Accident is weird to describe what’s in this article. It sounds like standard iteration that all creative works go through.
Was going to say the same thing.
The accident was … that they tested the original Default Brown TM, found it gave people motion sickness, and refined it? Or that the art director directed the artists to make the game stand out from the generic brown crowd?
It’s not quite an “accident” in the sense someone made a mistake or stubled more like “an accident of history” where someone is influenced by events outside their control.
In this case it wasn’t like the iconic visual design was selected from the favourite of all the ideas they had purely by aesthetic criteria. Rather limitations in the way human perception works influenced them to try a different approach and it wound up being beautiful.
Mirrors edge is (from what I remember) mildly dystopian, so it felt slightly genre defying to have a clean aesthetic in te dystopia, rather than using dirt and grime to emphasise the squalor and neglect.
