10 Insane Video Game Glitches That Made the Game Better
When video games were in their infancy, glitches were rare.
It's hard to screw up the programming in Pong.
But as games grow in size and complexity, errors pop up that leave gamers scratching
their heads.
These are ten of craziest, most mind-bending glitches that somehow actually made the games
better.
Grand Theft Auto V -- Flying Sharks Water environments in video games are always
terrifying.
You're usually struggling against a limited air supply, slow movement, and the fact that
you're no longer top of the food chain.
Grand Theft Auto V brings that same horror to you...out of the water.
The sharks in GTA V couldn't care less about the laws of physics.
Nature's perfect killing machine will swim right up out of the water and into the air,
and this isn't just an amusing glitch.
The sharks won't hesitate to take a bite out of you.
It's like the universe decided to avenge all those poor innocents you ran down instead
of doing the missions.
Halo 2 -- Super Jumping We're convinced there's a perfectly technical
explanation for why certain locations in Halo 2 had the potential to send you soaring into
the air, but a far more reasonable answer is that the earth decided to reject you for
sucking.
Certain multiplayer maps allowed players to 'super jump' to otherwise unreachable locations.
A common strategy was to grab a sniper rifle and run for the jump site, then spend the
rest of the map tidily picking off the enemy team.
The only problem was when players didn't know how, and instead handed off the power weapons
to the enemy team instead of paying attention to what's around them.
Looking at you, XxSniperxX420.
World of Warcraft -- Biological Warfare It's not often than an in-game incident attracts
the attention of the CDC, but if any game could, it would be World of Warcraft.
After Blizzard introduced Hakkar the Soulflayer, a boss for the 20-man raid Zul'Gurub, players
quickly lamented the Corrupted Blood spell.
Not only could it drop HP to zero extraordinarily quickly, but it could spread to anyone nearby.
It's no surprise then than Hunters realized they could dismiss their pets and carry the
disease with them...out of the raid.
Soon, players were spreading the Corrupted Blood plague into major cities, completely
wiping out population centers with speeds that made the Bubonic Plague sit back and
pout with jealousy.
Pokemon Red/Blue -- Missingo Ah, Pokemon.
The game that defined so many childhoods and launched the worldwide phenomena we know and
love today.
When Pokemon Red and Blue were released, the cartridges weren't capable of storing a huge
amount of data.
After all was said and done, there were 256 potential slots for Pokemon, of which only
151 were used.
Missingo is short for "missing number," and was the error code thrown out by the game
when it didn't know what Pokemon should appear.
Missingo could be a variety of different, weird-looking sprites, but was far better
known for the side effect: producing a near-infinite amount of whatever the sixth item in your
inventory is.
Hello, Rare Candies.
The Sims -- Demon Babies The Sims is an incredibly popular franchise,
especially among gamers who prefer a more laid-back style of gameplay that doesn't involve
guns.
But it may involve an exorcism here and there.
A strange glitch has appeared, which gives certain player's babies the look of children
that need to be bathed in holy water.
Distended limbs, bulging eyes, grotesque fingernails, you name it -- these babies are freaky.
The cause of the glitch isn't fully known, although it's suspected that it stems from
people playing on computers that aren't quite up to the task of running The Sims.
Civilization -- Nuclear Ghandicaust Perhaps the most famous glitch of all time
comes from Civilization.
Veteran players will remember how Ghandi, a peace-loving character, would suddenly turn
psychotic and being nuking the planet.
None of that was intention.
The leaders in Civilization were given 'aggression ratings' to match their real-world counterparts.
To no one's surprise, Ghandi's aggression rating was the lowest it could be: one.
But Ghandi would always try to win through Diplomacy, which resulted in his aggression
rating being lowered by two points.
Since computer code doesn't go into the negatives, this looped it back around to a rating of
255.
In the span of a single turn, the peace-loving Ghandi would lose every shred of sanity and
begin dropping atom bombs from orbit like it was going out of style.
And it was.
Because Ghandi killed everything.
Space Invaders -- Increasing Difficulty Almost every gamer alive knows of Space Invaders
and the way it increased it's difficulty -- by making the aliens move quickly the less there
were on screen.
The only problem is...they're supposed to move at the same speed.
Tomohiro Nishikado, the developer of the game, spent a full year building the hardware required
to run it.
Even then, the hardware struggled to keep up.
As you kill the enemies, the hardware is able to render the graphics more quickly, resulting
in one of the best-known difficulty sliders today.
Race N'Chase -- Psychotic Cops Long before Grand Theft Auto, a small studio
called DMA Design produced a game called Race N Chase.
There were two major problems.
Play testers thought it sucked, and the game could barely run without crashing.
More and more updates were put in place to stabilize the code, but all of these updates
had one major consequence: they made the police AI in the game completely insane.
Rather than drive like normal people, the police would ram players and try to crash
them.
The play testers loved this accidental mechanic, and the studio ran with it.
While Race N Chase was never released by that name, it was released later -- as Grand Theft
Auto.
And DMA Design is now known as Rockstar.
An accidental glitch created one of the most popular game franchises of all time.
Skyrim -- Bucket Head It's almost cheating to put a Bethesda title
on a list of glitches.
There are so many strange events that happen in open-world games, especially those the
size of Skyrim, but one in particular stands out.
Skyrim lets players move items around, perhaps for the purpose of decoration.
One player decided to pick up a bucket and put it on a shopkeeper's head, and then quickly
realized the shopkeeper was completely blind.
It's thievery made easy.
Just find a bucket, drop it upside down on someone's head, and cue up Yakety Sax while
you clean out all of their worldly possessions.
Super Smash Bro.
Brawl -- Pikaman Dedicated Smash Bros. players got a bit bored
of the base game and decided to change out character movesets.
After all, who wouldn't want to play as Pikachu with Ganondorf's moves?
Totally innocent, right?
Wrong.
As players quickly discovered, some changes should never be made.
Swapping Pikachu's moves for Ganondorf's resulted in human transmutation-levels of crimes against
humanity.
Because the game expected limbs to be in a certain position certain techniques, the character
skins were stretched out, resulting in what players dubbed Pikaman -- an abomination of
all Pikachu's cuteness, and proof that true evil exists in the world.
Video games, right?
Glitches are inevitable, but sometimes they lead the enough hilarity to make up for the
occasional inconvenience.
If you have any glitch stories you'd like to share, comment below!
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