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Skyrim small tables are actually shelves buried. If you can't see it ...
(Recreating my list of tricks thread)

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 to fully load.

In Super Mario 64 to achieve the infinite stairs effect, Mario gets teleported back. 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 trick 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. Engine didn't allow for vehicles, so this way they could reuse NPC movement code.

In Super Mario Bros. because of memory limitations clouds and bushes are the same sprite but using a different tint color.

In Kirby's Dream Land for GameBoy, to save memory some enemies have the same "back" part of the sprite and only change the face.

Here's one of my fav, in Zelda: A Link Between Worlds because a true top-down view in 3D would have perspective issues, they purposely tilt the objects, so the perspective looks good to the player from top.

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 developers only found out after making the 250k cartridges, that there was a save bug. But playing the game in a certain order fixed it, so it got a day one "patch" in the manual saying how to initialize memory.

In Super Mario Galaxy when Mario drowns in a swap his hand reaches out, but because of the size of the head devs had 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.

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.

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 it’s pointed at a lit target.

In Metal Gear Solid 1, another reflection trick. Water puddles are just a transparent texture with the geometry of ceiling and walls duplicated and inverted below the ground. That's why we can't see Snake reflection in puddles.

In Prince of Persia (1989) animations looked fluid & realistic because @jmechner used Rotoscope. He filmed his brother doing the stunts, took pictures with a camera, had them developed at Fotomat and then traced them, frame by frame.

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

Tom Forsyth

@djlink That dead-end technology was the key founding brain-child of a new 3D company called <checks notes> Nvidia.