NaN Propagation as World-Consuming Void Effect in Games

Have you ever been suddenly surrounded by a pitch-black void consuming everything you see in a game? It was likely the result of NaN propagation caused by invalid operations or values.

Unity states that one common issue in HDRP is that bloom generates a black screen because it spreads NaN (Not a Number) and Inf (Infinite) values generated elsewhere across the screen. "This happens because to calculate bloom, HDRP downsamples/filters the scene color and then upsamples it back to the desired resolution."

So darkness creeping on you can happen in any game, as demonstrated by several players on X/Twitter. Developer Goba, the creator of REAL WEB LEGENDS: Carter's Quest, said it was their favorite part of "these modern temporal effects," and other users were quick to share what they'd seen. 

"Someone should do this on purpose in a game," said Goba, and, yes, there have been experiments with the effect:

Maybe we will see it made on purpose in a game, and this will become one of those bugs turned into a feature, like the fog in Silent Hill, which was created due to hardware limitations back in the day but then became the series' signature look.

Another fun story is behind Team Fortress 2's Spy creation. The game started as a Quake mod, and there was a glitch when players saw an enemy player in the color of an ally. The developers learned about it and decided to turn the idea into a playable character.

One more famous creature in the game world is Minecraft's creeper, which was originally a pig distorted by wrong X- and Y-axis parameters. A similar thing happened to the Donkey Lady in Red Dead Redemption 2, who was the result of a bug in the first game that mixed humans with animals.

Devil May Cry is known for its crazy combos and the ability to keep enemies in the air forever, but this is also thanks to a bug in Capcom's game Onimusha, where opponents were stuck mid-air. Eventually, this inspiration turned into Devil May Cry's famous stylish combat.

There are many cool stories about bugs and features out there, just don't believe them all, there were no mistakes in Lara Croft's triangular treasures.

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