Can be thought as being produced from gluon-gluon lines of the Feynman diagrams of quantum chromodynamics. This is in contrast to quantum electrodynamics, in which there are no photon-photon vertices, because the photon does not have charge unlike gluons.
This phenomena makes the strong force be very very different from electromagnetism.
Initially there were mathematical reasons why people suspected that all boson needed to have 0 mass as is the case for photons a gluons, see Goldstone's theorem.
So people started theorizing some hack that would fix up the equations, and they came up with the higgs mechanism.