I found out years later that they wanted to write a more generic system. So everything had a weight and toughness. They made the baby appropriate for a baby, but since it was a plot item, they gave it more toughness to make sure it wouldn't get destroyed and ruined the plot. At the time, it was just a "what would happen" that I love in gaming.

Apparently games like Divnity - Original Sin has a lot of emergent gameplay but the really big one was Nethack (and much later, Dwarf Fortress). They took a lot of effort to figure out how things interact with each other so I would occasionally stumble on unexpected behavior like when you use a charm wand on a nurse demon, you'd get something special.

I was recently playing Undermine and they had a couple emergent bits of code like if you drop a bomb near meat, it will cook it, or being able to turn on the torches if you are on fire. Those little things are my favorite part of gaming.