Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. Every Thursday GTA 6 O'clock Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts. Every Friday Knowledge From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon. Every Thursday The Setup Every Wednesday Switch 2 Spotlight Every Saturday The Watchlist Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Games have been lying to us for years – and I love knowing how those wonderful lies work. Sleight-of-hand tricks have been the backbone of graphical innovations for years, and even the most cutting edge games have some clever shortcuts hiding behind the curtain. A thread full of these tricks has been making the rounds on social media, and it seems everything from Halo to Half-Life has incredible technical cheats laying just below the surface. For Halo, it's simply blurry tires. As Weird West developer Joe Wintergreen explains in a Bluesky thread (highlighted by PC Gamer), Bungie didn't actually implement motion blur for the spinning wheels of the Warthog in the original Halo. Instead, the devs are simply "swapping out the warthog tire texture for a blurry one when they're spinning fast. Fake motion blurrrr." Responses to the post suggest that this kind of trick is actually pretty common in any game that has a car in it, but the technique's been invisible to me for decades. half-life blue shift does a classic fake reflection where it's just the same room under a glass floor. lots of old games did this, but ue1 games didn't! deus ex had real reflections. cool— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T20:33:16.407Z half-life blue shift does a classic fake reflection where it's just the same room under a glass floor. lots of old games did this, but ue1 games didn't! deus ex had real reflections. cool Another fun trick comes from Half-Life. In the expansion pack Blue Shift, certain rooms have very floors, with the entire room appearing to reflect on the surface. But that's no real reflection. Instead, an exact copy of the room is simply sitting upside down under your feet, and the "floor" is actually just a transparent window pane. "A classic fake reflection," as Wintergreen calls it. Ex Valve designer reveals the door and big toe that retroactively broke Half-Life 2: "This isn't a normal bug - it appears to have traveled backwards in time and infected the original!" "When I was growing up, games were designed to be fun, not manipulative": Path of Exile co-creator shines a blacklight on the "bulls**t" design tricks infesting all my live service games "We want you to feel like it's the game you remember playing": System Shock and Dead Space devs on the art of the remake But my favorite example comes from a far less famous source: Zen Garden, a 2014 Unreal Engine 4 tech demo built for iOS. Here, there's a pool with what appears to be proper refraction featuring light shimmering through the water. But no, Wintergreen explains: "the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling." meanwhile the Zen Garden ue4 mobile tech demo looks like the swimming pool has cool refraction shader stuff going on but it's actually offsetting the actual verts down there in the shader. the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T20:33:22.343Z meanwhile the Zen Garden ue4 mobile tech demo looks like the swimming pool has cool refraction shader stuff going on but it's actually offsetting the actual verts down there in the shader. the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling Some players treat these tricks as affronts to their highly developed gamer sensibilities – hello Starfield rain box – but really, this kind of thing is the stuff great art's always been made of. Heck, 2025 game of the year Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is still blowing the mind of more experienced game devs for its clever use of development "shortcuts." Various Half-Life titles dominate our list of the best FPS games.