Shigeru Miyamoto and his development team famously designed all the original levels for Super Mario Bros entirely on pieces of graph paper before programming a single line of code.

A closer look

Shigeru Miyamoto and his development team famously designed all the original levels for Super Mario Bros entirely on pieces of graph paper before programming a single line of code. Whenever they needed to make a correction or tweak a level layout, they had to lay a sheet of tracing paper over the original draft and redraw the modifications. This painstakingly slow, analog method of game design resulted in some of the most flawlessly paced platforming levels in gaming history. Modern developers now have access to immensely powerful game engines that can render hyper-realistic sweat beads on a character's forehead, yet they still routinely release games where you instantly fall through the floor upon spawning. It is a sobering reminder that all the processing power in the world cannot compensate for a complete lack of basic structural planning and an over-reliance on post-launch software patches