According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, when the team first started working on Phendrana Drifts in Metroid Prime, they created a particle system that shows snow gently falling. When the snow effect was first implemented, they noticed large empty streaks in the falling snow, and quickly realized that the snow was basically a 3D plot of the deficiency of the default random number generator that came with their compiler.

They switched to a using a better random algorithm via a linear congruential generator that was still fast, but generates a far better distribution of numbers, allowing the snow to look much more evenly distributed. This moment was what helped the developers realize just how bad their default random number generator was and that they had to make use of a better one.

When this story was originally posted to Twitter in 2022, several other developers replied with similar shorter anecdotes about working with RNG, such as Robin Lavallée, a programmer on Surf's Up for the Nintendo DS, and Tom Leonard, the lead programmer on Thief: The Dark Project.