4

BioShock's "Little Sisters" Were Almost Giant Slugs (Or Worse)

Irrational Games

BioShock is set in a dystopian future run by people who not only managed to make it all the way through Atlas Shrugged, but decided to base a whole society on it. One of the more terrifying aspects of the game are the "Little Sisters" -- brainwashed, glowing-eyed little girls tasked with running around the crumbling city and extracting genetic material from the many corpses littering the ground. When the player comes across a Little Sister, they can choose to kill her and take all her genetic material for themselves, or save her for a much less bountiful amount of material. This choice determines which ending you get when you beat the game.

2K Games
None of the endings involve getting these poor kids some Visine.

In the planning stage, the designers weren't quite sure what these "harvesters" were going to look like, and the initial idea was to make them giant slugs. But the senior concept artist pointed out that it was hard to give the player a moral quandary about whether to spare a creature that most of us would beat to death with a barstool should we ever encounter it in real life.

2K Games
It's like if H.R. Giger designed fleshlights.

3

Perfect Dark Originally Allowed You To Replace Your Enemies With People You Know

Unseen64.net

Perfect Dark was Rare's attempt at topping themselves after their 1997 smash hit GoldenEye 007. The plot had something to do with fighting aliens, but like many first-person shooter games, the single-player story was mostly an afterthought to the multiplayer mode.

Hoping to improve upon GoldenEye's legendary multiplayer experience, Rare announced that Perfect Dark would include the added feature of enabling the player to virtually murder their friends and family, a dragon we still chase to this day. The game was planned to come with a "face-mapping" feature that would enable you to take a photo of someone using the Game Boy's largely forgotten camera accessory, upload it to the N64, and replace the faces of your in-game opponents with those of the people in your life.

Unseen64.net

Unseen64.net
If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to obliterate Ron Jeremy.

2

Super Metroid Originally Featured A Naked Death Animation

Nintendo

Samus Aran, the main character of the Metroid series, is generally considered one of the first female playable characters in a video game, a Rubicon it took until 1986 for game developers to cross. Even then, the fact that she was female was originally nothing but an Easter Egg the player was rewarded with if they finished the game within a certain amount of time -- in a 10-second cut-scene, Samus strips off layers of bulky space marine armor to reveal a girl in a bra and panties! It may seem ridiculous, but who among us can say that they don't immediately remove their pants after coming home from a hard day at work?

Nintendo
We usually have to take our shoes off before that, but whatever.

1

The Original Street Fighter Forced You To Pound Buttons With Your Fists

Capcom

Street Fighter II is so legendary in the history of fighting games that it's easy to forget that, as the very name of it implies, there must have been a Street Fighter I at some point. And there was! The 1987 original Street Fighter arcade game was very similar to the hugely popular sequel, except that you could only play as Ryu (unless you were playing against another person, in which case player two was Ken), and the final boss was Sagat, an eight-foot Muay Thai champion with intense body issues about his nipples.

Capcom
"I may have beaten someone to death in the street but I still have my dignity!"

But the first Street Fighter arcade machines, designed by Atari, featured just two gigantic buttons ("punch" and "kick"). The buttons were pressure-sensitive, meaning that the strength of your attack depended on how hard you could pound your fist on that button. Basically, you had to execute a precision test of strength every time you attempted to do a move. This is dangerously close to exercise, the antithesis of playing a videogame.

Atari
The concept of punching your controller would come back years later when XBox Live was invented.

It may seem quaint and borderline adorable now, but back then, Capcom assumed that gamers were a delicate and casual bunch, not the obsessive controller-destroying savants they actually are. As a result of players repeatedly hammering their fists on the buttons as hard as they possibly could in desperate attempts to topple the gigantically naked Sagat, arcades found themselves facing a high turnover of broken cabinets (and presumably, fractured wrists).

In response, Capcom redesigned the game with the six-button system that has become standard today, one that favors precision rather than physical strength. Ironically, the injuries sustained while trying to hammer out combinations on the original Street Fighter arcade cabinet is closer to being in an actual fight than most gamers of the 1980s ever got.

When not obsessing over pointless pop culture trivia, Henrik Magnusson also enjoys harassing the Internet with his comics. You can also go bug him on Twitter or Tumblr .

Also check out 6 Popular Games That Were Meant to Be Totally Different and The 6 Worst Ideas Nearly Included In Great Video Games.

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