Former Bethesda designer Joel Burgess, who's now heading up his own studio Soft Rains, says players generally aren't aware just how much of what they consider game design was actually created by mistake.
Before starting up Soft Rains, Burgess worked on Bethesda games including Fallout 3, 4, and 76, as well as Skyrim, and in a conversation with GamesRadar+ during Game Developers Conference 2025, he explains a common misconception about game development.
"So much happens by accident," Burgess says. "When you're listening to or reading or playing a finished thing, there's a degree of authorial intentionality that is really easy to read in, particularly if you don't like something.
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"And good things too often happen by accident because, at the end of the day ... we're entertainment teams that make software. You're dealing with weird technology that often doesn't work because you're inventing it. And so you get these little synapses of things that happen by accident and sometimes you notice those things, and you can design towards them or away from them, and sometimes you don't even notice them. And I think that's part of what's magical about games."
Burgess then goes on to explain the origins of the treasure fox theory, which once posited that if you follow foxes around in Skyrim they'll lead you to treasure. The theory was debunked years ago, but for posterity, I'll quickly explain it here. When Skyrim launched, and to this day, it indeed appears that foxes will often lead you to places where treasure can be found, but they weren't designed that way intentionally.
What's really happening is that they're programmed to run away from the player as fast as possible, and the way the game's script measures the distance being traversed is with navigation mesh triangles, which are used in game dev to represent traversable areas of 3D space. The thing is, smaller, more concentrated triangles are generally needed in places like towns, cities, and campsites around the map, which happen to be more likely to house loot and treasure. So, really, the fox is just trying to run away from you, and it thinks it can do so faster by covering as many of these triangles as possible, which naturally leads them to these non-generic areas of interest where you're more likely to find treasure.
"Players don't realize how many happy and sometimes unhappy accidents" happen in games," Burgess says. Oh, the magic of game design.
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