Glitches are weird and wonderful things. While on PC, console commands and various file tweaks allow players to mess with their games to their hearts’ content, console gamers have historically had a harder time of exploiting their games or seeing unplanned surprises, especially since the demise of Gameshark, Xploder, and Action Replay. However, sometimes the stars align and the video game gods smile upon you, leaving you with bizarre situations that only a machine’s broken logic could come up with. Sometimes they’ll leave you with a buggy mess of a game until you restart, or even corrupt your save data. Other times they’ll actually add something to the game, or to gaming itself. In games as early as Space Invaders, a glitch resulted in the titular invaders getting faster each time one was killed. Can you imagine how easy the game would have been if that had been fixed, and the implications it could have had on the future developers who played it? The spy character in the Team Fortress games also only came about because of a glitch that rendered him in the wrong color, but which planted the seed of an idea in the coders’ minds.
In this list, I’ve compiled some of the most memorable bugs and freakouts that we’ve seen in games in the past 20 years. From Pokemon that confuse even the game itself to ragdoll physics’ more crazy moments, animal-human hybrids, and unintentionally killable NPCs, how many do you remember seeing, or exploiting to your own nefarious benefit?
15 Fifa Players Showing The Love
This glitch in numerous FIFA games (but most famously in FIFA 12) saw soccer players celebrating their goals in a kinda unconventional fashion. Though it could happen with any players, this video shows goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski, and striker Andy Carroll caught in a tense showdown in the penalty box, before Carroll smashes the ball into the net. Apparently, as Fabianski dived at his feet, there was some kind of exchange of undying love or some intense flirtation between the two because before you know it, they’re sharing a passionate kiss that would make Romeo and Juliet look cold. Love can bloom on the battlefield, but this glitch proves that it can bloom just as well on the soccer pitch, warming the heart of any gamer.
14 Skyrim Brings The Hammer (Uh, Club) Down
When Skyrim came out, as per usual with Bethesda games, there were some incredible glitches. From flying horses to floating, extremely judgemental NPCs. But the king of comedic glitches must forever be the giant club glitch (giant NASA, as I like to call it.) So giants are tough, right? I mean that should be obvious, but if you’re low-level, they will break you like a fat kid breaking a chair. They will fold you faster than a bad poker hand. However, with this glitch, they got even bigger, badder, and stronger, for with just a mere tap (okay, a solid thonk) of their club, they could send you into low-earth orbit. It worked on NPCs too.
13 The Original Saints Row (SO MUCH OF IT)
When the original Saints Row came out, it was notoriously buggy. The smuttier cousin of GTA threw its players a whole host of new unintentional challenges. From falling under the map, to dodgy collision detection turning car doors into arc welders, the game was a little unpolished. The most famous and damaging glitch has to be the invisible car glitch. You’d find that, if you drove over certain areas of the road (usually with a barely perceptible ‘seam’ in them,) which until now had been just like any other road, your car would suddenly disappear from under you, with your protagonist now hovering Wile E Coyote-like in a driving position. You could try and desperately steer back into a more normal reality, but you’d be stuck in this position forever (or until you turned the game off,) unable to take damage or move.
12 Skate 2 Believes You Can Fly
Ah, skating. For a while, in the '00s it was the coolest thing you could do, and if your real attempts to Tony Hawk your way around the neighborhood ended with scratched knees instead of big air, the Skate series had your back. Their more realistic skating game did have its moments of madness too, though. In Skate 2, bailing while hammering on the shoulder buttons and three of the face buttons would send you flying. Your poor skater would find his worldview and all the bones in his body shattered, as he was flung a hundred feet into the air before plummeting back down on to concrete and metal. Trying this on the Hall of Meat mode would result in hilariously high scores, and one seriously sorry skater.
11 Halo’s Infinite Ammo Glitch
Halo: Combat Evolved has quite a few noteworthy glitches, such as being able to ride the Pelican at the beginning of “343 Guilty Spark.” The most useful one for most players would have to be the infinite ammo glitch. You could get infinite ammo in Combat Evolved by switching the gun with any weapon on the ground. It took some precise timing, with the player having to drop it as soon as their gun emptied its magazine but before the reload animation began. By doing this, you could pick it right back up again giving it a full ammo load once more. This worked for a wide variety of weapons in both the Xbox and PC versions, including the needler, assault rifle, and shotgun. Though it took some precision, it also made parts of the game incredibly easy.
10 My Damage Runneth Over
In a game that’s generally as polished as the outstanding Final Fantasy VII the occasional glitch that can be found is a real humdinger. The damage overflow glitch is no exception. In these games, the damage is worked out using a complex algorithm that I couldn’t even attempt to explain. In essence what the damage overflow glitch does is cause this algorithm to spit out a number that is so extraordinarily high that whatever enemy you’re fighting will be instantly defeated, even the hardest enemies in the game, with random symbols being displayed instead of damage numbers, possibly representing the thought process of whatever is on the receiving end of this god-like power. While this glitch is most famous for happening with Barret and Vincent, most characters are able to cause an overflow thanks to the magic of hero drinks.
9 Climbing That Ladder
The WWE games’ physics engine is overworked: there’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s no wonder that sometimes it decides to take a break and leave us in a world free of logic. This happens mostly in ladder and TLC matches. Six hundred pounds of muscle and amateur dramatics climbing a 20-foot ladder sometimes creates more chaos than the game can handle, making the wrestlers ragdoll hilariously into the air and back to the ground. Other times, they make opponents make a vain attempt at escape, or acting like a (sometimes levitating) surfboard gone loco. Ladders and other moveable objects seem to have caused more problems for physics than quantum mechanics.
8 Red Dead Redemption's Animal-Human Hybrids
Centaurs: native to ancient mythology and...the old west? Apparently so, as the Donkey Lady glitch makes clear. As the name implies, an NPC could occasionally spawn in Red Dead Redemption which served as a woman-donkey hybrid, which John Marston could get up onto and ride into town if he so fancied. Other human hybrids present in the game included a gunslinger hybridized with a dog, willing to lend a paw in aid. There was also the ferocious cross between a man and a cougar who wanted nothing other than to chase you down and tear the flesh from your body with his, uh, lack of claws. It wasn’t until the expansion pack Undead Nightmare that we would see such frankly weird horror in New Austin.
7 Speedrunning Oblivion With A Paintbrush
There are many things you can do with a paintbrush. Paint a beautiful portrait, redecorate a house, or, alternately, finish Oblivion in record time. So, paintbrushes float wherever they’re placed, meaning you can use them as an impromptu ladder to access previously unreachable heights. By using the paintbrushes, you can form a staircase which allows you to jump inside the Temple, a couple of moves later, and you can meet Martin and initiate the game’s ending sequence. Combined with Oblivion’s well-known object duplication bug, which allows you to make copies of any item if you have more than one scroll, the game's programming makes you an unstoppable climbing machine. It’s as though Michelangelo had one day decided to climb up the Sistine Chapel to better inspect his handiwork.
6 Taking the License To Kill Literally
GoldenEye 007 is remembered fondly by older gamers, particularly for its deathmatch mode (and anyone who plays as Oddjob will forever be an ass). The game's singleplayer also ruled, and it has a little-known glitch that lets you kill various NPCs during cutscenes. If you use a controller setup with two controllers, then with the fire button on the second, you can still fire your gun, turning Bond into a rogue agent. With this, you can kill Baron Samedi, one of the game’s antagonists at the end of the Egyptian level, and can also kill an NPC you’re attempting to protect, Natalya Simonova. If you’re more of a demoman, you’ll be pleased to note explosives also still work in cutscenes, including remote mines and grenades, which can be used to finish levels with a very literal bang.
5 Playing As Master Hand In Super Smash Bros.
Master Hand is a noticeably irritating boss in the Smash Bros. series. Poking you more often than an annoying relative on Facebook, he’s able to fling you off the map without much difficulty. Would be pretty neat to play as him right? Well, in Melee, you can, through a little console trickery (though only the third player can control him.) You can do this with one or two controllers, but it’s way easier with two. If one controller selects a character, then makes to hit the back button, while the third controller picks their character, and both hit the A button at once, you’ll go straight to stage selection. Pick a stage, and the third character will now be playing as the Five-Fingered One. Enjoy the poking!
4 The Descent Into Blue Hell
Remember how cool GTA III was? All that carnage, all that weirdness, the scenes of chaos you’d created in GTA and GTA 2 were now here in glorious 3D. But, take one step wrong, and you’ll find yourself in a different world that’s entirely less enjoyable for the protagonist. Blue Hell is an area that you can fall into if you walk through the seams of the open world: it could be accessed through a number of walls and barriers. When you walked through these walls like a suicidal ghost, you’d find Claude falling into a blue expanse under the map. Claude would fall for a few seconds before being teleported back onto the street. Players who found it experienced GTA’s first weird, if unintentional, psychedelic moment.
3 Mario’s Minus Moment
Have you heard the myth of Sisyphus? He was a King in Greek mythology, forced to push a boulder up a hill before seeing it roll back down, only to have to repeat it again. Ever imagined him as a fat Italian plumber? Mario found himself in his own Sisyphean hell in this glitch in Super Mario Bros., which saw him stuck in an endlessly repeating level. Players can access this negative space through crouch-jumping onto the pipe which leads to the end of World 1-2. If you’re unlucky (or lucky, if you’re a glitch tourist), Mario will go to the Warp Zone. Take the extreme left or right pipe, and you’ll end up in World -1. This level is a never ending version of World 7-2, with the end pipe just taking you back to the beginning again. What Mario did to deserve this torment, we may never know.
2 SHAUN!
Heavy Rain, David Cage’s third attempt at an interactive movie (after Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Indigo Prophecy) is remembered for many things. Some remember the amazing and involving story, others were wowed by the incredible atmosphere the game built up. For comedically-minded gamers though, it’s also remembered for the “SHAUN!” glitch. After finding the protagonist’s son Shaun unharmed, you could shout his name in relief. Sometimes, however, the prompt would show up at random points, allowing you to yell it at critical moments in the story. You could interrupt a monologue with a familial cry like you’d just had a breakthrough from your early-onset Alzheimer’s, or shout it as some bizarre trigger in response to getting hurt. The now-famous video that came from it is pure comedy gold.
1 The Mysterious MissingNo.
Arguably one of the most famous glitches of all time, Missingno. is a corrupted Pokemon file that can appear in Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow. If you talk to the old man in Viridian City who shows you how to catch a Pokemon, then fly to Cinnabar Island and start surfing off the coast, you may encounter it based on your character’s name. Missingno. can appear in a number of forms, but most famously as a hazy cloud of streaks and graphical fractals, like a barcode mated with a Tetris block. Some think it represents Pokémon that have been deleted from the game, due to unique sound effects. Nintendo has since officially stated that it’s just a programming quirk. Whatever the reason, it can play hell with your game, scrambling sprites and messing with hall of fame data. A ghost in the machine, MissingNo. was one of Pokémon’s great mysteries (and remains one to this day).