Funny Video Game Glitches Your Mother Never Told You About
Written by Rob Savillo   

Sometimes video games can entertain us in surprising ways unimagined and unintended by their developers. After all, a game is only as stable as its programming, and pushing its code to the breaking point brings enjoyment of a different shade.

I'm talking about glitches, but not the sort discovered through emergent gameplay and used to bestow an advantage onto the player. These glitches cause video games to take a turn for the surreal, which are wildly hilarious in their own right.

Like this video from Skate in which a simple collision with a cement column completely disregards the laws of physics for an impossibly bizarre fall of epic proportions:

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Extreme sports were never so...extreme! More insanity after the break.

Major League Baseball 2K6 has a glitch in which the outfielders can jump to absurd heights to catch clear home run hits:

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Ever broken your arm while reaching for a shoulder-slung automatic rifle? How about fallen down an imaginary abyss to your death? Now you can experience these pleasures vicariously through Nathan Drake in the first Uncharted!

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But I can tell that you're the more adventurous type. Join Isaac Clarke as he walks the cold, silent depths of the cosmos in Dead Space:

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Sometimes Desmond Miles remembers the exploits of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad incorrectly, but other times he just remembers them strangely. Who knew the star of Assassin's Creed could clone himself in late the 12th century?

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I'm sure there are dozens of more strange glitches in many of your favorite games. Which have you stumbled upon?

Comments (6)

Those are some great videos, especially the Skate one. My personal favourites always come from the GTA series. One of my favourites is from San Andreas, where there was a hidden interiors overworld where you could use a jetpack to fly through the sky and discover all the interiors in the game floating up there, even ones that weren't used.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfr8CnBfTNU
Nick Munson , January 06, 2010
A recent bizarre glitch for me happened at the end of a speed run through Shadow Complex. Jason was wearing the fusion helmet when I finished but this ending cut scene has him sporting a white and purple paper-mache fauxhawk and purple guyliner. Crazy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=466P1P7gDJ4
Kevin John Frank , January 07, 2010
Great stuff, guys! I never knew about that San Andreas glitch, and the Shadow Complex one makes Jason look damn silly.
Rob Savillo , January 07, 2010
I had the misfortune of experiencing the twin Altair glitch in Assassin's Creed. That entire sequence of the game was a technical disaster.

I recently played Ico for the first time (vague Ico spoilers ahead) and experienced a massive glitch with the scene and "battle" with the Queen at the end. First, when I reached the Queen's lair, the cut-scene wasn't triggering, and randomly triggered while I was in a corner of the room trying figure out what to do. As such, I was stuck in this corner with my face to the wall during the cut-scene while I was apparently having this conversation with the Queen.

I use the term "conversation" loosely, as the dialogue kept repeating itself. Both the Queen and Ico kept repeating the same line over and over, but the sub-titles weren't showing, so I wasn't actually sure if the repetition of these lines made sense in the conversation, to which I later found out online that it didn't.

Then out of nowhere, it cut to the "battle" with the Queen, which is supposed to be nothing more than you blocking her spells with your energy sword (which the sword automatically does for you) as you rush up to stab and kill her... Yeah, I wasn't so lucky. The sword decided not to block her attacks, killed me, and my screen went black and froze.

Seeing as there isn't a save point between when you open the massive gate in the courtyard and the final battle, I regressed roughly two hours back in the game. Suppressing a heart attack, I went through it all again and managed to beat the Queen the second time around. Needless to say, that soured the experience of that otherwise delightful game for me.
Bryan Glynn , January 07, 2010
I was playing Darksiders today and had a bit of a glitch.

I was in the second "dungeon" in a room with a bunch of decorative pipes on the wall. I was fighting a group of enemies with a weapon which sends people flying and after I had killed them all the doors did not open and I was stuck.

I started to use the lock on to try and find a wayward enemy I had missed and eventually saw one about ten feet in the air with his head stuck in the L-curve of one of those pipes. He was upside down, held perfectly still in the air so that he almost looked like a piece of the environment. I threw my glaive at him a few times until he exploded and I was free to continue, but it was a rather funny glitch.
Alex Gagne , January 07, 2010
A favourite of mine is the Goldeneye "Get Down" glitch.

Here's a link to a Youtube video showcasing the bug--set to awesome music just like the Skate and Assassin's Creed vids!
Spencer Gregory , January 08, 2010

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