Serendipity Writes The Plot / Video Games

Examples of Serendipity Writes the Plot in video games.

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Individual game examples:

• As making traditionally animated cutscenes for Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere proved to be expensive and the game was a financial disappointment, the development team of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies was pressured to find a cheaper way to tell the game's story. The resulting Framing Device (a man narrating over a slideshow of still drawings) proved to be one of the game's most praised and iconic aspects.
• Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie's iconic "blabber-talk" came about as a way to give characters personality without having to waste limited cartridge space on voice acting. Even when Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and Spiritual Successor Yooka-Laylee came out on much more advanced hardware, this little element was retained.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • The entire storyline of the series is essentially built around inventing new reasons to put Batman in fully explorable Gotham City locales that are big, but not so big that they would take too long to render with appropriate levels of detail. From the beginning, the staff at Rocksteady apparently knew that it would be nearly impossible to bring a life-sized virtual recreation of Gotham City to the screen with the levels of detail that they wanted, so they opted for smaller, closed-off environments that are nonetheless filled to the brim with secrets, puzzles, and Easter Eggs. Batman: Arkham Asylum takes place in Arkham Asylum while it's locked down during a hostage situation, Batman: Arkham City takes place in a section of Gotham that's been walled off and turned into a hellish prison camp, and Batman: Arkham Knight takes place in a quarantined section of downtown Gotham during a chemical attack by the Scarecrow. Even in the latter two games, which take place in the city proper, the storylines are written so that the developers didn't have to put extra work into rendering pedestrians and city traffic — Arkham Knight has the aforementioned quarantine and gas attack, while Arkham Origins has a winter storm warning in effect, meaning all civilians are staying inside for their own safety.
  • In Arkham Asylum, Batman's Detective Mode was so incredibly useful that there was pretty much no reason to turn it off — you could see enemies through walls, the important aspects of the environment were highlighted, and it made locating Riddler Trophies much, much easier without their green lights blending into the background. Rocksteady was upset that players were opting to ignore the incredible environments they'd created by keeping Detective Vision on, so the sequels nerfed it considerably — it darkens the screen so that it's hard to see anything, not nearly as many important details are highlighted orange like before, and, above all, enemies could now jam Detective Vision or (in the case of Arkham Knight) outright weaponize it against Batman.
  • Early in its development, Arkham Asylum was envisioned as (of all things) a rhythm game. While Rocksteady jettisoned this idea fairly early, it had a profound effect on the gameplay. Most notably: the combat system makes heavy use of a "counter" mechanic with a time-sensitive visual cue, it emphasizes using specific attacks and countermeasures against specific enemy types, and it encourages building long chains of combos by alternating between strikes, counters, and dodges in a way that often feels surprisingly rhythmic. The combat system turned out to be one of the most acclaimed and iconic things about the series, going on to influence numerous other action games in the 2010s (most notably Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Marvel's Spider-Man).
• How the plot of BioForge came to be: you're a cyborg (so you don't need fluid lifelike animations) and, due to a disaster, the base you're in is almost completely abandoned (no large amounts of on-screen characters needed).
• Breath of Fire IV: Yuna got off scot-free for all his atrocities because Capcom was in danger of going out of business. There were actually two planned ways he would have died, but rushed development meant no time to actually program either.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • A "temporal physics" law justifies the three-person-team combat system: no more than three people can jump in time at once (although the universe apparently allows single-person jumps, like the gurus and Janus).
  • In the Future/2300 AD, there is a hoverbike race minigame you play against badass robot bike(r) Johnny aka "The Man". Since for this first part, spiky-haired Crono is the party leader, he is chosen to represent them, and is represented with a special sprite of him piloting said hoverbike. However, apparently the cartridge had space for only one "bike pilot" sprite. So, the authors developed a rivalry between them (or, at least, on Johnny's part), which helps when, later in the game, the leader position becomes a rotating role. When Crono is present in the party, he is the chosen pilot, regardless of if he's the front character or not. When he is absent, Johnny refuses to race, saying "Where's Pointy-hair? I'll only race against him!"
• In City of Heroes, you could not initially wear a cape. In real life, this is because the developers couldn't figure out how to implement decent cape physics. In the game, new heroes could not wear capes out of respect for Hero 1, who went on a suicide mission to stop the Alien Invasion that wiped out the beta. The city representative gave a mission where you could read the history of Hero 1 and visit his memorial. Upon completion, you get the option to wear a cape. By the time City of Villains arrived this was a bit of The Artifact. But Lord Recluse will not let you wear a cape until you prove you're bad enough to go to Paragon City, smash lots of property, take out a chunk of Longbow, beat up a hero and take his cape for yourself.
• The protagonist of horror game Clock Tower is a weaponless, vulnerable girl who must flee or outwit enemies instead of fighting them. The developer wrote her as such because of the self-admitted sexist beliefs he held at the time. However, players reacted favorably to this new style of gameplay, as it heightened their fear and made for a deeper experience than other horror games of the era (which centered around shooting and/or hacking enemies to death). Today, Clock Tower is considered a forerunner of the survival horror genre-defining aspects of which are emphasis on flight-over-fight mechanics and the protagonists' helplessness.
• This series of blog posts by the creators of Crash Bandicoot describes how the limitations of the hardware of the original PlayStation dictated almost every design choice, from level design to character design to even one of the mechanics the series is most known for (which in turn named the character). Basically, Crash turned out the way it is because technology sucked at the time.
• Deus Ex:
  • The Unreal Engine would not have been able to handle a fully rendered city with 2000 technology, forcing the creators to Hand Wave the boxed-in sections in the New York levels with a justification that due to high crime rates, authorities have walled in ghettos and other undesirable areas. In Paris, the boxed-in city is justified with the nation being on lock-down due to terrorist attacks.
  • A very eerie example was the lack of the World Trade Center in the New York skyline. Due to memory limitations, the sections of the skybox including the World Trade Center had to be removed in favor of mirroring the other half of the skyline, and the creators justified it saying that they had been destroyed in a terrorist attack before the game started. Keep in the mind that the game came out in 2000. ^note It's not that prescient, mind — people forget this because 9/11 eclipsed it, but Al Qaeda operatives had already attempted to bring the World Trade Center down with a truck bomb in 1993.
  • A Game Mod of the game, The Nameless Mod, boxes its cities in as well and justifies it with a mention that Forum City is on lockdown due to one of the moderators being kidnapped. The maps are bigger than Deus Ex's were since the mod was designed with the thought that it would be run on more powerful computers, but you can see why the boxed-in method was needed if you "noclip" yourself away from the map and try to view it all at once - it can lag or even crash the game.
  • Half-Life 2 features highly constrained cityscape levels in City 17 for more or less the same reason (the outdoor levels are more open, and featured less detailed textures and fewer props to compensate). The result was a claustrophobic, hemmed-in feeling that fit perfectly with the early levels spend under the thumb of the Combine.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War: The final level at Liberty Island was frozen over and much of it cut off due to the fact that the console version of the game would not be able to handle swimming and larger maps.
• In Disco Elysium skills were originally intended to be represented with icons, but the game's concept artist quit before that could be finished, so that job fell to the art director, who is far better at drawing humans and thus made fantastical portraits instead. This eventually led to the skills exhibiting separate personalities and arguing with the Player Character and each other, turning them into a Cast of Personifications in their own right, which has become the defining feature of the game.
• Dizzy:
  • The first game made use of an engine for rotating sprites in real time, allowing the hero to roll and tumble. However, the engine worked best on simple shapes, such as circles - and thus, Dizzy became an egg.
  • Seymour Goes to Hollywood was envisioned as Movieland Dizzy, but the creators felt the real-world setting was too far removed from the fantasy settings of the Dizzy games. So with 12 weeks to go until release, the character was given a more distinctive design, thus giving birth to Seymour.
• Donkey Kong owes its existence to this trope three-fold:
  • The original arcade game had a chubby, mustachioed Mario (then known as Jumpman) wearing a hat and overalls due to technical limitations. The technology at the time would not have been able to show Mario's hair sticking up when he fell, a mustache would be easier to show than a mouth at that resolution, overalls were the only piece of clothing that could also be seen with 1981 graphics, and only square hit boxes were possible. These same traits would later come to benefit Mario again in his Nintendo 64 outings, which have aged considerably better than other early 3D games as a result.
  • The game also owes its mere existence to serendipity. In 1980, Nintendo attempted to release their latest arcade hit, a game called Radar Scope in the United States; however, while the game was popular in Japan, it flopped hard in the United States. Looking for a way to clear out their warehouse of returned and unsold Radar Scope machines, Nintendo looked to create a game that would run on the same hardware as Radar Scope so that the existing machines could be easily converted to run it, but would also be a surefire hit in America. The result was Donkey Kong.
  • Notably too, the original Donkey Kong was intended to be a Popeye game. Partway through development they lost the license, however, and Shigeru Miyamoto turned the concepts they had into original properties with Bluto becoming Donkey Kong, Popeye becoming Jumpman, and Olive Oyl becoming Pauline. Since Nintendo got not one successful and beloved franchise from this but two, it's safe to assume this worked out monumentally well for them. A few years later, Nintendo did actually make a Popeye arcade game, in what was one of their very few licensed games.
• Doom:
  • The BFG9000 is both undeniably powerful, and a weird weapon when one looks under the hood to any degree: it looks like it shoots a single big energy ball that somehow vaporizes everything next to it, but it's more like a shotgun with invisible pellets whose firing mechanism triggers when the aforementioned energy ball hits something. The reason for this is that when in the very late stages of working on Doom, the designers realized that the current version of the game's big secret death gun was kind of a mess. Originally designed as a supercharged plasma rifle, it fired such a massive spread of projectiles that it lagged the game to a crawl and also completely obscured the player's vision with red and green spheres. Because of this, the "final" BFG design ended up being hacked together very quickly in less than a month, resulting in one of the most unusual and iconic FPS weapons of the 90s.
  • According to Tim Heydelaar, the reason Doom 64 is so dark visually is because he and the other level designers created their maps in offices with no windows and with the lights off, so the game looked great to them in such conditions. It wasn't until the game went into QA testing, where the game was played under florescent lighting, that the game's darkness issues came to light and testers complained they couldn't see anything, leading to a gamma slider option to brighten up the game being added at the last minute. The 2020 remaster would also go on to feature a higher default brightness level, and includes an overall and environmental brightness setting for extra measure.
• Double Dragon was originally conceived as a sequel to Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, but evolved into an original IP because the lead director (Yoshihisa Kishimoto) wanted to make a game that could be marketable in the west without having to spend time working on a second version for the foreign market as he did with Renegade.
• Dragon Age:
  • None of the Qunari had horns in the first game, although their race is supposed to have them. This was because BioWare didn't have the time to create alternate designs for all the helmets just so your Qunari party member could wear them, so they opted to not give him horns at all and Hand Wave it by saying that Qunari born without horns are considered to be destined for greatness, while those who choose to leave the Qun cut off their horns as a way of showing their rejection (all the other Qunari in the game).
  • Similarly, golems are supposed to be 10 feet tall and appear that way in cut scenes, but Shale, a golem you can recruit, is much smaller and explains that it used to be the same size as the others until a previous owner actually chiseled down its legs because it kept getting stuck in doors. This is something of a Development Gag since the meta reason for this was just that — the character model kept getting stuck in doorways, but in the story, it helps explain Shale's disdain for humans after being treated that way.
• The reason why all the meat cooking scenes in Dragon's Dogma II are in live action as opposed to CGI is to save on development costs. It also helped that there are some camping enthusiasts among the development team.
  Hideaki Itsuno: We could have used CG to depict the meat, but we decided to spend the money on buying good meat instead. That's how it came to its current form. Each type of meat obtained in the game has different visuals when grilled.
• According to an interview with the developers of Earth Defense Force, the reason oversized ants are the basic fodder enemy of the franchise is because the original game's extremely short development (four months to make the actual game, two for debugging) meant there was no time to create original characters.
  Masatsugu Igarashi: Basically within four months there's no time to design original characters, so you take something that exists around you everywhere. We picked up reference images from books and used them to create the enemies.
• The designers of Façade (2005) admitted that they deliberately made Trip and Grace such self-centered, denial-prone people in order to justify and disguise some of the limitations of the A.I. If the player says and does something the dev team didn't anticipate, Trip and Grace will choose to focus on their own needs instead, or just ignore the player's actions entirely.
• Fallout: New Vegas's four expansions feature considerably smaller casts than the main game, and there's an abnormal number of characters who don't speak verbally, including Doctor 8, Christine, and ED-E. This was because one of the stipulations of the game's creation was an upper limit on how many voice lines they could record, and this gave them a lot more breathing room.
• In Far Cry 3, Hoyt Volker was supposed to be the sole main villain. Then Michael Mando auditioned for the minor character "Lupo". He didn't get the part but they were so impressed by the audition that they decided to scrap Lupo and create an entirely new character for Mando to play, one which took over all advertising and even the cover of the game, and is still agreed to be one of the best villains of the franchise: Vaas Montenegro.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy VI, a careful viewer will probably notice that any time Kefka appears in the battle screen while using his overworld sprite, the party never has more than three characters in it. This is because the designers needed Kefka to be able to do certain expressive sequences in the battle screen (for instance, his confrontations with Leo and Gestahl, or him attacking the Espers at the gate), but the game's system for enemies was fairly static and simple, usually amounting to large sprites that didn't do much. To solve this, the designers instead made it so that Kefka would effectively join the party during those sequences. This had storyline implications, because you can only have four party members, meaning that whenever Kefka is doing things, the party is at least one member shy.
  • The miasma in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is the driving force of the entire game, but it was originally just designed to keep the whole team on screen at all times. Your party has to carry around a chalice that wards the miasma in its radius, and leaving the ward causes you to take damage, so nobody can wander off, so split-screen isn't necessary, so everyone gets to enjoy Scenery Porn.
  • Final Fantasy XIV was released as an Obvious Beta so horrible, that it was a Creator Killer for original producer Hiromichi Tanaka. After switching directors, the game made many improvements, but the engine was ultimately too taxed to handle anything more. Thus, it was decided to close the game and rebuild it from the ground up. In the days leading up to end of what would be known as version 1.0, a final storyline started involving The Empire planing a Colony Drop of the lesser moon Dalamud, which turned out to be a prison for the Primal Bahamut, a plot point which would have been touched upon later in the game's life. As the game's closing time drew closer, the moon would get closer and closer despite all the in-story efforts to stop it. The end of the game coincides with a final cutscene of Bahamut breaking free and causing The End of the World as We Know It, with the players only being saved from it by being sent into the future to a time when the world has started to recovered from "The Calamity".
  • When XIV was remade, the zones were a lot smaller than they were in 1.0. This was done to cut down on the maze-like/huge open fields where players could easily get lost and also due to the limitations of the PlayStation 3. By the Stormblood expansion, development of the PlayStation 3 version came to an end since the game was simply too much for the console to handle. Players who upgraded to a PlayStation 4 were able to transfer their game over free of charge.
• Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem had the game's entire ending be the result of its Permadeath mechanic. Over the course of the game, it is possible to recruit many rulers and heirs-apparent of the various kingdoms of Archanea, and it is also possible for every single one of those characters to die. At the time, the technology wasn't available to alter the game's ending depending on who was alive or dead, and so the game's ending was forced to work with the idea that any and all of them might be. Consequently, the story has a somewhat Bittersweet Ending where Marth takes rulership of all of Archanea, due to, in their own endings, the other rulers and heirs stepping down for various reasons, be it guilt, trauma, or age. This had implications for quite a bit of future worldbuilding, and even stuck around in the remake, which ended up fleshing out some of the individual reasons involved.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: The whole Uncanny Valley that is a characteristic of the series? Creator Scott Cawthon was originally a D-list indie developer who had little budget to create convincing animated characters, and his previous attempt at creating a children's game was lambasted because the characters look too lifeless to entertain actual children. When Cawthon did a complete turnaround and made a horror game, he didn't change his visual style one bit. The rest is history.
• Most of F-Zero's science-fiction elements were a consequence of technical limitations. The use of hovering vehicles came as solution for sprite artists to not waste time drawing wheels (which would require several more individual sprites for each vehicle) and the concept of sky-high floating courses was to justify a perspective trick of the SNES's Mode 7, which turned a background layer (in this case, consisting of the racetrack and the environment "below" it) into the course itself. Because of this, Nintendo did not have to program in actual environmental elements around the racetrack, only needing the illusion of a city or whatever being viewed from top-down.
• Grand Theft Auto was originally supposed to be a car racing game. But attempts at making the AI opponents more challenging resulted in the AI chasing after the player and crashing into them. Thinking that this was cool, the programmers retooled the game into a madcap crime simulator that spawned a mega-franchise.
• Many plot and design elements of Half-Life: Alyx were clearly the result of the limitations of VR. The Gravity Gloves, though serving as a Call-Forward to their later Gravity Gun counterpart, meant that a lot of the difficulty involved in picking things up in VR was solved. The change in protagonist to Alyx made the shift to slower-paced puzzle-solving gameplay and small numbers of enemies much more suitable for a character who lacks Gordon's power armor and massive arsenal. Additionally, Alyx can only carry three guns and they're all one-handed, since one-handed guns are much easier to aim and code than their two-handed counterparts. And to compensate for the loss of powerful weapons, the game introduced a weapon upgrade system, as well as scattering the currency throughout the maps, which encourages the player to poke around the environments as much as possible (which is something of a selling point in VR anyway).
• One level of Halo: Combat Evolved tasks you with infiltrating the Covenant starship Truth and Reconciliation to rescue human prisoners. Originally, this would have involved walking from the initial desert area of the level onto the ship by way of a ramp. But the team found that having both the desert area and the detailed ship rendered together in one continuous level would've been too much for the hardware. So they separated the two into two instanced areas, with the ship as seen from the desert being shown from a distance at night and its interior only being accessible by way of a "Gravity Lift" that pulls people up from the surface. The Gravity Lift would go on to be a common feature of Covenant structures in later Halo games, whether for other spacecraft or their turret towers.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • After a bug involving an item that took meat away from players (coupled with the ridiculously high cap for meat) screwed up the game's economy, a number of "meat sinks" were introduced to deal with the "bug meat", including the Penguin Mafia and the various goods they offered. Much later in the game, a database error that wiped out several days' progress for many players led to the introduction of a "Time Arc", in which portals through time started opening up throughout the kingdom.
  • And on the creative side, there's another example. KOL celebrates holidays both via the in-game calendar and the real-life one, which aren't synced. Occasionally, that means that two holidays are being celebrated on the same day. One year Arrbor Day (where pirates plant trees to get wood to repair their ships) happened on the same day as Halloween. This combination of pirates, trees, and spookiness resulted in a special zone: the Shivering Timbers.
• The King of Fighters XIV was the first mainline installment in the King of Fighters the series to make the leap to 3D models^note KOF: Maximum Impact predates XIV by over a decade but the MI games are an Alternate Continuity, as well as a huge starting roster and the greatest proportion of new characters in the series so far. The developers said that in light of this, they saved some development time and expense by designing three characters who wouldn't need facial expressions: Kukri (a mysterious man in blacked-out hood), Mian (a masked fighter who styles herself on Chinese opera) and King of Dinosaurs (a heel wrestler in an enormous costume). To wit, the only part of Kukri's face that is ever visible are his eyes, Mian only briefly shows her face during her CLIMAX Super Special Move, and what King of Dinosaurs looks like underneath the mask is never shown (though this is also true of his face persona, Tizoc).
• Left 4 Dead 2: The original plan for "The Passing" would have featured one of the original Survivors having died, but with the dead Survivor randomizing each play-through. However, when Valve contacted the original voice actors for the DLC, they couldn't contact Jim French, Bill's voice actor. They solved the problem by having Bill consistently be the dead Survivor, and then using later materials, specifically "The Sacrifice" comic and in-game campaign, to explain how Bill died and how the Survivors got to Rayford in the first place^note Remnants of the original plan exist in the game's code; although Louis is incapable of throwing supplies even if he's modded away from his mounted gun, Bill can throw supplies just like Francis and Zoey can if he's modded in.
• The second game of the Legacy of Kain series, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, was much larger during development, which led to it being an Obvious Beta. Among other cut content, Raziel's final brother Turel would have been fought, the Human Citadel would have been non-optional and contained a hidden area where the vampire worshipping humans lurked, and the ending was entirely unambiguous, Raziel successfully killing Kain and then activating the Silenced Cathedral to destroy every Vampire in Nosgoth. Crystal Dynamics was running out of time and there was only so much room on the disk, so a lot of content was cut and left out to be included in future games. This would lead to a case of Tropes Are Not Bad though, because the series would go on to have an amazingly complex Kudzu Plot centering on Kain and Raziel's trips through time.
• League of Legends had the "Burning Tides" gameplay/lore event of 2015, with one of the biggest updates being the mechanical and visual overhaul of Gangplank, the Big Bad of the whole event. How audiences saw the event is that they got accustomed to the pirate king and his shiny new captain look, but at the climax of the story where Miss Fortune's plan to assassinate him via bombardment goes off, he ended up being disabled from play, with the client simply listing that "Gangplank is dead." However, during the epilogue of the event, it was revealed that Gangplank had survived — without his ship, arm, and riches, but alive and really, really angry — and he was subsequently reenabled with his actual new default look, with the previous "Captain Gangplank" look was retroactively made into an alternate skin. As it turns out, Riot Games didn't intend for him to become disabled, and only did so because of an unforeseen Game-Breaking Bug, taking the sudden need for repairs into an opportunity to merge gameplay with story.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Like the Mario example above, much of Link's now-iconic appearance — his hat, tunic, and pointy ears — was simply a result of what could be easily rendered with the NES's 8-bit graphics.
  • Because of Ambidextrous Sprites, Link in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past always keeps his shield pointed north, which the manual explained was due to a superstition about keeping one's shield towards Death Mountain.
  • The developers of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask were tasked with completing the game in just one year, a very short amount of time compared to the development cycle of other Zelda games. Their solution: Set the game in a Bizarro Universe of the previous game's setting, where most of the characters are counterparts of people from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, who look exactly the same (allowing the developers to reuse the models) but who often have radically different names and personalities. Furthermore, they were able to store a more complex world on a cartridge with barely more memory than Ocarina of Time by means of the "Groundhog Day" Loop; resetting everything in the game except the Plot Coupons, the masks, the songs, and the non-ammo items meant that there were far fewer variables that the game needed to keep track of between play sessions compared to its predecessor (this is also the reason that non-Japanese versions of Majora's Mask that do let you save in the middle of the 3-day cycle at the Owl Statues have two save slots instead of three).
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker had a somewhat rushed production that required the team to cut two dungeons they planned to include. This influenced the whole Nayru's Pearl arc of the game; turns out that Greatfish Isle, where the Pearl and the dungeon containing it would have been located, has been torn apart by Ganondorf by the time you reach it, and locating the Pearl requires you to instead explore the previously-visited Windfall and Outset Islands.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a mechanic called the "Blood Moon", a Bad Moon Rising that happens at midnight every seven in-game days or so, which explicitly revives all slain enemies and also respawns all of the items Link has collected. Aside from gameplay and story purposes, Blood Moons also exist to fix the game when it's running out of memory; when this happens, it will perform what's been termed a "panic Blood Moon" to soft-reset, regardless of the time of day or how long it's been since the last one. This is also the case with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which, thanks primarily to the plethora of Zonai devices you can build stuff with, makes the Blood Moon more common.
• The LEGO Adaptation Games often have to fudge their storylines to accommodate for the gameplay requiring a second player at all times.
  • In LEGO Star Wars, the final battle of Episode III is a Duel to the Death between Obi-Wan and Anakin. The game gets around this by making the Final Boss the second player in a meta-Fighting Your Friend situation. Later on, in Episode VI, Darth Vader's death is delayed slightly so he can participate in the final battle with the Emperor.
  • In LEGO Harry Potter, Hermione is not held back by the potion puzzle, allowing her to fight in the final battle with Professor Quirrell in Year 1. Later, Year 2 has Ginny awaken from her coma so she can fight the Basilisk. Finally, Year 4 delays Cedric Diggory's death so he can fight Voldemort alongside Harry.
  • Averted with LEGO City Undercover. The original Wii U version was strictly a single-player only experience. In 2017, the game was ported to numerous other consoles, now boasting a two-player mode. Rather than altering the existing story to accomodate a second protagonist, Player 2 is completely absent from cutscenes and is represented by a second Chase McCain during gameplay.
• Mass Effect 2 features the protagonist Shepard leaving the Systems Alliance Navy and joining the shadowy Cerberus organization, forcing the player to recruit a whole new party of allies (give or take a few familiar faces, like Garrus Vakarian and Tali'Zorah nar Rayya). Most of the characters who may or may not have survived the first game (like Urdnot Wrex, the Citadel Council, and either Ashley Williams or Kaidan Alenko) have drastically reduced roles, with some being relegated to brief cameos. According to Word of God, this was because the sheer number of branching story-lines brought about by the first two games' Multiple Endings were already taxing the software for the planned Mass Effect 3. By keeping the number of returning characters to a minimum, the developers were able to keep the number of possible story-lines to a somewhat manageable level.
• For the Mata Nui Online Game, LEGO hired Templar Studios to create a browser Point-and-Click Game promoting their Bionicle toys, but only let them use side characters and random nobodies, while the main products, the Toa, were set to star in a PC game. Templar took the task immensely seriously, and the limitations allowed them to put heavy emphasis on atmosphere — Myst was cited as an inspiration — and world-building, and create likable characters out of the everyday villagers, who kept the outlandish world and lore grounded in familiarity. The Toa only made brief appearances, making them mysterious and memorable. The game helped catapult the toyline into success and is widely regarded by fans as the finest piece of Bionicle media — meanwhile, the PC game, which had very little of what made MNOG so beloved, was scrapped due to quality issues. As a result, Templar was asked to wrap up the Toa's plot along with the villagers', which made for a fulfilling climax. Not only that, many characters fleshed out by Templar became major players in later stories when LEGO realized their popularity.
• In Mega Man 3, the developers wanted a rematch against the robot bosses of Mega Man 2, but there was not enough space for eight enemies' sprites. The solution? Make Mega Man fight eight times against a single enemy named Doc Robot/Dokurobo ("Skullbot") who mimicked their attacks and movement patterns!
• Metal Gear:
  • The original Metal Gear on the MSX2 was originally envisioned as a top-down shooter. However, the hardware limitations of the platform meant that too many sprites on the screen would start to make the picture flicker. The game was thus re-tooled to focus on avoiding enemies and combat, and an iconic stealth franchise was born.
  • When Metal Gear Solid was remade for the Nintendo GameCube as The Twin Snakes, just about all of the dialogue was re-recorded, despite most of it being identical to the original PlayStation version (and it even uses all of the same actors to boot, thanks to David Hayter's insistence). While it makes sense to account for different buttons and such, Hayter mentioned in an interview that the original game's dialogue was recorded in an apartment hastily converted into a recording studio. If those recordings were used for the remake, the GameCube's higher quality audio format would reveal other noises the microphones picked up, including traffic outside the apartment.
• Metroid:
  • With Metroid, the iconic Morph Ball came into being because the programmers had trouble making an animation of Samus crawling through small passageways. Thus, they made do with a much simpler animation of a rolling ball.
  • The similarly iconic shoulders came about in Metroid II: Return of Samus because, it being a classic Game Boy game, they couldn't use alternate colors to differentiate between the starting Power Suit and the Varia upgrade as they did in the first game. This look has essentially become her defining outfit, to the point that Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission are the only games in the series that don't give the massive shoulders with the Varia upgrade or even give her that upgrade from the start. And said games even have reasons for doing so: the former because Samus's Fusion Suit is made up of remnants from her removed Power Suit and the latter because Samus doesn't get the shoulders until she receives an ancient, but more advanced Power Suit towards the end of the game.
  • Metroid Prime, like Resident Evil, hides loading times behind the doors. The doors simply won't open until the next room is loaded. During normal gameplay, you usually won't notice this unless you listen to your GameCube or Wii's disc drive suddenly spin up as you approach or shoot the door.
  • More like "Serendipity Designed the Character", but in the original game, the space-dragon Ridley is fairly small and somewhat hunched over, even while flying, due to limitations on sprite sizes at the time. This would later get Ridley Promoted to Playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; modern Ridley is too big, but a hunched-over Ridley is just big enough.
• In the Monkey Island games, Stan has an Unmoving Plaid pattern due to technical reasons in the first game, but it has been kept, even after the series became full-3D (and it required extensive effort to replicate under the conditions) and becoming a plot point in Tales of Monkey Island, simply because it is so iconic of Stan.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The reason for the franchise's famous Palette Swap ninjas is because for the first three games, it allowed the developers to create new fighters without having to expend limited memory on additional Digitized Sprites, not to mention having to hire additional actors. As the games moved into 3D, the "ninjas" were each given distinct looks as they no longer had to share the same male/female/cyborg sprite.
  • Limited memory is also why, in the first game, final boss Shang Tsung's primary mode of attack is shapeshifting into other fighters and mimicking their attacks, his only original move being his three fireballs. When Tsung became playable in 2 and 3, he was given the standard basic attacks in addition to his fireballs, though shapeshifting remained his signature ability. But as future games grew more complex, it actually became more memory-intensive for him to turn into other fighters, as only the two fighters selected for the match had their data loaded, so his shapeshifting was either dropped altogether or limited to preprogrammed special moves.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 Guest Fighter Freddy Krueger has a blurb in his story that explains why he's wearing a second claw-glove, even though he usually only wears one in the movies. This is to address the fact that MK9 lets all the characters switch their stance on command, meaning Freddy's attacks must be consistent regardless of whether he's leading with his left or right side (as Front and Back limbs will change each time a character's stance changes). This is also the reason why Jax was given two cybernetic arms instead of just one in Mortal Kombat 3.
• According to Rand Miller, the game Myst was originally intended to solely be an exploration game where the player mainly took in the story and copious Scenery Porn. However the team needed to find a way to slow down the player enough to load the areas, so they implemented puzzles you had to solve to get to the Ages and wrote the story about how paranoid Atrius was about someone finding the books, resulting in the Myst series becoming one of the defining point-and-click puzzle game series.
• The game Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor was rendered in still frames (and the occasional FMV), which made it difficult for NPCs to appear during actual gameplay. So they wrote it into the script that Ethel appears out of nowhere after Nancy leaves the East Hall, spooking her. This scene was received favorably by players, who thought it heightened the game's scary atmosphere.
• Overwatch faced a problem in 2021 regarding their resident gunslinger hero Jesse McCree, as he was directly named after a Blizzard developer who had been fired from the company amidst sexual harassment allegations. The Overwatch team made the decision to change the character's name to Cole Cassidy, but chose not to entirely retcon "McCree" out in favor of a storytelling opportunity in the New Blood comic, which was in production during the scandal. In the story, Cassidy was confirmed to be his birth name, but "Jesse McCree" was an alias he used while working under the criminal Deadlock Gang in his backstory, which continued being used during his time in Blackwatch. New Blood hinges around Cassidy being appointed to help rejoin and reunite Overwatch, and so he makes the decision to return to his birth name, representing his "rebirth" as a hero of the resurrected team.
• Persona 5: Following Isamu Tanonaka's passing in 2010, Atlas had severe trouble finding a suitable replacement VA for Igor, proprietor of the Velvet Room and one of the most important characters in the franchise, to the point where it took until 2024's Persona 3 Reload before finally finding one. This forced them to have to write him out of spinoff games, as well as find a way to cover his voicelessness in this game. The solution was to have the "Igor" you interact with in this game, who has a drastically different voice, actually be the game's Big Bad and Final Boss Yaldabaoth, who infiltrated the Velvet Room before the start of the game and imprisoned the real Igor, while the few lines Igor has come from archived recordings. This twist ended up being one of the most widely praised aspects of the game, and succeeded in catching most players by surprise.
• Pokémon:
  • To save space, many Kanto locations from Pokémon Red and Blue are inaccessible in Pokémon Gold and Silver (set three years later in-universe). The town of Cinnabar Island was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, the entrance to Cerulean Cave has collapsed, the explorable area of Mt. Moon has shrunk due to rock slides, and Pewter Museum of Science and the Safari Zone are closed (due to renovations and the owner taking a vacation respectively). Of course, this is to be expected when putting two whole regions into a Game Boy cartridge, which is a miracle in itself. Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, released for the more advanced Nintendo DS, added some of the missing areas back in.
  • In the similar vein, Sophocles' trial at Hokulani Observatory in Pokémon Sun and Moon is a sound quiz to help correct a power outage due to difficulties in development that cropped up. In Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon a year later, (that game's version of) the trial is completely redesigned after the difficulties were resolved.
  • Junichi Masuda has said that the rivals in earlier games are more antagonistic due to the pixel graphics limiting what they could express. Putting more emphasis on characterisation through dialogue became more important, with more emphasis on speech over visuals also meaning they could give them a more jerk-ish personality with less harsh of an impression on the player.
• The reason Portal takes place in a Shared Universe with the Half-Life series is because the game had a small development team, so it originally reused most of its assets from Half-Life 2, allowing a handwave of Black Mesa plagiarizing Aperture’s technology. The final game uses mostly original assets, but still has some from Half-Life 2, such as the High Energy Pellets, which look and sound the same as the Combine's energy orbs.
• Portal 2:
  • Cave Johnson's assistant was originally going to be male and named Greg. However, since the part was so small, Valve didn't want to pay another voice actor so they changed the name to Caroline and had Ellen McLain voice her. Naturally, they had to come up with a reason as to why Caroline and GLaDOS have the same voice. Amusingly enough, for the Perpetual Testing Initiative expansion, they had J. K. Simmons record new lines as "Cave Prime", in which he references his assistant Greg. Greg is still The Voiceless.
  • Originally, the reason why GLaDOS (or PotatOS, rather) can't help you with tests after Wheatley takes over the facility was going to be the bird swooping in and eating parts of the potato, causing her to forget the test solutions and gradually making her dumber until her IQ is on par with Wheatley's. This ended up being too hard to program, so it was changed to Aperture's systems giving any AI who helps subjects solve the tests a painful shock as Wheatley finds out the hard way a couple of times.
• In the original Prince of Persia, the game developers wanted to add another character; however, space on the game floppy was limited, and a new character could only be created if it was a Palette Swap of an existing one. After tinkering a bit, the development team came up with a dark copy of the Prince: the Shadow Prince. This later became central to the game's plot: the Shadow Prince is generated when the Prince passes through a magical mirror, and the Prince must rejoin his split self near the finale of the game.
• The reason why Little Mac was made so little in the NES version of Punch-Out!! was to make it easier to see your opponent, as the developers couldn't translate the wireframe graphics from the arcade version properly.
• Q*bert and his enemies were supposed to speak in full English. However, the Votrax speech synthesizer used made things sound almost unintelligible, so this was changed to a sort of alien language that gave Q*Bert his famous profanity. The only distinguishable sounds are "bye-bye" when you get a game over and "Hello, I'm turned on" when the machine is powered up.
• Rayman was given Floating Limbs because this saved animation time and disc space for other content on the limited hardware of the time.
• Resident Evil:
  • Due to technical limitations, the early games had a loading screen for each area. The designers took advantage of this by making the loading screen the animation of a door opening. The door, in fact, that the player was entering through. As with Silent Hill's fog, these became so linked with the series that, even when they were able to effectively eliminate loading times for the first game's GameCube remake, they kept the door scenes in anyway. At least once, surprise attacks were hidden in these same loading screens (most notably the infamous "door of death" from Resident Evil 2). In Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X the developers tried to manufacture this tension, with deliberately delayed door openings accompanied by thudding heartbeat sounds and throbbing rumble controllers.
  • The infamous live-action opening and equally bad voice acting from the original 1996 game was the result of having a budget so tight that the developers couldn't afford to hire professional actors.
• Shinobi (2002) for the PS2 has the hero wearing an extremely long red scarf. This originally started with them goofing around with the parameters, and they set it to 200%. They realized this allowed the player to keep track of the character much better, so it was left like that.
• Soul Series:
  • The entire existence of Soul Calibur is down to the infamous trademark lawsuits that have been filed due to Tim Langdell of Edge Games, which argue that any use of the word "edge" with relation to video games infringed on his company's name. When Namco attempted to release Soul Edge in the U.S. under its original title, they were slapped with this, forcing them to sidestep with renaming the game "Soul Blade" and then later "Soulcalibur" for the following installment, which it retained from then onwards (an attempt was made during the development of Soulcalibur V to return the series to its "Soul Edge" name but it was rejected). The Soul Calibur was thus introduced as the antithesis to the already established Soul Edge to anchor the newly renamed series to its title.
  • The character Hwang (a Korean warrior) was created for the sole purpose of replacing Mitsurugi (a Japanese samurai) in the Korean version of Soul Edge, as, thanks to historical enmity, South Korea used to ban any positive depiction of Japanese samurai in their media. Then Namco decided that they liked Hwang and expanded him into a full character in Soulcalibur, where Mitsurugi was once again replaced by Arthur, a European samurai.
• One of the key traits of Space Invaders is how the aliens get faster as you destroy more and more of them. This was originally an unfortunate consequence of the low processing power being choked by a large number of enemies, but the creators liked it and decided to keep it in.
• The titular protagonist of the original Spyro the Dragon was planned to be green, but this made him too hard to see in grassy levels, so his iconic purple appearance was born.
• After the smash success of Spyro the Dragon, Insomniac Games was trying to come up with a plot for the foregone sequel. While looking at the Japanese box art for the first game, they noticed that the katakana for Spyro's name looked like it spelled out "Ripto". They now had the perfect name for the villain of their sequel, and thus Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! was born.
• StarCraft: One developer said that the original game was very much Warcraft in space, down to the graphics.◊ At a con, they saw a rival RTS called Dominion Storm Over Gift 3 with much better graphics, gameplay, and all around better quality, the gameplay demo of which inspired them to start again and create the game we know today. Years later, the author learned that the game was in fact just as unprepared for the con as their own was- they were watching a pre-made video with the demo guy pretending to play.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • When the very first Super Mario Bros. was nearing completion, the playtesters deemed the Koopa Troopas, originally intended to be the basic enemy type, to be too tricky to beat for earlier portions of the game. However, very little space was left to program anything else into the code. So they came up with a simply-designed walking mushroom that only had two frames of animation, which were actually flipped versions of the same image. At the same time, this creature's resemblance to the Super Mushroom required them to change the item's look and behavior. Thus, a last-minute attempt to squeeze in something to make the game fairer led to the creation of the iconic Goomba.
  • The Fire Flower Power-Up launches bouncing fireballs because straight-flying fireballs were too impractical and hard to program otherwise.
  • The recurring character Waluigi was created for Mario Tennis so that Wario could have a tennis partner—allowing him to play doubles with Mario and Luigi, or Peach and Daisy. This is also why he doesn't generally appear in the Wario Land games, or any games that don't involve competitive team sports. Amusingly, though, this hasn't stopped him from becoming a very memetic fan favorite.
  • A planned two-player version of F-Zero for the Super Nintendo ended up becoming Super Mario Kart because of hardware limitations. The SNES couldn't handle two Mode-7 display of the F-Zero tracks, which were large due to needing long stretches of road to mimic the sensation of speed. What the SNES could handle was smaller compact maps with lots of turns, more suitable for slower-paced races like go-kart racing. So when it was decided to make a go-kart racing game instead, they needed a way to distinguish the different racers from the back since unlike F-Zero where they could show different vehicle designs, go-karts are pretty much the same, and fully expose the driver. Mario characters ended up being chosen because they can easily be told apart from the back. With the choice of using Mario characters, making the entire game Mario-themed was natural at that point.
  • Peach needing a doubles partner is also largely the reason Daisy became a prominent character at all; prior to that point, she was reserved to the original Super Mario Land. That said, the spin-offs have also made Daisy a fan favorite in her own right, even going as far as to be playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and later making a return to the main series in full with Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
  • Toadette exists for similar reasons as Waluigi, having made her debut as Toad's partner in the duo-centric Mario Kart: Double Dash!!. Toadette would go on to be a recurring Toad character in the series, eventually having a breakout role in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
• Super Robot Wars 2 was meant to have Aura Battler Dunbine in, but Banpresto couldn't secure the rights to it. Rather than simply give up on the idea entirely, the company decided to create an Original Generation Expy in the form of Masaki Andoh and the Cybuster. Since then, the number of Super Robot Wars games that are devoid of original protagonists can be counted on one hand and the Masou Kishin plot, in particular, is the longest one of them all, and still ongoing as well.
• In Super Smash Bros., this is how Ganondorf's controversial portrayal as a Moveset Clone of Captain Falcon came about. Masahiro Sakurai originally had no plans to include him as a playable character in Melee, but late in development, felt obligated to do so as he was the most popular Zelda character in a poll he conducted earlier. He eventually realized that Ganondorf's build would fit Captain Falcon's animations easily, and so his model from a GameCube tech demo was ported into the game with this in mind. He remains this way in all future installments in spite of being portrayed as a sword-wielding Magic Knight in future Zelda games, although he also had his animations redone in Brawl to resemble certain hand-to-hand moves that he does in various games in his home series, while Ultimate gives him a sword (from the aforementioned GameCube tech demo) for his smash attacks but otherwise leaves him largely the same.
• Star Fox's iconic Arwing fighter design was conceived largely because it could be made out of relatively few polygons. In addition, the "fly into the screen" approach was used because of the SNES's strength at drawing 2D backgrounds, further conserving limited processing power. Full details are provided in this Iwata Asks interview.
• The Tenchu games take place at night because it was easier on the PlayStation's processor.
• Thief originally came about due to issues with the game design. Looking Glass Studios originally wanted to make an in-depth swordfighting game, with a huge variety of different moves for the player to master. In the end, the swordfighting mechanic was simply too complex for the game's physics engine to handle, and no test players could reliably defeat even the basic enemies in a swordfight. One developer hit upon the idea of using the unnecessarily complex and difficult combat to emphasize to the player that they should avoid said combat if at all possible, and thus was born Thief.
• One reason why Touhou Project features a cast predominantly composed of girls in frilly outfits is because early on, ZUN wasn't that great of an artist, specifically in regards to drawing believable human forms, something which is nigh-manditory for drawing a male character. Female characters, on the other hand, could be largely hidden underneath poofy dresses, leaving only heads, hands and feet to have to be drawn. While ZUN's art has improved considerably over the years and art in official mangas and spinoff games is left to other artists, by now the series has become so synonymous with "girls shooting each other with lasers" that any serious attempt to shake up the status quo would likely be met with backlash, which was why ZUN ultimately swapped the male Myouren Hijiri with his sister Byakuren in Unidentified Fantastic Object. So far, the only named male characters either appear in official manga, are mentioned but never seen, or in the case of Unzan, aren't even human.
• Undertale:
  • The Fallen Child looks near identical to Frisk because when Toby Fox asked Temmie to storyboard the intro, she got the number of stripes on Frisk's shirt wrong. This ended up a key plot point, as Asriel admits mistaking Frisk for the Fallen Child in the Pacifist ending.
  • In Undertale, player's choice is a huge aspect of the game, as just about everything you do affects the game world and the characters. However, Undertale's sequel of sorts, Deltarune, makes it clear from the very start that player choice does not matter, and that the story is completely out of your control. This is done partly for story reasons, but also because Deltarune is a way bigger and more complicated game than Undertale (one playthrough of the former will have significantly more content), so implementing that many branching storylines would be nigh impossible.
• The gameplay of the Wario Land series, and most of Wario's attributes, were because of the limitations of the original Game Boy. The Game Boy had a tiny, monochromatic screen where Screen Crunch was a frequent issue, and an outdated CPU that paled against other handhelds and home consoles, both of which made translating the kinetic precision platforming of the Super Mario Bros. series to the handheld a challenge. In response, Wario became a Mighty Glacier who did not run fast or jump high to work with the Game Boy's screen resolution, and his games eschewed common Platformer tropes like Death Courses and Bottomless Pits in favor of exploring every nook and cranny of levels for coins and treasures.
• The Yamate Tunnel course in the Japanese version of Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 5 was reconfigured for 5DX and beyond to reflect the closure of a road running along the course's real-life counterpart.
• The makers of Yoku's Island Express, Jens Andersson and Mattias Snygg, initially set out to make a game in one year without a dedicated animator. Hence, they decided to "make a game about a ball" because that would be easy to animate. While the scope and timeframe for the game's development expanded quite a bit from that initial idea, they continued to retain the focus on the ball, resulting in a Metroidvania controlled like a pinball game.

Hardware/Multiple games examples:

• Fog in video games is usually done because of the difficulty — or even impossibility — of rendering an entire area all at once. In order to make up for the limitation, the developers will usually Hand Wave it in some way. Some examples:
  • A well-executed and well-received case: Silent Hill's fog helps the game's atmosphere so much that the fog (or sometimes snow) was retained long after technical improvements had obviated the need for it. Tellingly, an HD re-release of the original games drastically increased the draw distance... and was considered the vastly inferior version because of it, to the point where the fog was patched back in for the PS3 version.
  • Spider-Man (2000) uses the fog as a major plot point. The sequel got around it by having all the rooftop levels at night or dawn.
  • Grand Theft Auto III has heavy fog that just adds to the overall aesthetic of "crappy New York-esque city".
  • The gas zombies in Dead Rising 2 are accompanied by green fog because it makes it easier to render the increased amounts of zombies.
  • Superman 64 has green "kryptonite fog" which allegedly explains why Superman isn't so super-powered in Lex Luthor's virtual world.
  • San Francisco Rush...well, it's San Francisco. It makes a little less sense in Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA, which features various US cities, although the Los Angeles course changes the fog to smog instead, reflecting LA's notoriously poor air quality.
  • Left 4 Dead and its sequel make use of fog to emulate horror movies that had fog smoking the set. The fog in game would not only hide objects and level geometry being drawn in as the player approached them, but it also helped make the zombies in the distance stand out more. Using mods that remove fog gives the levels a much cleaner look, but some objects that took advantage of being covered in fog look less impressive without it along with said objects popping in.
  • Resident Evil 4 blurs the overall look of the game in some parts to compensate for the hardware's limitations, while also adding some feeling of dread and danger. Of course this is averted in the HD releases.
• As indicated above, multiple disc games often make certain areas inaccessible after certain points in the plot, to save on space on each disc. Each disc usually has some big event occur at the end of the disc that will remove access to certain side areas that are no longer useful to the plot in the next disc. It's annoying if you needed a certain item for a side quest, but allowing the developers to not have to try and fit the entire world and everything in it on the last disc, freeing them up some space for ending cutscenes, boss data, and the very definite final dungeon.
• The Nintendo Hard trope exists, in large part, because of the technical limitations that video games faced when the medium was still in its infancy (hence Nintendo being the Trope Namer). In a time when limited memory made it impossible to fit more than about an hour of material on a single game cartridge, the best way to prolong a game's running time was to make it as challenging as humanly possible, ensuring that it took at least several days (if not weeks or months) for all but the most skilled players to beat it. There's a reason games from the 1980s have a reputation for being difficult: their difficulty level may have been frustrating, but it was often the only way to make gamers feel like they'd gotten their money's worth out of a game. By the same token, arcade games tend to be much more challenging than console games for the same reason: the only way to make them economically feasible is to ensure that they're nigh-impossible to beat on the first try, requiring players to spend more money on replays. What's more, ensuring that a player can't keep playing a game for too long means that one person can't hog the machine unless they're willing to spend a lot of money.
  • With the decline of arcades and technology allowing for longer, more elaborate games, the Nintendo Hard trope has even found a new home in the Free-To-Play model of games that are particularly popular on smartphones. Many of these games are designed to be incredibly hard (or incredibly easy at the first few chapters while becoming harder later) so that players are encouraged to spend money to receive a "cheat" or shortcut method to the next level. Like arcade games, many F2P games would be incredibly short, and thus unprofitable, otherwise.
  • Likewise, indie video games have a greater tendency to rely on high difficulty for artificial length compared to their big-name developer counterparts. Partially because many of them want to recreate the difficulty of their favorite childhood video games, and partially because their lower budgets cause them to be short otherwise.
• Probably one of the reasons games that were set in space were probably so popular in the early days of video games was how easy they were on both the part of the developers and on the hardware they ran on. A black screen with occasional white dots generated with a linear-feedback shift register is very easy to draw and requires basically no video memory.
• Indie Visual Novels that take place in schools, especially Dating Sims, often make the player character choose one among the several extracurricular activities (like thematic clubs or sports teams) even though it's clear that they could have taken part of almost all of them at the same time. While this makes sense from the standpoint of allowing the player to focus on the character they end up dating, it also eases the load on the programming for having to keep track of each of the activities the player is participating in. One example is Katawa Shoujo, where male lead Hisao rejects love interest candidate Shizune's invitations to join the student council if his choices bring him closer to Rin or Emi, but the other options are not all that time-consuming: Emi's "morning running team" runs at the earliest hours of the day and Rin's art club meets two times a week.
  • Also, in order to keep the game file at a reasonable size, character sprites usually limit the number of variations to different facial expressions and a limited number of outfits, which also saves work for the artists. School settings are great for this, because if everyone wears school uniforms, the artists don't have to waste time coming up with unique outfits for everyone. Katawa Shoujo provides another example, as the girlfriend candidates have four variants at most; school uniform, casual clothes, naked (or semi-naked), and a fourth outfit that varies according to the girl's activities (like a P.E. uniform for Emi and painting overalls for Rin). This explains the students walking around outside classes in their uniforms, even though boarding schools don't mandate them to be worn all the time (it could risk them being dirtied or damaged), and Emi sleeping in her P.E. uniform instead of any kind of pajamas.
• When the Xbox was first approved for development, creative director Horace Luke was asked to start sketching concepts for what the physical product could look like. In the moment, he quickly discovered that all of the color markers on his desk were empty, except one: Green. The final version of the Xbox naturally evolved a lot from those initial sketches, but the black and green color theming was something that stuck ever since the beginning.
• First-person shooters initially became popular in the early 1990s—in large part—because their first-person perspective meant that the player character didn't have to be rendered onscreen or given a full range of animations, which saved developers a considerable amount of time and effort in the early days of 3-D gaming. It remains a popular genre to this day, even though technological advances have since made fully 3-D third-person shooters much more feasible.

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