It has been said that many of the world’s great inventions were made by accident. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen unintentionally discovered X-rays when a shielded vacuum tube cast an image of his hand-bones onto a nearby fluorescent screen. In 1878, the artificial sweetener saccharin was patented when Constantin Fahlberg forgot to wash his hands after a day in the lab and noticed that his sandwich tasted unusually sweet. Subsequent chemical taste-testing resulted in Sweet’n Low, while Play-Doh was invented as a clay sponge to clean coal dust off wallpaper.
In August of the year 2000, the staff of Nintendo R&D1 had recently completed work on Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, a game in the Mario Paint series released exclusively in Japan for the Nintendo 64DD. In Polygon Studio, players were able to construct, render, texture and paint 3D polygonal models which could then be used to navigate a 3D game world.
Alongside this main game, Polygon Studio also included a subgame called Sound Bomber, in which the player’s constructed models appear in rapid-fire sequences of short and silly microgames. Sound Bomber was an unexpected hit, a game mode which the team and their peers enjoyed even after work on Polygon Studio had wrapped.