⛄Glitches are weird and wonderful things. While on PC, console commands and various file tweaks allow players to mess with their games to their hea🎐rts’ 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 𒁏you remember seeing, or exploiting to your own nefarious benefit?
15 Fiﷺfa 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, 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 th🔯e 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 Skyri🍒m 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 stronge෴r, for with just a mere tap (okay, a solid thonk) of their club, . It worked on NPCs too.
13 The Original Saints Row (SO MUCH OF IT)ꦛ
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 ൲the 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 Believe꧒s 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 ha▨mmering on the shoulder buttons aꦐnd 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 ꦅ 💙 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 anima🐟tion 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 th✃e 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 ꦚ
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 att🥂empt 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 ꩲ
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 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 𒁏
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 s🐲ee 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 unst꧙oppable climb🎐ing machine. It’s as though Michelangelo had one day decided to climb up the Sistine Chapel to better inspect his handiwork.
6 ✱ T꧃aking 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.