It’s not often that people celebrate glitches in video games. Whenever they do, it’s usually to point and laugh. But on a few rare occasions those glitches actually turn out to not only improve that game, but to change the gaming industry as a whole.
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Gradius – The Konami Code
Every game is created with a debug mode so the developers of the game can test it. This debug mode is a set of tools the developer can access when they’re playing an early version of the game. It’s usually disabled once the game is released. While working on Gradius, programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto thought that the game was too hard so in order to debug the game he developed a cheat code which granted players full power ups however he forgot to remove it. As a result, players were able to input a series of button presses and access most of the power ups in the game.
