • When playing Age Of Empires 2, if one player threatened to kill another unless they turned over a ridiculous amount of gold, the AI could respond by declaring war.
  • In the Game Cube version of Animal Crossing, your villagers complain if you send them gibberish letters because the game was designed to look for certain things... which means that you can still write gibberish so long as you use proper spacing and punctuation. However, writing a letter in French could result in the villager's return letter reading something along the lines of "Bonjour! Sorry, my French isn't very good..."
    • If you reset the game enough times, Mr. Resetti will force you to write a letter of apology. If the player writes a letter that is less than apologetic, he'll force you to do it again. Writing something like "Hell no" or "I hate you" will cause Mr. Resetti to freak out.
  • Deus Ex is chock full of these. Examples: In the Statue of Liberty, after detaining the head terrorist, you can shoot the UNATCO soldier that's coming up. When reporting for debriefing, your boss asks you if you know what happened up there. Also, when terrorists are about to be questioned, you can go into the cell once the doors are open, watch the interrogation, and even execute or interrogate them by yourself. The interrogator (Walton Simons) is not amused, and tells you so, as do his goons. Another example can be found in the 747: when you are about to arrest Lebedev, your teammate storms in and orders you to kill him. Amongst other options, you can then kill said teammate. Not to mention the myriad backdoors, sideways, hidden entrances etc. that are around..
  • In Baldurs Gate (1 & 2), it is more than possible that a devious player may have killed a character before they have divulged plot specific information. In these cases, a robed character named "Biff the Understudy" will appear and say the required lines.
    • In part 2, Biff the Understudy gets a real role as he is asked to replace the lead actor of a troupe who has been kidnapped (thus giving you the quest to rescue him). Naturally, Biff stinks up the whole play with his wooden, talentless performance.
    • Furthermore, Baldur's Gate II features the character Arkanis Gath, who will appear and instantly kill off your party if you for some idiotic reason attack a plot-sensitive NPC and make it impossible to proceed with the main story. You can't save once he appears either, so it keeps you from screwing up.
    • Also in Baldur's Gate II, if the player is an elf named Drizzt with low reputation, then when you meet the actual Drizzt Do'urden he'll challenge the player for the honor of his name.
      • Likewise, if, in BG1, the player kills Drizzt and takes his loot, he'll recognize it as his when and if he meets the player in the sequel. He'll also be much more hostile than normal.
  • Bioshock includes several sequences that require navigating past a few electrified tripwires. The programmers discovered during development that the anchors of the tripwires could be moved by one of the player's weapons, and decided to work this "bug" into the game as a feature — when it's used properly, one can rearrange the wires and trick the mooks into running into them.
  • Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is chock full of this. No matter where you go, there's something there that evidenced the dev team thought of it first: tunnels just big enough to get a helicopter/VTOL jet through, others with things that make it just the wrong size, parachutes in high places, and even a sign atop a bridge saying, 'There are no easter eggs up here, go away.'
    • In Grand Theft Auto IV you get a mobile phone. If you're in a car listening to the radio when someone contacts you, the car speakers skip just before it rings, as often occurs in real life.
    • GTA IV has this in spades. The subway stations have performers at rush hour that you can tip. You can meet a girl on the in-game internet, and after your dates she will blog about them. You can even take the Roosevelt Island tram ride.
  • Full Throttle gave you a boxful of mechanical bunnies intended for clearing a path through a minefield. If you had any left over later, you could chop them up for fun with the help of a large truck's engine fan.
    • Left over? You can go back to the shop after a certain point and gank a second box of the things! In fact, Ride of the Valkyries is playing while you do it... dun dun dun DAH *bzzt* dun dun dun DAH *bzzt* ...
      • "Fun."
      • "Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."
      • There is also a scene where your attempting to operate the computer console of an out of control jumbo-jet screaming down the highway (It Makes Sense In Context). Most options lead to "Computer damaged, unable to comply." If you try to select "Access Adult Movies", the screen begins to flash "Loading..." before hitting you again with the error message. Bastards.
  • Disgaea 2. Try sending multiple people into the Dark Court at once, for example...
    • A lot of the subtler game mechanics in the Disgaea series seem to be built around this trope as well. Throwing enemies into your base panel, for example. (Save first.)
  • In Portal, it is possible for creative players to trap either themselves or vital objects in inaccessible locations by using portals. When this happens, the AI running the test will either let you out or provide replacement equipment, while making a sarcastic jab at your ineptitude.
    • The XBLA re-release even has an Achievement for managing to trap yourself in a room.
  • Fallout 2 has a healing device called a Super Stimpack, which heals massive damage instantly, but has a timer that inflicts some less-serious damage later on from harsh drug side-effects. It is possible to assassinate the Enclave's president by healing him with about ten of them. There is a special text message for this eventuality.
    • It's actually possible to kill anyone with this technique; it's not usually done because it requires large amounts of super-stims, and they are very expensive and hard to find, but it's useful in case the player wants to kill someone without alienating their allies.
    • You can collect the (highly addictive and very dangerous) Psycho packs and use them as impromptu assassination tools to avoid big firefights. Three Psychos and *bing!*, they're done.
    • The withdrawal effects of various drugs (chems?) in general are useful in various quests where a ridiculous attribute(s) would otherwise be required in order to beat an opponent.
    • You can also force alcohol down NPC throats to lower their aim before you fight them.
    • The stealing skill lets you open up enemy inventory and take their items. But it also lets you drop items into their own inventory (used in some quests). Combine that with the fact that a bundle of lit dynamite behaves just like any other item and will blow up regardless of whether it's dropped or in somebody's inventory.
      • Taken further in Fallout 3, as using the pickpocket command to deposit a grenade or a mine in another person's inventory will a) automatically activate it and b) give you an achievement for doing so.
    • The last level is supposed to be a running shootout through the Big Bad's home base. However, if you have the same kind of Powered Armor the Bads use, you can drop off your allies at the front door and bluff your way through the entire mission, save the battle at the end.
  • In Fallout 3, you can skip much of the first half of the story by going immediately to the right location after leaving the vault. If you do so, Three Dog will actually give you access to a weapons cache if you do his quest anyway, even though you don't need to do it anymore.
    • Early on in the game, you are given the opportunity to do a fairly long sidequest that is essentially an optional, extended tutorial, one stage of which involves investigating an old robotics factory. Another sidequest, normally started much later, involves two "superheroes," the AntAgonizer and the Mechanist. There is special dialogue for accepting the submission to the robotics factory while wearing the Mechanist's costume.
      • Remembering that the Antagonist is based on a comic book character, it's possible to use info found in the publisher's ruins to make her give up her life of villainy.
    • If you talk to Stockholm (a sniper in Megaton who is normally unreachable) by using the command console to make yourself fly (or give yourself godmode and launch yourself upward with a mini-nuke and land just right), he will chat like other NPC's, and end the conversation with "And how the hell did you get up here, anyway?"
    • One of the DLC packs for the game requires you to talk to a few Brotherhood of Steel renegades called the Outcasts. After helping them with a Super Mutant problem, you almst immediately engage in conversation with them. If you happen to be wearing armor that you took from the dead body of an Outcast elsewhere in the game while they talk to you, they start asking what the hell you're doing off-duty.
  • The Quest For Glory series had a ton of these, especially amusing for players who think of particularly creative ways to get themselves killed. If you play as a thief, you start out with a lock pick in your inventory. If you type "pick nose", the hero will stick the lock pick up his nose and die, and you will get a game over. However, if your lock-picking skill is high enough, you will get a message that says, "Success! Your nose is now open!". Later games have the game reply "Success!" with the same sound effect the player hears when picking a lock. This also increases your lock picking skill.
  • In The Legend Of Zelda Phantom Hourglass, the player can choose not to take the heart containers received from boss battles. Should they want to obtain it later, they can return to the boss room to get it. But, as the fourth dungeon cannot be returned to, you cannot go back to get the container there. Normally, this would make 100% completion potentially impossible. However, if the player misses that container, they will get a letter in the mail from the developers themselves with a heart container attached.
    • Earlier, in The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess, Midna will say a variety of context-sensitive things if you call her up in certain locations - including commenting on how cool it is and suggesting taking a bath in a room with a pool of water in the Goron Mines and refusing to help you because of how warty and disgusting the Hylian Toad is while fighting it.
    • An infamous example from Link's Awakening involves a technique that allows the player to actually steal an item from the village shop, potentially allowing access to the bow and arrows long before any reasonable person would have accumulated the Rupees to get it. Apparently, Nintendo realized this and decided to have some fun with it, throwing in multiple You Suck reactions directed at the player from the game itself, and a Scare Em Straight Aesop. This shows the whole moment.
  • The Metal Gear Solid series has tons of examples of this. Focusing on just MGS2, you can make Snake and Raiden... pleasure themselves to the bikini posters scattered throughout the game (and have people on the other end of the codec comment on it [and have your character comment on their comments]), get your codec support mad at you for punching hostages or photographing the panties of female hostages, destroy a huge amount of inanimate objects for the time, and get comments from Snake referencing things you won't find out he did until much later during Raiden's story if you call him at the right times. Also by killing enough birds as Raiden in MGS2 Rose will call you a monster and refuse to let you save until you apologise.
    • We're talking about a game series that accounted for the possibility of the player shooting guards in the crotch, and incorporated it into that bit with the Sorrow in MGS3. "I'm useless now!"
      • We're talking about a series that also accounted for the possibility that the player might have eaten a vulture who had, in turn, eaten human flesh. The victims of Snake's cannibalism-by-proxy also appear in the Sorrow's river, complete with a vulture on their shoulder. ("You ate me!")
    • In MGS3, you can also find a crocodile cap and peek around corners while crawling, causing guards to believe you are some kind of indoor crocodile and freak out.
      • If Snake gets a stomach ache from eating rotten food, you can cure him with medicine OR go to the medical screen, spin him around a dozen times, and then exit the screen and watch Snake puke up, fixing the problem.
      • MGS 2 and 3 could fill a whole page with this. Saving during a sniper battle with a very elderly boss and leaving the console off for a week will result in him dying of old age.
    • A video of some MGS1 easter eggs.
    • And frighteningly exhaustive lists of of eggs from 2, 3 and 4.
  • In the intro of MegaMan Zero 2, Zero is being chased by some rather lowly mooks. When you actually gain control over Zero, there will be 3 of them directly behind him. Killing them will spawn more, leading one to believe that this would be a good place to grind weapon skill. However, once you kill enough of them, Zero will comment on how "this isn't fun anymore" and you will stop gaining weapon exp.  *
  • At one point in Psychonauts, you have to go into the minds of a few people to assemble a disguise to trick the warden. A lazy or creative player might think that just jumping into the warden's mind would be quicker. The game will let you try it, but all you'll get is an amusing note explaining that the warden is protected against psychic interference. Similarly, if you try to jump into any of your fellow campers' heads, you'll get a notice saying that the mind-jumping-device won't work on minors.
    • If you decide to take Mr. Pokeylope to camp after saving him, every camper reacts to him in different ways, mostly involving how adorable he is. In fact, almost every NPC in the game reacts differently to every single power-up and item you could possibly use on them. One particularly amusing example: Using the "Rose" item from Black Velvetopia on the dog painters will make them tell you to "Go find someone your own species."
    • The Lungfish Call item makes a... specific sound. Using it near Dr. Loboto has him tell Sheegor to "go outside if [she's] going to do that."
    • Some of the best responses to the Confusion attack show up in Fred's mind, which is cleared of its inhabitants by the time you're technically supposed to be able to get Confusion.
    • Using cheats early in the game allows you to use powers that you're not supposed to have yet on characters that might not be around at the time you're actually supposed to have the powers. Using cheats in this way often results in amusing dialog that you wouldn't hear if you played through the game normally. Using confusion on the G-Men is particularly hilarious. "Oh my God, why am I holding a gun?!"
  • Rhys, the first protagonist of Phantasy Star 3, gets tossed in a castle dungeon almost immediately upon starting the game. More Genre Savvy players can sell his boots to raise enough money to buy an Escapipe (which allows you to escape dungeons) before the fact and skip rather plot-crucial cutscenes to escape. On the other hand, doing so will trap you in the castle, where the king (Rhys' father, it should be noted) tells you, in (slightly) nicer terms, that while using an Escapipe is normally a wise move, this particular example of Sequence Breaking has appropriately broken the game's script, and now reset the game and do it right. Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
  • Dwarf Fortress is known for its elaborate and detailed gameplay. If you piss off the humans enough to attack you after letting their guild representatives wander through your fortress, they avoid any traps said representative knows about. It also allows you to make extremely elaborate constructions and traps by yourself without any hints from the game. There are no instructions in the game on how to build a magma moat and there's no building or set of buildings that constitute as one. You manually dig a trench from your local magma supply, let it fill up and put bridges over it. However, there are far more elaborate contraptions, like the Degrinchinator, a trench invaders would have to run through in it's length to enter the player home, lined with machinery that pumps water up from the aquifer and then instantly freezes when it reaches the surface, encasing the enemy in ice because it was built on a glacier. A rather new one is the Kinetic Projectile Trap, which consists of both water and magma being released into a tiny room, the water cooling the magma to obsidian and the resulting slab of rock being dropped on any would be invaders. These could double as a Guide Dang It as the only way to figure such things out is from the forums or your own imagination.
    • Dwarf Fortress even allows combinations that make the game unplayable - a magma waterfall is only moderately difficult to construct and awesome, but the burning, molten mist makes your dwarves very unhappy and will totally destroy a normal computer's framerate.
  • In the Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure, it is necessary to the plot at one point to "enjoy Vogon poetry". Earlier, you can "enjoy mud" (it's nice and squishy!), but if you try enjoying Ford, you are sternly told that this isn't that type of game. Additional fun can be had by inputting random words into the titular Guide - it has entries on some very unlikely things.
  • Not even robot dinosaurs are safe - witness Pleo R.I.P., complete with choking sounds and reacting to being held up by his tail!
  • Many games have intentional safeguards to prevent the game from crashing or entering the territory computer programmers euphemistically refer to as "suboptimal performance." In this case, it's not really "thinking of everything," but just good programming technique - assume "everything" is possible, and plan accordingly. A good example is the Chris Houlihan room in The Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which is loaded whenever the game can't find the proper room data for where Link is supposed to be. Final Fantasy VI has tons of such "default" data, such as default monster reward data (which, if you're curious, is a Thunder Blade or a Jewel Ring, with no EXP or Magic points).
    • Sonic The Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles also had a similar failsafe system - if the game ran into an internal error, it would simply load up the Blue Sphere minigame instead of crashing.
  • In the text game Colossal Cave Adventure, there is a bird which is important, as it is needed to kill a snake, but if the player types "eat bird" the game will let the player eat the bird, responding with "It was delicious."
  • Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, being the first Sierra game to be publicly playtested, included a wide variety of possible inputs to any situation, often with comedic responses: During playtesting, the developers would take note of various phrases used by players in certain situations, and think of new ways for the game to react to it. For a particularly amusing example, typing the command "masturbate" at any time would result in the prompt "The whole idea was to stop doing that, Larry!"
  • Freespace came bundled with FRED (FReespace EDitor), the same development tool the designers used to create the main game's missions. They included a rather amusing response to one attempt at crashing the program. FRED has an autonaming feature: when a new ship is placed, before the user renames it, it is called "<class-of-ship> 1" or "2", or whatever, the number being how many ships had been placed already plus one. It was discovered that attempting to fool FRED's autonamer by renaming a ship to the next ship name in line (for instance, naming a ship "Ulysses 2" and then placing a second Ulysses) would result in the new ship being autonamed "URA Moron 1". For those interested, renaming a ship the next ship in line and renaming a ship "URA Moron 1" results in the next ship being "URA Moron 2" and so on...
  • The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind features, at one point, an NPC who falls from the sky and dies (and when you search his body, you find out why). With no preparation, there's no way to save him; however, if the player knows where he's going to fall, it's possible to purchase a spell or scroll of Slowfall before encountering him. If you cast the spell on him to save him, he'll say, "I don't want to talk about it."
    • Certain Morrowind NPCs are also "smart" enough to recognise your relationship to whatever organisation they are part of. For example, mages guild members will mutter that you shouldn't be there if you aren't a member or greet you warmly if you have a high guild ranking. Joining the Imperial Legion may see the fort commanders question why you aren't in uniform if you aren't wearing Imperial armour.
    • Also, all NPCs in Morrowind are killable, including ones essential to the plot. In a minor instance of this trope, whenever such a character is slain by the player, a prompt will come up, informing them that "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
      • But even if you do it, you can still win the game through a ridiculously complicated and obscure backdoor the dev team stuck in.
      • The most extreme example of this trope: even if you sever the thread of prophecy and close off the backdoor, you can still win if you know exactly what to do and have both an obscene amount of health and some way to heal very quickly (usually super-powerful potions).
  • In the DS version of Dragon Quest V, the game normally starts with Pankraz suggesting the lead character be named Madason, only to have that vetoed in favor of whatever you entered. If you actually do enter Madason, Pankraz instead suggests Erdrick — this also doubles as a Mythology Gag to the NES-era translations of Dragon Quest I, II, and III.
    • Similarly, in Dragon Quest III if you opt to name the main character Erdrick, the game rejects it with no immediate explanation- because the game is actual a prequel to the first two. You are Erdrick, but you won't receive that name until the end of the game.
  • In Final Fantasy VI there is one boss that after defeating, will have a short cut scene after the battle where it spits out a magicite for you. This is the same game where you could exploit a glitch to make instant kill spells kill most enemies including bosses. If you use Death, the animation shows the monster getting its soul sucked out and it dies with the appropriate cut scene of the magicite falling out of it's mouth. However, if you use X-Zone, a spell that animates as the enemy getting sucked into another dimension, the boss will be defeated but you won't get the cutscene or the magicite, because logically the magicite got sucked into the other dimension with the boss.
    • There's some heated discussion whether or not that was a bug, but it was retained in the remakes, so the developers liked it at least.
  • In Grim Fandango, you can use the "Pick Up" command on a former co-worker, to which Manny replies "I guess I could, now that we're not working together."
    • Similarly, if you try to "Use" your abusive crew in the first Monkey Island, Guybrush will say "I think I'm the one being used around here.
  • On the subject of Monkey Island, in chapter 3 of Tales of Monkey Island DeCava asks you to get him 100,000 grubs to create a cochlea. If you actually manage to get 100,000 grubs, it will have the same effect as when you just find the required item.
  • In the very beginning of Final Fantasy IX, answering Baku's question of who the gang is going to kidnap with "Queen Brahne" 64 times causes Ruby to burst in and scold Zidane for being stubborn.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has an upside-down castle (not really a spoiler at this point). When the developers implemented a percentage counter that shows how much of the map you've explored, somebody realized that players would figure out that something was wrong when they got near the end of the game and only had 50% of the map explored (you only get to the inverted castle if you take the good ending branch by saving Richter). So they altered the counter so that fully exploring the normal castle yields a percentage of 100%... and then exploring the inverted castle increases that to 200%. It worked so well that it was incorporated into Portrait of Ruin, which has 10 different maps (for a total of 1000%)... even though these extra maps weren't really a secret at all.
  • The Nameless Mod has this all over the place, mostly because as a mod for a nearly 9 year old game, they know all the exploits in the engine. For example: climbing over a fence before you can unlock it will result in an NPC on the other side asking how you got there, and listing some of the possible methods, such as grenade climbing (sticking a grenade to the wall, jumping on it, sticking another to the wall, jumping, removing the first, and repeating).
    • Extra Mario Bros, a ROM hack of the original Super Mario Bros, has this as well. The original SMB engine is full of bugs, but in the hack, there's no way to get stuck. Ever. And there's plenty of out-of-the-way secrets that require you to use these bugs to get to otherwise inaccessible areas.
  • Lifeline, the game controlled almost entirely by voice commands, there are quite a few words in Rio's dictionary that you might be surprised by, especially if you didn't actually say them due to the prototypical nature of the game's main feature. Telling her to commit suicide, for example, elicts a response unique to the request. You could also say Rio's voice actor's name (the exact name depending on whether or not it's the Japanese version or the English version) when asked who your girlfriend is for a unique response. She also dislikes it if you swear, ironic considering this is a survival horror game.
    • Ask her how to open that first door. You'll get an answer that's 100% accurate but useless to you because you've got a Dualshock2 contoller in front of you instead of what's actually in the room your character is in.
  • This is the hook of the Nintendo DS game, Scribblenauts — you can write any kid-friendly, non-proper noun (even some proper ones like God, Cthulhu, Albert Einstein, and Longcat) on the touch screen, and the object written is spawned. The game's dictionary is its greatest asset, and the Dev Team has repeatedly assured gaming websites that they are Thinking Of Everything. It's become standard form in interviews with them to ask them a random collection of nouns to find out if they're in, or being put in, the game. They've been hit with things like "dialysis machine" and a specific kind of cooking pot. With the exception of vulgar things, trademarked characters (for obvious reasons), and abstract or really, really, really obscure nouns, they haven't been caught off-guard yet. (One reporter apparently stumped it with "pillory," but he notes, "That tends to get used more as a verb anyway. [Did you try "stocks," buddy?])
    • Check out this story (somewhat NSFW). In short, "I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES."
    • When someone actually stumped the dictionary at E3 with "Plumbob"  *, the dev watching the playtest got on his cellphone, chatted with someone else on the dev team, closed his phone, and told the playtester that the word would be in the final release. Awesome.
    • And yes, you can summon a Starite, but you can't actually clear the level with the phony Starite. Sorry.
      • Except in one level, where it's the only way to beat it.
  • Rise Of The Triad uses "pushwalls" for hiding secret areas. A pushwall reacts to the "open door" command and moves forward until it hits another wall (if you've played the original Wolfenstein 3 D you've seen these). If it hits the edge of the map, the game crashes with the error message "Pushwall tried to escape at (map coordinates)." One of the playtesters, who was also a graphic artist for the game, thought this was hilarious and immediately drew a picture of a brick wall running off the map declaring, "I'M FREEEEEEEE!◊" This picture was actually used in-game for the aforementioned error message.
    • The same incident resulted in the warp-only level "This Causes an Error!", which does exactly that and is where most people discovered this.
  • List of characters that can be hacked into Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. The fact that one of these characters shares a name with a character from Radiant Dawn is probably just a coincidence, as the two have different classes. The fact that Zelgius and the Black Knight have the exact same affinity, weapon ranks, and growth rate? Uh...not so much so. Yes, The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything, including putting in spoilers for the sequel.
    • Similarly, Sacred Stones has image and stats for Nergal, the Big Bad of the previous game. Even though they take place in completely different worlds.
    • In Rekka no Ken's penultimate level, The Value Of Life (32x in Hector's Story, isn't in Eliwood's), the mission is to kill the Magic Seal Kishuna, whose chamber is closed off by a door and who summons reinforcements when said door is opened. Using the Warp Staff to send a unit into Kishuna's room on turn 1? Not such a great idea, or if you do, you'd better be prepared to go right after him rather than wasting time so your other units can pick up the treasures in the level. Sending a unit to the space directly above the door while it is still closed causes it to not only open on its own, but four Berserkers that wouldn't otherwise be in the level show up as reinforcements.
    • Also in some Fire Emblem titles, there are levels in which there is a door which opens automatically after a specific number of turns, usually by an NPC. Under normal circumstances at the points in the game which they occur, It is effectively immpossible to get to the door before it automatically opens. However, if the player somehow manages to reach the door and open it themselves, an otherwise inaccessable cutscene is displayed to accomadate the situation. Chapter 16 in Rekka no Ken is an example of this.
  • If you use an Action Replay to boost the experience gained in Disgaea DS, the game will adapt the characters leveled up in this fashion so that they need to more than double their total EXP gained just to go up one more level—essentially forcing you to keep using that cheat just to level up at the normal rate. Of course, by the time it figures it out (which varies from character to character), you could already have your characters' levels in the 4000s... (usually, it figures it out by around 2300 or so.)
  • In the old Infocom text game Planetfall, the command "Eat self" produced the response "Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
  • Cave Story has a minor example: If you are invincible after a hit, you can jump on monsters, unlike most platformers. You'll fall once invincibility wears off and monster damages you. Also, if you don't pick up Missile Launcher, you'll get no missiles from enemies (more health and exp) and if you open a missile upgrader sans the weapon, you'll get it.
    • And if you skip the upgrade to super missiles, the very last missile upgrade will contain over a hundred missiles to compensate, instead of 24. Also, if you skip all missile launchers up to that point the box with super missiles is unopenable.
    • Also, during one of the last chapters of the game the player is required to temporarily give up their jetpack. Observant players will note that, with the exception of one jump in Outer Wall, every area except the Bonus Level Of Hell of the game can be navigated without the jetpack (and that one jump is only if you wish to climb up rather than down), presumably in case you backtrack without it. Many of the tools used to facilitate this look quite deliberate, such as the sandcrocs in Outer Wall and a single lonely fan added to the level before it to get you out of a nook which would otherwise be inescapable if you fell in it. Additionally, if you complete the Last Cave (which contains several hidden fans necessary for completing this task and nothing else) without retrieving your jetpack, the dialogue before fighting Misery changes and you'll get to wear a silly mask throughout the entire ending sequence.
    • In the Labyrinth, one of the Gaudi NPC's tells you that he's hungry for Mimiga flesh. Near the end of the game, you're given a Mimiga mask. If you backtrack and talk to the hungry Gaudi while wearing the mask, he'll say "Haha, very funny."
    • Also, during a sidequest you're asked by a small NPC to escort him to his house and he becomes part of your inventory. You can still finish the game and if you do he says something along the lines of "forgetting something?"
  • In Chrono Trigger, there is one Hopeless Boss Fight which you are clearly not supposed to win - in fact, Lavos is at its strongest at this point of the game, just to make sure of it. Still, if somehow you DO defeat the game's end boss at this point, you are rewarded to a Developers Room ending where the developers complain about why they bothered programming half the game's content if you already managed to beat the game this early anyway. I suspect that the reason why a boss fight with Lavos is available from the very beginning in a New Game Plus is just to make this Developers Room ending more accessible. Although with that said it's even harder to win it at the beginning, since Lavos has the same strength and you have only Crono and Marle in your party at that point (doing it after you get Lucca gets you an easier battle and a different ending).
    • Actually, if you warp to fight him at the beginning, you get normal Lavos, not the one that deals a jillion damage to everyone before you can even twitch. But at least you have three party members.
  • Metroid Fusion has the notorious shinespark Sequence Break cutscene, viewable here. This was an unexpectedly difficult task for a Nintendo game. The game itself acknowledges this, praising the player for their high skill, and actually wondering how many players would see the cutscene.
    • It should be noted though that this message is actually possible to reach without needing to do the ridiculously fidgety Shinepark trick. The developers obviously didn't think that anyone could hit the puffers just before the Diffusion missiles with regular ice missiles without them puffing up. You can.
    • Metroid Prime 3 also has a Timed Mission in which a meteor is about to crash into the planet, and at one point you catch a glimpse of it as you move through an outdoor area. If you stay put and watch the meteor instead of moving on, it will slowly move through the sky, speeding up in the last 10 seconds or so as it crashes towards the ground. Made better by the fact that there is no onscreen countdown, so players may not realize the mission is actually timed and watch the meteor just to see what, if anything, happens to it.
  • In The Sims 2, don't think you can get away with screwing around with the social worker if she shows up to take your kids. Most sadistic players who played the first Sims usually boxed the kid or the worker in a room with no doors or the like in order to prevent the kid from being taken away. Trying to pull the same trick off in the sequel? EA gets the last laugh since if the worker can't reach the kid after a certain amount of time, she will teleport the kid to her car! Now imagine that happening in Real Life...
    • Don't think you can cheat in the DS version without consequence. Setting back your DS's clock will cause the concierge to accuse you of being a time-traveling witch and aliens will swarm the town. There is no consequence for setting your DS clock forward, other than causing bugs to occur more frequently.
      • You can avoid this by removing the game cart before turning back time on your DS. However, this sometimes doesn't work.
  • In Space Quest 4, there is a one-in-a-million chance that any given player will figure out how to pick up the bunny in the first part of the game, and then while being shot at later pull out the bunny and use it on the shooting mook. This has not only a response, it has a voiceover reading it: "Don't throw the bunny at the Sequel Policeman! He might have a hare-trigger!"
    • At one point, you end up having to delete some files from a computer. One of the files is named SQ4. If you delete it the game simply quits.
  • Star Trek: The Game Show, a PC game hosted by the character Q, will give feedback based on the scores earned by the players as they enter the final round. In one game in which there was a massive disparity in the scoring, Q's remark after reviewing the scores was, "Well — I see one of you has a life."
    • In Star Trek: The Kobyashi Alternative, a text adventure, typing in swear words gets the NPC's to react with shock, and typing them in three times in a row causes McCoy to cart you off to Sickbay for a Nonstandard Game Over (since you've obviously gone insane, poor soul).
  • In the video game adaptation of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace you (as a Jedi) are able to do whatever you like in various locations. However, the developers appeared to realise the implications of this and made extensive preparations for the inevitable massacres. If you start killing civilians in the Gungan city guards will start to attack you, and if you kill boss Nass they will destroy the entire city with thermal detenators. In the Mos Espa level, if you walk over a vendor's dung worms people will comment on how much you stink.
  • Super Mario RPG: in the Kero Sewers, there is a treasure chest that you would normally return to after having stumbled across a Spring/Warp Pipe in Lands' End. If you utilize a trick, you can reach the chest and find that it contains something different than usual. After doing so, you can also get the other contents if you use the Lands' End route later on.
    • Likewise, if you try to SequenceBreak by going down a pipe you're supposed to arrive at the Kero Sewers from Lands End through, an enemy mook will pop up from the pipe and tell you not to go there. Thanks to a large cliff, you can't proceed further from here, you have to go through the other way and knock down a barrel that gives you a boost allowing you to climb up the cliff.
  • In SWAT 3, if you radio in some false information (the easiest being to report an officer as incapacitated when they're still okay), any living, AI-controlled officers will immediately correct you. Perhaps fairly ordinary on its own, but if this happens enough times, your Voice With An Internet Connection will comment that "it sounds confused in there."
  • In System Shock 2, if you bring a basketball to the basketball court and take the time to score a point (which can be very difficult for the lack of a throw skill), you are rewarded with an easter egg audio log from the ship's monkeys saying that they stole all the ship's bananas.
    • This is more of an ordinary Easter Egg, since the only way to access it is to carry the basketball from the tutorial level all the way through 90% of the game.
  • Minor example in Trauma Center: One of the first missions presents you with a patient with glass shards sticking out of their chest and no pulse. You're supposed to resuscitate him, then treat the injuries (your assistant will even start yelling at you if you do treat the injuries before getting a pulse), but if you do so then revive him, the game actually gives you different dialogue instead of just screwing up your assistant telling you to treat the wounds.
  • In an old Who Wants to be a Millionaire computer game, failing the Fastest Finger enough times in a row resulted in the host getting angry and shutting the game down.
  • In Wild ARMs 4, there is an error message that says, "You cannot open the chest while on top of it."
  • In World Of Warcraft back in the old pre expansion days, by going through a demon infested gorge, jumping in exactly the right places and using wall walking, which wasn't supposed to be possible (it had to be removed at least twice), you could enter Mount Hyjal. When you got there, you found a zone that was actually fairly fleshed out, including the skeleton of Archimonde and, the actual note that merits this entry, construction signs telling you you weren't supposed to be here and better get out.
    • Also, when water walking didn't apply to mounted people and it was nigh impossible to get to it, an island to the south east end of Kalimdor had a message in the bottle with, basically, "How did you get here?!"
  • In the Jellyvision quiz game series You Don't Know Jack, certain questions require you to type in an answer. The inevitable response will annoy the game's host, who will deduct a ridiculously large number of points from your score. If you do it twice, he will lambaste you and pointedly remove no points for not being original. If you manage it a third time in a single session, the host will give up on you and force quit the game.
    • Also, in many versions, if you buzz in to answer before the question appears, rather than having multiple choice answers, you have to type in the exact answer without ever knowing the question.
      • And if you DO know the question, due to playing the game multiple times, the host will give you the points for a correct answer, but accuse you of cheating.
  • Zork responds to command such as "win" and "die", and characters react to the phrase "Hello, Sailor".
    • In Zork II, at one point you come across a room containing naught but a giant bucket. If you should type "kick bucket" while playing Guess The Verb, the parser helpfully replies, "Kick the bucket? OK, if you insist. *** You have died ***"
    • "Eat", 'Eat what?', "Eat Self", 'auto-cannibalism is not the answer'
  • Streets Of Rage has this for the final level in the first game. If you have been playing alone the whole time, the ability to have player 2 join in is disabled in the final level. The developers probably knew that people would try to cheat and switch to player 2 if they exhausted all their lives as player 1. Oddly, this safeguard was removed in the 2nd and 3rd game.
    • Salamander 2 has something similar. Upon reaching the second loop of the game, your continues are turned off. If you try to be a smartass and start a game on the unused side to circumvent this, you'll find that the unused side can't join in.
    • NAM-1975 also did this with the final boss.
  • Creatures 3 includes information help text on several vanishingly insignificant items... including "The Hand", the game's cursor, which it is theoretically impossible to access help for (since getting help text requires clicking on it, and you can't click on the cursor). The text accuses you of "messing around with things you know not the wont of"—though, in all fairness, it's probably true.
  • In an old FPS game Blood, if you got killed after lighting dynamite in your hands, the dynamite would blow up even after your death - letting you see your final revenge from the angled "dead" view. Useless but entertaining.
  • Peasants Quest (a text based game on Homestar Runner) is chock full of jokes, Shout Outs, and responses to commands you weren't expecting. See here.
  • We were playing the Scott Adams text adventure game Pirates Cove (on a Vic20, back in the 80s), and came to a door which wouldn't open. Frustrated, we typed "BREAK DOOR", which gave us the response "Sorry, I don't feel destructive today." We then typed, "FEEL DESTRUCTIVE", it responded with something like "OK, I'll destroy your game!" and gave us game over. We were annoyed and amused in equal measure.
  • Modern interactive fiction games are usually written using systems which contain a number of witty automatic responses. For instance, Inform's default response to "sing" is "Your singing is abominable."
  • Snake Rattle And Roll required you to eat until your snake was heavy enough to trip the weight-sensitive switch that activated the level exit. (Don't ask.) On the fourth stage, you had to run across of a narrow strip of falling anvils to make it to the switch. It is possible, though very difficult, to trick an anvil into falling on the switch itself. This will open the exit. You even get bonus points for it!
  • In Starcraft, the Protoss faction had Dark Archons, with an ability called Mind Control, allowing it to take control of enemy units. A creative individual might try to take control of a critter and discover that the game would let you do this. Then they would discover that critters don't show a faction color, making them the best scout units in the game. It's worthless in highly competitive play, but fun to spring on unsuspecting Battle.net players.
    • It can also be used to gain control of "constructor" units, which can be used to create that enemy's buildings and units under your control; effectively allowing you to double, or even triple, your forces (depending on resource availability).
  • In Tetris: The Grand Master 3, if you go over 15 minutes (which is an extremely long time given the usual length of a TGM game, and is possible via a quirk in World rotation), your speed level will take a massive spike regardless of your current level—pieces will drop instantly with minimal lock and appearance delay. It's still possible to play under this speed, but if you do this trick outside of a Promotional Exam, you will be stopped at level 500 for going over 7 minutes.
  • GURPS tends to evoke this, especially when reading the more specific supplements. The Space book, in particular, seems to cover EVERY possible trope related to space. The alien creation rules contain everything from trophic level to biological symmetry.
    • The martial arts supplement gives 58 different real world combat styles (not counting differentiation by era) plus another five ones they made up. Go ahead see how many you can think of.
  • In the second Ratchet And Clank game, there's a level at a tourist site. It's expected that at least some of the tourists will die, some of them because of you, so nothing happens if you kill some of them. Killing too many of them (most easily achieved by standing in front of the tour bus and hitting them with your wrench as they arrive), however, eventually prompts a helpdesk message asking you to stop. If you continue, the helpdesk suggests that maybe you should kill the local wildlife. Continuing further causes the helpdesk to tell you that you're kind of scaring them, and to please stop. The final message is that they've reported you to the authorites, and they trust that the response will be "swift and merciless."
  • Many Harvest Moon games have events based on your friendship with certain people. Some of the events involve characters who are in the pool of potential Love Interests; some of the events must be seen if you want to marry them, but some of them are optional. If you see these optional events after you've married them, the dialogue will often be slightly different—in addition to calling you by your nickname, they'll say somewhat different things.
    • In HM DS, if your Ball item gets lost, Mayor Thomas will return it to you. Your ball can get lost if you so much as sneeze (though you can purposefully ship it or give it to people), but if you specifically throw your ball in the water? Thomas will appear angry and dripping wet, and chide you for being so irresponsible! If he wasn't a champion swimmer, your ball would be lost for good.
      • What's even more disturbing is that he will also pick up your ball if you leave it on the floor of your house or throw it in the pond in the basement. He breaks into your house to steal your stuff and give it back to you.
  • Riven has unique game-over cutscenes for everything you can possibly think of doing. If you trap yourself in the prison book on any of the main islands, you get a game-over cutscene with Gehn — but if you trap yourself in the prison book while in the Moiety world, you get a completely different one. The same is true for game-over cutscenes you get when releasing Gehn from the prison book. In fact, there's even a unique game-over cutscene that you can only reach if you play through two-thirds of the game to get a secret code, then open a saved game from the very beginning and use the code long before you could possibly have known it! This is even more impressive when you consider that the code is different each time you play — so you can't reach this cutscene merely by using the code in a new game. It has to be one of your months-old saved games. This grand tradition is continued with Myst III: Exile, which also has an impressive number of very-slightly-different-from-each-other Game Overs, some of which are very difficult to reach.
  • Semi-famous example from Earthbound: at one point in the main game, you are required to detour through a rain forest to remove an obstacle from the main path; walking through any of the numerous puddles there is accompanied by an appropriate splashing sound unique to the area. The real kicker, though, comes after you've beaten the game and are walking alone back along the aformentioned "main path" to your home. You might have forgotten by this point, but way back in the first town, you got a free bicycle that you haven't been able to use since the second town when you got your first party member (since they don't "stack", and riding around while everyone else has to walk would be rude). IF, during this post-game trip, you decide to go out of your way to revisit the rain forest, and IF you remember your bicycle and take it out of storage (because that's where you've put it, guaranteed), riding it through those same puddles has its own completely different sound effect, which plays at no other point or under any other conditions in the game. A rather Zen approach to the Bragging Rights Reward, isn't it?
    • Though admittedly, if you managed to get the guide that came with the game, the newspaper at the end of the game guide shows a picture of Ness doing just that (riding through the puddles on his bike), so perhaps the game-makers did suggest it in their own way.
    • Also, get caught using a pirated copy of Earthbound and you can expect a world of hurt, Encounters up the backside, warning messages and then the game locks at the end and eating your save.
    • Another one from the series— in Mother 3, Duster is nicknamed Lucky at a point in the game. If you name him Lucky, the nickname will be changed to Gorgeous.
  • Super Smash Bros. has the audience. The audience existed in the first game, but it only applauded in a few situations. It got fleshed out more in Melee, with cheers for each character, gasps when a character manages to recover from a powerful attack, and a few other responses. This trope truly gets invoked in Brawl, however. The audience has a wide variety of reactions to thousands of events; if it seems like they should be gasping, or applauding, or whatever, they already are.
    • In Super Smash Bros Melee, each player is awarded bonuses after a match based on his or her performance. These bonuses range from easy (Coward: frequently run away from opponents) to extremely challenging (Switzerland: never attack, never take damage) to why-would-we-even-do-that baffling (Button Holder: hold down one of the attack buttons for the entire match). In short, no matter how you play the game, you'll be recognized for it. If you're trying to get the Diskun trophy, you're gonna have to to get every single one of these bonuses; in other words, you'll have to think of everything that the developpers have thought of.
  • If one is caught using a cheat device in Persona 3, the game will let you know it. Not by screwing your save or throwing monsters out the yin-yang at you. Oh Crumbs no, what it does is have your Navigator verbally admonish you for your cheating was, I'm serious, it's fully voiced too!.
    • Beyond Zork had this back in the 1980's, ending the game if you restored from a save file with an improper checksum "Shame on you."
    • Tachyon: The Fringe has a similar setup, wherein using cheat codes will result in the main character making fun of you. The fact that the main character is voiced by Bruce Campbell almost makes it worth cheating.
    • The dev-team did miss the one Debug menu dialoge, however.
  • In Advance Wars: Dual Strike, if you run out of gas in the first level, you'll get some humorous dialogue where Rachel will scold you and tell you to restart the level.
  • In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2, 3, and 3 DX, after you clear all 80 stages of Story Mode (or 100 stages in the case of Maximum Tune 3 DX), you get a title, and can do all of Story Mode again, as many times as you want. Subsequent Story Mode clears will net more titles, and the titles keep coming out. 3 DX, for instance:
    • 3 times (300 stages): "You'll Keep Driving"
    • 4 times (400 stages): "You can no longer Retreat"
    • 9 times (900 stages): "I am Serious"  *
    • 41 times (4,100 stages): "No Answer"
    • If you time out a stage in Story Mode (very unlikely given the extremely lenient time limit), you get the title "Fight."
  • If you use a PC tool to extract all the voiceover tracks from Lunar 2 - Eternal Blue Complete you will find one track of Zophar chastising you for "illegally" ripping the voice data.
  • Hitman Blood Money anticipated for "Til Death Do Us Part" that people might disguise themselves as a priest during a wedding. So naturally, there's a bonus cutscene where you can tie the knot for your target.
  • In Batman Arkham Asylum, if in solving one of the Joker's puzzles you don't do things in the order you're expected to - for example, taking off a ventilation duct grate before moving towards the stairs to make your job easier - the Joker will lampshade it, saying something like "Reading the last page first? That's almost cheating!"
    • Better yet, during the third Scarecrow scene, you're presented with a cutscene. Where you can normally press A to bring up a message reading "Skip: B" in the corner, allowing you to skip it, since you're temporarily playing as the Joker, the message reads "Skip: J". Glorious stuff.
  • The old text adventure Time Quest involves quite a bit of time traveling. Usually, leaving items in one time period doesn't change anything in other periods, but in one particular time period, you can leave an item in a cache in the past and then pick it up in the future (or, more recent past). If you do this, then go back in time, you can have two items of the same type (the original, and the one you got from the future). But try to leave the "copy" in the cache (so you can go forwards and get another one), and the game stops you: "Now I'm about to put up a timestream paradox message, but because you deserve a bonus for your ingenuity I'm going to bump your score by 5 points that no one else will get". Don't get too greedy, because if you don't fix the situation, it's game over time!
  • Super-extra-lucky-rare tabletop version from Vampire The Requiem: In the previous incarnation of the game, some Disciplines were notoriously easy to ignore. To hammer home that this iteration is more ruthless and harder to cheese, the developer's state that that using the Dominate Discipline always requires eye contact, and if a character were to try to ignore this rule by wearing sunglasses, said Ventrue player is free to laugh at the n00b's incompetence.
    • On a more practical note, the dev team was kind enough to supply the likely effects massive pressure differences would have on vampires. In space.
  • In the early parts of Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, you can take control of a Czerka Corporation protocol droid and use it to expose the company's corruption. You could just head straight to their offices and download the data from the mainframe — or you could have the droid wander all over the station, listen to unique reactions from every unique NPC you encounter, and cap it all off by convincing another protocol droid to embezzle credits on your behalf.
  • In many of the more recent sports games, playing the game in a way that would either be extremely counterproductive or unsportsmanlike (e.g.: punting the ball on first down in a football game or trying to lay down a sacrifice bunt while up by 15 runs in a baseball game) is frequently commented on by the announcers.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam - Encounters in Space, Versus Mode, different characters have different things to say, depending on who they are paired up against. For example, Amuro Ray and Char Aznable will say something if they are paired up together, same if they are opposing each other. As if this weren't enough, there is a mode in the game where one can create their own customized pilot, with a mix and match set of abilities. The Newtype characters (Char, Amuro, Lalah) will react differently, based on whether the pilot is a Level 1, 2 or 3 Newtype, and the customized character will in turn react to an opposing character who is a Newtype. Non-Newtype characters will generally react to Newtype characters with surprise. Furthermore, the characters have different lines depending on if they are piloting a Mobile Suit or a Mobile Armor, or are paired up with certain characters (I.E., a customized character, when calling for backup from Amuro Ray, might say something like "Go get 'em, Newtype", depending on the type and voice). Certain combinations of teams will also produce certain mini-conversations (such as a team consisting of Gaia, Ortega and Mash). There are a truly great amount of combinations one can try, and the things the developers thought of to suit these situations is astounding, given it's just a versus side-mode.
    • Similarly, in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2, different characters will say different things to pilots they are performing Combo Attacks with. Considering this game has tons and tons of characters to choose from, this leads to a number of characters saying the same thing to some of the pilots, but saying some unexpected things to others. For example, pairing Amuro Ray with Heero Yuy causes Amuro to say "You're a good shot!" and Heero to respond "Not as good as you!". Additionally, placing a Universal Century pilot, such as Seabook Arno, into a mobile suit other than their main model (the F91, in this case) will cause them to comment on the fact that they're piloting an antique (any mobile suit from an earlier era) or how advanced the suit is (for mobile suits created after their relevant series/movie).
  • Mech Warrior 2 had some levels happening in a city, made of many, many buildings. The developers at Activision gave normal names to most of them - "hospital", "mall" and such. But the city was really vast, and the developers predicted that players with time to spare would go exploring for the hell of it. And so, far from the road you were supposed to take in the mission, one little building would be identified as "Activision Headquarters". If you blew it up, a nuclear explosion would happen that would destroy everything, mission objectives and player included. Time to reload...
    • Likewise, Mechwarrior 4 features a pair of missions set in a city, with some buildings labeled hospital, corporation, data center, and FASA Interactive. You can't blow it up though.
  • If you cheat to get higher than possible starting stats in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, Smiling Jack will tell you to do it again fairly.
    • Even better, if you're playing as a member of the insane Malkavian clan, you can tell him that Malkav (the clan's legendary founder) changed your stats.
    • In one quest you must get rid of an annoying ghoul-associate. You can 1. Get her to leave town 2. Kill her in an alley. But if you've encountered the monster woman in the abandoned hospital who relies on flesh to survive you get 3. Tell her that she needs to meet with a person in the hospital. Cruelty Potential indeed...
  • The developers of Kingdom Hearts thought of what would happen if one decided upon Sequence Breaking and so had cutscenes involving Maleficent changing if the player does so:
    • Normally, Maleficent spots Alice wandering into her chamber in Hollow Bastion, but if one completes Deep Jungle before sealing the keyhole to Wonderland, Snow White wanders into Maleficent's chamber instead.
    • If one skips Monstro, the scene where Maleficent grants Riku the power of darkness will play at the beginning of Neverland instead.
    • Complete Hollow Bastion before going to Olympus Coliseum (for the first time) or Monstro, and Maleficent won't appear in those two worlds because she's, well, dead. However, scenes with Riku will remain in the latter world, despite what happened in the plot at the point...
  • Mario And Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has quite a few examples of this, such as in the final level. Normally, only Bowser can fight the last few types of enemies. But when Mario and Luigi fights them via Action Replay, they're all possible to dodge or counter attack as the brothers. For example, Mario or Luigi hammer away the Dark Mechawfuls when they punch, jump to break the bricks thrown by Naplocks, etc. Okay, it's not perfect (the final area has major issues, at least the bit before Dark Bowser), and one enemy attack causes you to have to just wait it out for three minutes as it does nothing, but it's better than the game freezing as expected. You can also do this with other Bowser-only foes, like the Choombas, which have Mario and Luigi specific attack patterns.
  • PNG files always begin with the following bytes (in hexadecimal): 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A. Seems random, but it's actually carefully constructed to prevent against as many potential problems as possible.
    • 89 protects against file transfers that clear bit 7.
    • 89 50 is for systems that expect the first two bytes to uniquely identify the file type (Linux).
    • 50 4E 47 is the literal string "PNG" so that image programs can identify the file.
    • 0D 0A protects against file transfers that translate CRLFs to LFs.
    • 1A is the Control-Z character, which stops the file from being displayed under MS-DOS and similar systems.
    • 0A also protects against file transfers that translate bare LFs to CRLFs.
    • So in short, the PNG file format automatically protects against 90% of all possible file errors in the first eight bytes.
    • Similarly the custom content in ''Spore' are entirely in PNG format. Yes. A picture file. This allows saving pictures from the sporepedia website and moving into the creation folder and detected as Spore creation complete with information and tags, even when the computer is offline while playing Spore.
  • In Evil Genius secret service agents usually infiltrate the rooms of your underground base via doors, and given enough time they will hack any door. If they specialize in sabotage they will seek your power plant room to blow it up, which leaves you defenseless. Since normally you don't need an access to the powerplant, it might seem a sound idea to brick up the entrance after the room is fully set up and running. You wish. The bastards will just teleport there (in a matter too insane to describe and worth seeing personally) and carry on with their despicable do-gooding while you are helpless to stop them because the entrance is bricked up.
  • In Band Hero, whenever the song you're playing is sung by a person of the opposite sex of your lead singer (you can choose the members of your band), the game automatically switches the lead singer to a random character of the appropriate sex. In addition, the custom microphones you assign to characters are used whenever the character is a backup singer.
  • The Super Robot Wars OG games have sets of dialog for any character piloting any mech (except in cases where characters have their own specific, exclusive one), occasionally with some humorous results
    • Additionally, an early scenario in OG2 has the player, with only four units, being ambushed by three boss units. However, with persistence, a crazy player CAN beat them, resulting in a Breaking The Fourth Wall moment and rewarding the player with various powerful items.
  • New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros Wii has a safeguard with the battle against Bowser. In the original Super Mario Bros, players would run into Bowser on purpose if they were powered up so they could survive a hit and run through him during Mercy Invincibility to grab the axe. In the listed games, you try to pull the same trick off and Mario gets thrown backwards, forcing you to fight Bowser the way you are supposed to.
  • Some enemies in Super Mario World are normally undefeatable, and are in levels that contain no Starman invincibility powerups. However, with Game Genie codes to allow Mario/Luigi to have permanent invincibility, they can be defeated, and have unusual "death" animations. Example: Eeries in Ghost House levels inexplicitly become gray blocks when killed.
    • They are rather glitches because the game isn't prepared for you to kill them. They just grab some random grapichs as the "dead" sprite. It is actually possible to do this legally in some places by sliding, as sliding kills enemies regardless of their invulnerablility.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 does this with some of the achievements that require actions from one player to do on another, like Heartwarmer and Shock Jock. You can't kill a player and revive them hoping to advance on the Shock Jock achievement for example. A zombie has to kill the player in order for you to advance in the achievement.
    • The zombies in both games are attracted to loud noises. The Dark Carnival finale shoes that loud music (and fireworks) suffice, which also works in other campaigns: a Horde is summoned when any given song is played for long enough on one of the in-game jukeboxes.
  • The pinball game Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure features a sinkhole chute that is guarded by three targets. Normally the sinkhole is accessable only when the targets are stuck and dropped out of play, revealing access. Because pinball games are physical, it is possible to slip by without striking the targets. The character Shorty will cry out, "you cheat, Dr. Jones!" and awards bonus points.
  • In Half Life and its sequels, many out-of-the-way areas can be reached by inventive or simply persistent players. The developers tend to place useful or rare items here, or if it's outside the way, block them with invisible, selective brushes.
    • In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, it is possible to reach an otherwise inaccessible cave through the antlion guardian's powerful headbutt attack. There is a small message saying "How did you get here??"
    • If a necessary NPC or vehicle is killed or destroyed, an special message appears listing the player's name, status, and reason for failure, ending the game. If the reason is getting stuck, the reason will be "Demonstration of exceedingly poor judgment."
    • During the coast levels, if the player swims out too far or attempts to bypass the levels by swimming, he will be quickly swarmed and eaten by alien leaches.
    • For two chapters in Half-Life 2 Gordon is accompanied by small groups of La Resistance, who make various comments as appropriate to the situation. If you happen to die with the crowbar equipped, one of them will shout "Dibs on his crowbar!"
  • In Mass Effect 2, sending a probe to Uranus would make EDI reply with an exasperated "Really, Commander?"
    • Entering the opposite sex bathroom on the ship prompts EDI to redirect you to yours.
    • Attempting to enter the Quarian Flotilla with a certain squadmate(Legion,a Geth) initiates a conversation that can get you kicked out without enough charm points.
  • The entire point of the interactive fiction Pick Up The Phone Booth and Aisle. Just start with the title alone, and try flying, swimming, or some infamous IF buzzwords, really, anything, and see the results.

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