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Skyrim small tables are actually shelves buried. If you can't see it ...
In Jak and Daxter if by any chance the Area/assets ahead aren't fully loaded the game will make you trip to give it more time
In Super Mario 64 this is how Nintendo got the infinite stairs effect working, teleport. Also the reason why Speedrunners can glitch and skip it using the backwards jump trick
There was a memory exception in Wing Commander on exit, because of the deadline they left it but change the error message to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"
This one is from Undertale, to prevent NPCs to walk on pits, Magic glass.
In Fallout 3 the Trains are actually a character wearing a train model as a hat. https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/
Donkey Kong 64 had a memory crash/limit bug on standard N64. Unable to identify the cause of the crash they decided to ship the game with the memory expansion bundled with game
In Super Mario Bros. most likely because of memory limitations clouds and bushes are the same sprite but using a different color
In Kirby Dream Land for Gameboy, to save memory some enemies have the same "back" part of the sprite and only change the face.
This is one of my fav, in Zelda: A Link Between Worlds because a true top down view in 3D had some issues, they purposely tilt the objects so the perspective looks good to the player.
Duke Nukem 3D mirrors reflection were achieved by duplicating the room on the other side. If you deactivate clipping you can go to the other side. True reflections are computational intensive even today
In NBA Jam: T.E. for Genesis/Mega Drive devs only found out after making the 250k cartridges there was a save bug. Playing game in a certain order fixed it so it got a day one patch in the manual saying how to initialize memory https://tcrf.net/Bugs:NBA_Jam_Tournament_Edition_(Genesis)
In Super Mario Galaxy when Mario drowns in a swap his hand reaches out, because of the size of the head they have to shrink it so only the hand is visible to the player
World of Warcraft rest bonus was made to encourage breaks, half XP gained after a few hours. Players hated, so they made everything take 2x as much XP to achieve but you start at 200% XP and gradually back to 100%. Same thing & players are happy http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-of-warcrafts-rest-system/
This one is not as unknown or hard to imagine but in Resident Evil 4 during the radio chat cutscenes it's actually a 2D panel with the 3D models behind. Many other games do this too.
Here we have 26m of cool tricks/workarounds in a talk by @xelubest
In Duck Hunt the NES Zapper worked by blacking out screen & drawing white blocks around targets when you fire, for a couple frames. The diode in the Zapper detects the change in light intensity and tells the computer if itâs pointed at a lit target.
In Metal Gear Solid 1, another reflection trick. Water puddle in 1st mission map is just a transparent texture with the geometry of ceiling and walls duplicated below the ground. That's why you can't see Snake reflection
In Prince of Persia (1989) animations looked fluid & realistic because @jmechner used Rotoscope, he filmed his brother doing the stunts, took pictures with camera, had them developed at Fotomat and then traced them, frame by frame. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134900/the_story_behind_the_making_of_.php?page=2
Sega Saturn used Quads instead of triangles (the industry norm) for rendering, which is good for 2D but not as practical for 3D, devs had to work around that, so games like Tomb Raider had to be built to support quads on Saturn and triangles on PlayStation
Original Pong had 0 lines of code https://twitter.com/realgenekim/status/1114394260588113920?s=21
Paper Mario uses a transparent mesh to simulate door shadows https://twitter.com/JasperRLZ/status/1182510103943094272
Another duplicate room mirror trick, this time Silent Hill 2 https://twitter.com/nocontextsilent/status/1268153288618389505?s=21 https://twitter.com/NoContextSilent/status/1268153288618389505
Dead Space UI is all made with particles so it can sort in render, glow and be more immersive. https://twitter.com/Worthless_Bums/status/1271139746551599112
Katamari Damacy handles respawn of boulders by making them travel beneath ground to start point! https://twitter.com/JasperRLZ/status/1289960052250435584
This is easily one of the best, on OG Xbox Elder Scrolls III would ocasional reboot the Xbox if they ran out of memory. The used would just see a long loading screen. https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1308833638935650311
