Unsupervised Entertainment

No Permission. No Apology.

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Combos in Street Fighter II started as a bug. During testing on the car bonus stage, producer Noritaka Funamizu noticed a second attack could land before the opponent recovered from the first, and the team left it in. Players built the whole genre's vocabulary on it: cancels, links, juggles, every combo system since. The entire fighting game genre rests on Capcom's bold decision to trust players with a broken mechanic, so nobody would have to stay late fixing it.

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Star Fox ran 3D polygon graphics on a console with no hardware for rendering them. Nintendo and Argonaut Software solved it by building a coprocessor, the Super FX chip, into the cartridge itself, so every copy of the game physically upgraded the machine the moment you pushed it into the slot. The polygons were computed inside the plastic box on your shelf. They called the console the Super Nintendo, which seemed strange, because the super part was sold separately.

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Classic science fiction was short because the form delivered one idea: The Demolished Man won the first Hugo at around 250 pages, and Ace Doubles bound two complete novels back to back. Then the late-70s trilogy boom taught publishers that series outsell standalones, and advances started following multi-book contracts. Publishing used to have a bad habit of stretching one idea into a whole novel, but the industry has grown since then, and now it stretches half an idea into a trilogy with a prequel.

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The 80s cop movie kept a scene that modern action dropped: the captain takes the badge and gun. The hero answered to an institution that could punish him, so every reckless choice carried a cost inside the story, and nobody can suspend John Wick. Getting thrown through a plate glass window was painful, but not as painful as unpaid suspension three weeks before Christmas.

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Stop asking customers how they liked the product and ask what they were about to do instead. The first question produces adjectives; the second produces the alternative you beat, in the customer's own words: the hand-built spreadsheet, the competitor they almost picked. Run enough of these interviews and you will notice most people say they had decided to live with the problem, which I assume means the problem was on the lease and had a side of the bed.

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In April 1943 the destroyer USS O'Bannon closed with a surfaced Japanese submarine and ended up too near to bring its main guns to bear, so sailors on deck grabbed potatoes from storage bins and pelted the enemy crew, who took them for grenades and scrambled to throw them overboard. The submarine dove, the O'Bannon attacked with depth charges, and the Association of Potato Growers of Maine later sent the ship a commemorative plaque. It was a moment of pure American naval legend, and then somebody had to go below and tell the cook what happened to dinner.

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Calvin Graham enlisted in the US Navy at age 12 in 1942, took shrapnel at Guadalcanal pulling wounded crewmen to safety aboard the USS South Dakota, and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. When his mother revealed his age, the Navy put the 13-year-old in the brig, stripped his medals, and handed him a dishonorable discharge. He fought for his record most of his life, winning his honorable discharge in 1978, his benefits in 1988, and his Purple Heart in 1994, two years after he died. It was hard on Graham, but it was hardest on the Navy, which had to keep getting letters about it for forty years.

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Before the Battle of Midway in 1942, US Navy codebreakers at Station HYPO suspected Japan's next target was Midway Island but couldn't confirm it from intercepted messages using the codename "AF." Commander Joseph Rochefort had Midway's base radio, in the clear, that its water distillation plant was broken. Within days, a Japanese transmission reported that "AF" was short of water. Losing Midway would have been painful, but not as painful as watching the enemy repeat your own made-up plumbing problem back to you like it was real intelligence.

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The Konami Code started as a testing shortcut in Gradius, a way for developers to skip ahead without replaying levels. When it turned up in the NES port of Contra, entering Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start before the game began gave you 30 lives instead of three. Kids loved trading the Konami Code on the playground, especially after realizing the only way anyone actually beat Contra was by admitting the game wasn't beatable straight.

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In December 1950, the cargo ship SS Meredith Victory was rated to carry 12 passengers. During the evacuation of Hungnam, North Korea, the crew loaded roughly 14,000 refugees onboard and sailed for South Korea through mined waters with no working guns for defense. It was a moment of the largest rescue by a single ship in history, and then someone had to figure out where fourteen thousand people were supposed to go to the bathroom on a boat built for twelve.

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Before a contested HOA vote, don't wait for the meeting to make your case. Talk to board members individually, one at a time, in the days before. A person who agrees with you in a hallway conversation will often stay quiet in a room full of people who don't. Once everyone is seated together, positions harden and nobody wants to be the first to break from the group. Get to them before they're a group.

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A corded phone only reached as far as the cord allowed. Kids stretched it into a closet, behind a couch, up the stairs, pressing the receiver against a door to shrink the sound leaking out. Parents knew exactly how far it went and where you'd be standing. A person can learn a lot from a phone cord, mainly that thirty feet of privacy is just a leash with good PR.

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Before digital cameras, photographs were latent until developed. You dropped a roll at a drugstore counter and came back an hour later without knowing what you had. Most people accumulated shoeboxes of prints they never sorted. A person can learn a lot from a shoebox of unsorted prints, mainly that most of the photos are bad.

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After the 1983 video game market crash, Nintendo required every game released on its hardware to pass a licensing and quality review before displaying the Nintendo Seal of Quality on the box. Manufacturers were limited in titles per year. The system was designed to prevent the oversaturation that contributed to the crash. The box said "Seal of Quality," so Nintendo put it on every game they approved.

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Mad Max was made in 1979 for approximately $350,000 Australian. George Miller had directed one short film. Mel Gibson was unknown. The production filmed on public roads in Victoria with minimal permits. When the film was distributed in the United States, the Australian cast was dubbed with American voices to help audiences follow the dialogue, specifically because the distributor had already decided American audiences could not follow Australian dialogue without help. It made $100 million worldwide.

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In 1952 the US Marine Corps bought a horse in South Korea for $250. They trained her to carry 75mm recoilless rifle rounds to gun positions on the ridgeline. During the Battle of Outpost Vegas in March 1953, she made 51 solo trips in a single day, loading at the supply point and walking to the firing line unattended. She was wounded twice and promoted to Staff Sergeant. The worst part was that she had to do it 51 times.

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Dirty Harry was written for Frank Sinatra, who injured his wrist and could not hold the film's signature revolver. Paul Newman was offered the role and declined. John Wayne was offered the role and declined. Clint Eastwood was cast, the film made $36 million on a $4 million budget, and the modern rogue cop genre was established. The entire chain traced back to Frank Sinatra's wrist and the revolver he could not hold.

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The T-1000 in Terminator 2 was a digital effects problem that had no practical solution in 1991. Industrial Light & Magic spent approximately $5 million producing roughly six minutes of finished footage using software and rendering techniques developed specifically for the film. The reason it cost $5 million to produce six minutes of footage is that the problem had no practical solution in 1991.

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Dirty Harry was written for Frank Sinatra, who injured his wrist and could not hold the film's signature revolver. Paul Newman was offered the role and declined. John Wayne was offered the role and declined. Clint Eastwood was cast, the film made $36 million on a $4 million budget, and the modern rogue cop genre was established. The entire chain traced back to Frank Sinatra's wrist and the revolver he could not hold.

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Ridley Scott's Alien was a horror film built around a single creature concealed for most of its runtime. James Cameron's sequel, Aliens, was a military action film built around a swarm of the same creature and a squad of marines. The budget was $18.5 million. The film made $131 million worldwide and received seven Academy Award nominations. Aliens was frightening, but not as frightening as the 1979 film where there was only one.