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Good Bad Bugs
aka: Good Bad Bug

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"'Last version was better,' says Floyd. 'More bugs. Bugs make game fun.'"

Some software glitches are so weird and wonderful that everyone likes them and looks back upon them fondly, either because the glitch is funny, or because the glitch can be exploited to help the player and make the game easier.

There are two common breeding grounds of popular bugs. One is 8-bit and 16-bit consoles where the code, data and game state are stored in one homogeneous block, and a single misplaced pointer can read sound generation code as level data or write the graphic memory to the player inventory. The other is cutting-edge 3D games where half a dozen third-party renderers, physics engines and net codes can conflict with one another in freakish ways.

While professional players of single-player games like speedrunners are usually allowed to use glitches to clear games faster, they often have a sort of code of honor of making a separate category where you're not allowed to use glitches to skip parts of the game, although discerning glitches from unmentioned game mechanics can sometimes be controversial. In online multiplayer games, exploiting glitches for your advantage is often considered the same thing as cheating and in some cases may even lead to your account being banned, but in other cases glitches may instead be treated as unintended but fair mechanics. Opinions about these bugs are often controversial and can easily cause a Flame War.

If a Good Bad Bug is liked enough, it may become an Ascended Glitch. In some games, the bugs are a major draw for the game, which can lead to claims the work was So Bad, It Was Better if the bugs are removed. Subtropes include Minus World and Glitch Entity. Compare Artificial Stupidity and A.I. Breaker, which are more to do with how the game's processing handles (or, sometimes, can't handle) playing the game itself. See also Good Bad Translation.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Action Games 
  • Bayonetta has the Lt. Col. Kilgore, the slow but powerful rocket launcher tonfas that can launch a rocket with each attack. By putting the Durga in lightning mode on her feet in the first weapon set and the Kilgore on the second, use the rapid-fire kick attack of the Durga's lightning mode and switch weapons after the animation starts. Bayonetta will continue to do the Durga's kick animation and fire the Kilgore's rockets with every kick. Mind you, the rockets are balanced to only launch one or two per attack. Using this glitch on the fight at the end of Chapter 2 during the fight's invulnerability phase can get you millions of halos.
  • Castle Crashers had a glitch that would cause the boomerang to get stuck on any three bosses if the boss was between you and it. Since experience points are given based on how much you hit an enemy and not how much damage you deal, and the boomerang does 1HP damage per hit, the stuck boomerang would rack up hits and increase your experience quickly. A patch fixed this, but replaced it with a completely different Good Bad Bug that made the Boomerang able to demolish any destructible barrier in one throw.
  • The Toy Spitball Gun in Dead Rising 2 really only serves as Item Crafting parts to make the Fire Spitter weapon. Except for when you face TK's Helicopter, which takes Scratch Damage from anything except thrown weapons. Due to a programming quirk, the Toy Spitball Gun's foam balls are considered thrown weapons, meaning they'll bring it down in under a minute.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry has multiple glitches that make Dante fly around the screen avoiding enemy attacks, and bosses that are unwilling to attack or are just paralyzed. The fandom decided to use them to have fun.
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury, you have to get a Senzu Bean (an item that gives full health and Ki) early in the game to give to Gohan for a Fetch Quest, but you also can eat it before you deliver it. Does the game want you to get another bean if you eat the delivery? No, Gohan will accept the one you don't have, leaving you with -1, a.k.a 255 of them to appear in your inventory. For reference, you're normally capped at carrying three Senzu Beans.
  • Ghostbusters (1984):
    • The original Japanese version of the NES port has a glitch where the Ghost Alarm sells for more than it actually costs, easily allowing the player to buy it and sell it back repeatedly for unlimited money.
    • The infamous stairs sequence in the Zuul Building has a very useful glitch involving the doors. If the player has only one hit point left and they take damage from a ghost on the exact same frame that they open one of the doors, instead of being brought to the Game Over screen, their health will underflow to a staggering 255 hit points, more than enough to effortlessly brute-force their way up to the final battle against Gozer.
  • In the coin-op version of Paperboy, there's a race where you tried to get through a timed game. At the end of the race, you're supposed to cross the finish line. Here's where the bug comes in: if you cross just off the edge of the finish line outside of the edge but before the hedge of the game, it switches to an inverted video version of the race you just ran. This game normally has a high score of around 50,000, but the scores for things you hit in this strange area are very inflated, making it possible to get a score of around a billion, so high it can overwrite part of the screen.
  • In New Rally-X (or at least the Xbox Live Arcade version), a glitch can cause you to go onto the walls. This can sometimes end up saving you, as the CPU-controlled cars can't get you there.
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog, during the Hero missions a secondary character follows you around, and a second player can plug in a controller and control that character. In the Lost Impact stage, while Shadow is riding the Gun Rail he apparently loses his Friendly Fireproof status, as the secondary character (who is Maria, no less) can slap Shadow out of the cockpit, causing an explosion and making you lose rings.
  • The video game adaptation of Spider-Man 2 allows you to fly into the stratosphere if you're hit by the train.
  • In Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, Gambit's first level has a spot where a carefully placed jump can cause you to rapidly collect a single item without it disappearing, allowing you to rapidly gain extra lives. Considering the game's Nintendo Hard status, the glitch goes a long way to making the game at least somewhat beatable.
  • In Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II, the game will not take a life away if you die right as a cutscene begins. The "Razor Rendezvous" mission triggers a cutscene to end the mission the very moment you destroy the Star Destroyer's command deck. As such, once all three shield generators are down you can quickly end the mission (and still qualify for a gold medal; one of the criteria is losing less than a set number of lives) by smashing your ship into the command deck.
  • In Superman 64, the levels alternate between the infamous "fly through the rings" Ride Stages and objective-based Action Stages. On Easy difficulty, completing the fifth Action Stage will display a sneak-peek of the sixth Action Stage while telling the player to play on Normal to access the next levels before returning to the main menu. If the player then changes the difficulty and then select Continue Game, the game will "resume" from the sixth Action Stage—completely bypassing the sixth Ride Stage. This also applies to the seventh and final Action Stage, which can only be played on Superman difficulty. Given that Easy difficulty removes the aforementioned rings from the Ride Stages, this makes it possible to complete the game without flying through a single ring.
  • Wizards & Warriors
    • In the first game, when you take a hit midair there is a brief window where you can perform a mid-air jump. Since the game is downright horny for flying Goddamned Bats and almost every level throws them at you like it's late for a meeting, this allows you to cheese what should be difficult sections and get powerups far easier than normal. Of particular note is the jump in Level 2 that normally requires you to grab a blue potion and run up, around, and over to reach a ledge before it wears off to reach the Feather of Feather Fall, and the jump in Level 3 that normally requires either said feather or grinding until you get a Pink Potion to reach the Battle Axe of Agor and red key.
    • In the sequel Ironsword there is a glitch that allows the player to take the weapon of the previous level to the next one. This allows the player to bypass the level 2 and 3 puzzles and even beat the level 2 boss where you normally need the Blightwater with the Windbane instead. This has become a important trick for when speedrunning the game.

    Adventure Games 
  • In Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsène Lupin, the player, as Holmes, must have his companion Watson with him, of course. Unfortunately (or hilariously), instead of simply having Watson walk behind you, the game engine never has him actually move. Instead, he simply appears to soundlessly teleport right back next to you whenever you're not looking. A hilarious YouTube video illustrates the problem.
  • Infocom games, being text-based, have some of the most amusing glitches in gaming, as your mind can fill in ridiculous blanks to make them seem more ridiculous. Some gems include: poking the idiot in Arthur: Quest for Excalibur, causing him to drop dead and losing you the game; giving robotic commands, even suicidal ones, to the humans trying to kill you in Suspended; deleting absolutely anything from the universe by shoving it under the rug in Beyond Zork, and throwing body parts, like your hands or head, across the room in Plundered Hearts, leaving them lying there on the ground where you can't retrieve them.
  • Sherlock, the followup to Melbourne House's already infamously-buggy Hobbit, was less a game and more a collection of wonderful errors strung together with plot. Contemporary videogame magazines had a cottage industry of finding the best bugs.
    • Inspector Lestrade plays the game and interacts with NPCs and game systems in the exact same way the player does. Preventing him arresting the wrong person can be difficult... unless you wait for him to get in a hansom cab, then tell the driver of his cab to go somewhere. The cab driver obligingly whisks Lestrade off to your choice of destination, and Lestrade freezes because he doesn't know what to do there.
    • By repeatedly giving instructions to the NPCs it is possible to coax a hansom cab driver out of their cab and onto a train, which then departs. Having done that, returning to the abandoned hansom cab will have you driven to a bizarre location where you can pick up objects such as "innocent, guilty, an opium den, and a Russian agent".
  • Demoniak, a rather obscure text adventure on 16-bit systems, used a similar system to Sherlock but allowed players to take control of almost any character in the game, which allowed even more creative chaos. For example, one of the normal playable characters is Flame, a superheroine who can transform herself into fire with the command BURN. Rather dourly, giving the command BURN as any other character causes them to spontaneously combust, actually being set on fire and burning to death. As a result, BECOME ing any character who is in your way and having them BURN becomes an excellent way to get past things.
    Furiously burning Cortex, furiously burning Sondra, and the furiously burning governor are here. The furiously burning governor is burning furiously. The furiously burning governor is dead.
  • The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet opens with the player and Lady Amilia riding in a howdah on an elephant's back. It's possible to ask Amilia to pass you objects — but she will happily give you any object you can refer to, even ones never intended to sit in a person's inventory. She will readily give you herself, for example, meaning she's available to do the same in later scenes; or hand you the green glow you see in the sky.
  • In the original v1.10 version of Adam Cadre's 9:05 from 2000, it was possible to pick up the car, drop it anywhere in the game (including the house, the office, and even the bed), and drive it, with your imagination filling in the blanks. This was fixed starting with the v1.11 release from 2012.
  • King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!: If you play the DOS version with the CD for the Windows version in your disc drive, the game will try to read the audio files off of the disc... but since the disc is for a different version of the game, it plays the wrong audio files. You'll get entirely the wrong dialogue being played with entirely the wrong scenes, turning the plot into nonsense, in addition to sound effects replacing dialogue, dialogue bits replacing sound effects, songs from nowhere, hammers going "boo-boop" and rivers telling you to quit.

    Card Battle Games 
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Spirit Caller, the pack glitch. Apparently, whoever was responsible for the code for buying packs en masse did a horrible job of it; there's a fairly easy way to buy all or all but one of the packs in a set for the price of a single pack. This can potentially mean that you're buying 51 packs for the price of one.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Duel Academy:
    • It was possible to give the Copycat monster an obscene amount of Attack points. At least one AI duelist (in this case, Blair) uses Scapegoat, which creates a group of tokens on the field. Bringing out Copycat and having it copy one of those tokens would, strangely, give it more than 30,000 points when it came time to attack. Note, however, that the exact circumstances that lead to the Attack increase are not known, so use with caution.
    • Burst Stream of Destruction should only be playable if you have a Blue Eyes White Dragon on the field, but the game doesn't check for it, so you got an unrestricted card (i.e. you can have 3 of them) that can destroy all monsters on the enemy field and is also fairly easy to get. This also has the amusing side effect of making Blue Eyes worse, since it gives a penalty for using it instead of making it a Raigeki.
    • Goat tokens from Scapegoat can be substituted for fusion materials a la King of the Swamp (which isn't in this game) after being on the field for one turn. While you still need an original piece of fusion material, it greatly cuts down on the difficulty of fusing.
  • A selection of several cases from Touken Ranbu, which includes such gems as swords saying other swords' lines, swords turned into giants, an enemy being the MVP and, in a chilling moment, a sword who has only sustained serious damage being displayed as dead.

    Light Gun Game 
  • GHOST Squad will still award the "EXCELLENT!" point bonus for Lacard Zimone, the Mission 2 boss, if you fire before his third shot even if you miss.

    MOBA 
  • Brawl Stars: When the Summer 2019 update dropped, a new bug came with it: In the friendly games screen, if you were to change brawlers fast enough, you would keep the other brawler's Star Power. Some of the combinations could get pretty wild:
    • Colt with Brock's Incendiary Star Power: Every single one of Colt's bullets would leave fire on the ground, which dealt 600 damage per second. This was normal for Brock, since he only shoots 1 rocket, but since Colt shoots 6 bullets, he would leave six times the fire, for six times the damage.
    • Bull with Poco's Da Capo!: While the Star Power would normally cause Poco to heal teammates, it caused Bull to hurt teammates.
    • If Max were to use Brock's Rocket no.4 Star Power, it would crash the game, as Max already has four ammo.

    Pinball 
  • Early versions of Game of Thrones has the Martell Super Jackpot Glitch: By choosing House Martell at the beginning of a game (or House Greyjoy after clearing the Martel mission, as House Greyjoy takes on the abilities of every House cleared), you can press the button at the front of the machine to add another ball onto any multiball. If this is done the first instant only one ball remains and Super Jackpot is lit, however, Super Jackpot will remain active for the rest of the ball. Any hit onto the battering ram target will award a Super Jackpot, worth a large amount of points. Ordinarily, collecting the Super Jackpot will disable it until you re-do the process all over again to activate another Super Jackpot.
  • An as-of-yet unreplicatable glitch in WHO dunnit (1995) causes the elevator doors to remain open for the rest of the game. Not only does this allow easy access to modes available only on certain floors, but the shot into the elevator is by far the easiest and safest shot in the game. The discovery of this glitch in 2015, twenty years after the machine's debut, got it banned from all high-level tournaments due to its exploitability once activated. It was then later discovered that an earlier version of the software was immune to this glitch.
  • Because Star Trek: The Next Generation contains six pinballs loaded underneath the playfield in varying locations to help keep the game constantly moving, this machine is quite prone to accidentally releasing more balls than it's supposed to, providing the player with a sudden multiball (albeit one without any extra effects and one the machine doesn't even realize it's doing). It's exciting for anyone playing, but for advanced players, having more than one ball out at a time also makes for good insurance in case they make a mistake, as Star Trek: The Next Generation won't penalize the player until every ball has drained.
    • Similar glitches can be done with any machine with a faulty sensor at the plunger, however: If a ball is at the plunger and the machine doesn't detect it, it will load another, letting you play with 2 balls instead of 1. Whether the game considers it the end of the ball when one of them drains, however, depends on the machine and what made the added ball come out.
  • If the player reaches the 255th mansion room in The Addams Family, any subsequent mansion rooms will provide huge point awards, as the 255th room is the limit of the game's programming (8 bit variable) and it starts glitching up after that. Normally, 9 million is as high as direct point awards go for reaching mansion rooms—these glitched rooms award points in the billions. That being said, this is a glitch very few people will ever see due to the absurd level of skill required: Even top-ranked players are unlikely to reach 50 rooms.
  • In Tales of the Arabian Nights, a glitch allows, under some circumstances, for Harem Multiball and Genie Hurry-Up to occur at the same time. Both of them are high-scoring modes that cover each other's downsides: Genie Hurry-Up normally has a strong chance of you losing your ball down the middle, which is negated by Harem Multi-Ball's ball saver (and the fact that there's more than one ball, meaning there's no harm done in losing one or two); whereas a successful shot in Genie Hurry-Up temporarily traps a ball on a magnet, slowing the pace of Harem Multiball to a more controllable state. Under normal circumstances, neither of these modes allow for the other one to begin as long as they're active.
  • While playing 24, certain conditions cause the Nuke Jackpot to be worth 20 times more points than normal. Considering the normal Nuke Jackpot is the biggest single award until the Wizard Mode, attaining this bugged Nuke Jackpot pretty much guarantees you beat anyone who doesn't also get a bugged Nuke Jackpot.
  • In Johnny Mnemonic, getting the Hold Bonus award is supposed to carry your end-of-ball bonus to the next one. Instead, it will award the end-of-ball bonus at the end of your current ball, then award it twice at the end of the next one. This is good news for anyone with any amount of end-of-ball bonuses, but because one mode, Spinner Millions, is worth a ludicrous amount of points and is only given to you during the end-of-ball bonus, this allows you to obtain the points from Spinner Millions three times (or more than that if you can get Hold Bonus again).
  • One revision of Star Wars (Stern) had a bug that caused the player to almost never leave Victory Multiball once it is earned, effectively putting the player in a semi-permanent multiball state. What's more is that the major mode that was used to achieve Victory Multiball will continue to run, allowing the player to easily cash in on multi-hundred-million shots far longer than intended. Many players have been able to break 100 billion without too much effort. This was despite some of the other bullet points in that revision that were meant to tone down some of the scoring.

    Puzzle Games 
  • Pokémon Puzzle League has a habit of freezing either player during a 3D puzzle match. This is one of those cases where the bug is both a Game-Breaking Bug and this trope, as depending on which player is frozen, you'll either have to restart the game or just wait for an easy victory.
  • Tetris:
    • In Sega's 1988 arcade version, the Random Number Generator uses a very specific seed upon starting up, causing the same permutation of pieces to be generated during the first game after a machine startup. This is known as the "power-on pattern", and top-ranking Sega Tetris players use it to max out their scores in the fewest pieces possible.
    • Tetris DX's rotation system is such that your current piece, provided it isn't the square "O" piece, can be kicked back up the wall, over and over, so that the game never actually progresses. If you're astronomically patient or have access to utilities for tool-assisted runs, it's possible to max out the score counter this way through the points earned from fast dropping before you even put down a single block.
  • Scribblenauts:
    • Using the "Shrink Ray" on summonable terrain features like the "Hole" creates gaps that it's possible to escape the stage through.
    • Terrain features containing water (like the "Sea") can buoy floating objects in themselves without being placed down. This can even be used to carry Starites in things such as ice blocks to you!
    • Attaching objects to each other can produce a lot of bizarre (and hilarious) effects:
      • Objects made with lots of other objects (e.g. by gluing things together) have a tendency to "creep" along the ground with steady momentum. Attaching an object that causes other objects to gain momentum with one of those items using a rigid body (like glue and planks) yields hilarious results.
      • Sticking too many things onto something Maxwell can pick up (like a BASEBALL BAT) can result in him being flung across the screen when the creation explodes.
      • The "flying bridge" glitch, wherein using a fishing rod on a bridge Maxwell is standing on causes him to fly to the ceiling or off the screen, where he dies.
      • If you attach one end of a rope to an object and move the other end of the rope to a container, you not only have the option of attaching the rope to the container, but also the additional option of putting the rope inside, which also puts the attached item inside. You can instantly win almost any level where the starite is visible from the start by spawning a container next to the starite, attaching a rope to the starite, and putting the rope and starite inside the container and dragging the container all the way to Maxwell instantly. Living things can also be put into containers this way, thereby allowing Maxwell to avoid enemies entirely and/or keep vital NPCs out of harm's way by attaching rope to them and stuffing them into refridgerators.
      • Attached objects are treated as one object, which messes with collision. If you attach two objects together via rope, they can pass through each other, meaning that you can attach a starite to a gate and then have it fall through to the other side of the gate.
    • Summoning items that always vanish upon being put into the world (like "Bubble") in the level editor results in said item not vanishing, and becoming a lovely fountain of its appropriate particles. If you start the level you've created, they'll stick around, and you can knock them about. Not surprisingly, though, the huge particle streams crash the game rather quickly if you start summoning other things.
    • Some animals, like gorillas, can both ride things and be ridden on, allowing you to easily create things like gorilla totem poles that slow the game down to a crawl.
    • Scribblenauts Remix has a silly glitch in which making a building ridable can allow the player to walk offstage or even clip through the ground.
    • Creating a vehicle that is invincible or indestrucible during a mission involving an Advancing Wall of Doom will often cause the vehicle to wildly spasm and possibly throw you out of bounds after you have hit end. Similarly, spawning a flying vehicle that is just small enough to fit in a room can cause you to glitch through certain walls if you know how. One can use this in a certain mission in the sequel to skip the puzzle entirely.
  • Puzzle Platformer The Castles of Doctor Creep had a couple of doors in the castle Doublecross that didn't go where they were supposed to. The effect of these doors was to basically create two shortcuts that considerably shortened the castle.
  • Early versions of The Witness contained strange glitches where completing specific puzzles under specific conditions would lead to completely unexpected results:
    • In the red portion of the swamp (the last portion before activating the laser), solving the puzzle that lowers the yellow cubes in a specific way makes disappear a large purple cube in a completely unrelated zone of the swamp, even though the purple cube serves only to decorative purposes.
    • Early in the game, you can find a locked vault with a puzzle involving hexagonal dots and black and white squares. Much later, in the quarry, you can find a puzzle which is completely identical to the aforementioned puzzle except that it adds an annulation symbol. It's been reported that solving the later puzzle would open the vault even if the former puzzle hadn't been solved yet. However, this is an extremely rare situation, since it's unlikely the vault puzzle hasn't been solved by the time the player is able to reach said quarry puzzle.

    Rhythm Games 
  • The DDR Extreme arcade cabinet had a difficult-to-time trick in Oni mode. When switching between courses, the song list shuffled off the screen and is replaced by the new one. By pressing the start button in the middle of this animation, the cabinet may accidentally load the correct songs for the course, but load the difficulties from the previous one. Most combinations don't produce anything special—either a crash and reboot of the machine or Heavy step charts mislabeled as Challenge—but a few courses reveal Challenge-difficulty step charts that were Dummied Out and are not playable through any legitimate means. The main highlights are two: a full Challenge chart for "Love Shine" (mostly similar to the Double Heavy chart, but fitted to four panels) and a Challenge chart for "Dam Dariram" which doesn't quite fit... but, as fans have worked out, it's meant to fit to the Captain Jack remix of "Give It Up", revealing that that song was intended for the game but cut.
  • Due to the way DJMAX Technika's touch screen handles touches, you can do tap notes by dragging your finger across them, and conversely, you can do chain notes by individually tapping each individual segment. Whether this is a legitimate way of playing the game is a matter of debate.
  • StepMania 3.9 (and "3.95", the version used by In the Groove 2) has a series of bugs that allow for some serious Interface Screw. The most famous one is perhaps the "Negative BPM" bug, which can be used to create warps, which can then be used for a wide variety of effects and tricks. It has been leveraged to create crazy fan favorites.
    • Unfortunately, this bug was fixed on 4.0. However, sm-ssc (StepMania 5) turns it into an Ascended Glitch by providing built-in means to perform warps.
  • Rock Band 3:
    • In the PS3 version at least: some venues have large props that the rockers sometimes stand on. There's one venue with lots of green lanterns that does not seem to have such a prop, but the game seems to think it does, so rockers will sometimes stand several feet above the stage.
    • The "custom X setlist" challenges allow you to choose which songs you want to play, but only if they meet the condition X. But someone forgot to disable the filters option, so you can just turn off the filters and select songs that don't match the challenge description, and play a "Custom Metal Setlist" consisting of Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga.
  • In Crypt of the NecroDancer, there is an uncommon bug involved with the tempo switches on the floor. If you set one off, and blow it up before it reverts, the music will stay slowed down/sped up for the remainder of the level.
  • In the Groove 2's r21 update allows players to play custom songs off of their USB drives, but the song must not be tagged as longer than 2 minutes. Emphasis on "tagged"; the game uses the track's metadata to determine if it exceeds 2 minutes, and it's possible to trick the game into playing a "2-minute" song that is actually 5 minutes long, for example. The r23 update instead cuts off songs at 2 minutes and 15 seconds regardless of metadata.
  • Pump It Up will give out all Perfects for a hold step as long as you keep it held the entire time, even if you hold down the note in advance. A song where this exploit can be put to use is "Pumptris Quattro"'s S17 chart, which is composed entirely of hold notes, allowing a sufficiently-heavy player to sit down on the panels for the duration of the song to obtain the easiest SS ever.
  • Being an early, rap-based Rhythm Game, the COOL freestyle system in Parappa The Rapper is far from perfect & can be easily broken...to hilarious results.
  • BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!'s flick notes, on paper, are meant to be flicked up. However, flicking horizontally a la CHUNITHM works as well.

    Shoot-Em-Up Games 
  • Space Invaders:
    • In the original, the "random" point value of the flying saucer is actually a completely predictable function of how many times the player has fired. It is worth 50 points if hit with one of the first 8 shots, 100 points if hit with shots 9 10 11 or 12, 150 points if hit with shots 13 or 14, and 300 points if hit with shot 15; then the cycle starts over. Savvy players can count their shots and get 300 points each time.
    • Due to the way the game was designed, the amount of sprites on the screen seriously lags the system. The more invaders you kill the more game speeds up, inadvertently creating the idea of Difficulty by Acceleration.
  • Sinistar has a bug that allowed you to acquire 255 ships. It takes a second or two for the Sinistar to eat your ship, during which a Warrior ship can shoot you, making you lose two lives at once. If you start with one life, your number of lives will drop from 1 to 0 to -1. Since this number is stored as an 8-bit unsigned integer, -1 will register as 255.
  • Touhou:
    • Later games in the series have Marisa's B firing mode glitched up. In Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism, using Marisa B with 3-3.95 Power caused insane damage, enough to cut lengthy cards to a third of the length. It's a bit nerfed in SA, though, as you need to shotgun with a specific formation. It also fails in MoF if the player focuses.
    • Akin to this, "Malice Cannon" in Imperishable Night. As the Magician Team (Marisa and Alice), tapping the focus button with the right rhythm allows both characters' attacks to be active simultaneously. This bug doesn't break the game, but rather moves the ridiculously underpowered Marisa/Alice team's damage output to top tier.
    • Lunasa from Perfect Cherry Blossom can glitch at times, making her "Fake Strings 'Pseudo-Stradivarius'" card last unusually little for Reimu A, should you choose to fight Lunasa after the sisters' first joint attack. While the glitch can be observed with a certain degree of consistency during Normal and Lunatic gameplay, it's currently unknown whether or not it can trigger on Hard, given that the script for "Spirit Strings 'Stradivarius'" is noticeably different on this particular difficulty. The glitch, nonetheless, trivializes the card, which comes to ease the heavy-dodging you're normally subject to with Lunasa. you can watch the glitch on action here (skip to 5:53).
    • In Ten Desires, due to the way Mamizou's creature bullets are animated, the boolean that tells the game that a bullet has already been grazed doesn't activate. What this means is that by simply sticking close to any creature bullet, the player can accumulate ridiculous amounts of graze, far more than the actual number of grazed bullets. While all of Mamizou's cards feature this to some extent, it's most noticeable during Wild Deserted Island, which fills the whole screen with nothing but creature bullets.
    • Almost all spellcards in Touhou gradually reduce the points you get for capturing them over time, so capturing a card after 15 seconds gives more of a reward than capturing it after 20 seconds. While this is normal and fine in itself, it can lead to some odd quirks in a few cases; for example, Yuugi's first boss spellcard on Lunatic has a rather low reward for capture. If you spend enough time against the spellcard, the capture bonus will go negative, causing you to actually lose points for capturing it. Then there's Rorschach in Danmaku, where the point value fails to change at all; if you time it out, the game will consider it a capture, as shown here... though given that this card is That One Attack, scorerunners generally do not appreciate this fact.
    • In the later games with spellcard practice (as of this writing, Ten Desires and Double Dealing Character) you can practice any spell you've seen with any character. This is intentional. What isn't, though, is that doing this unlocks the relevant stage practice, even if the card in question isn't even in that character's version of the stage.
    • Suwako Moriya's first spellcard in the Extra Stage of Mountain of Faith has a glitch wherein the laser waves that is normally intended to fire downwards will fire on the direction the player was positioned during the pre-boss conversation. The player can cheese the spellcard by positioning himself above the screen on the center before the pre-boss conversation take place. This results with the player only has to dodge the homing bullet bursts without having to contend with the enclosing waves of lasers.
    • In Subterranean Animism, Marisa-B's bomb can hit Yuugi, Orin, and Sanae during their pre-midboss cutscenes... before their hitpoints have loaded, instantly defeating them. (there's a reason Marisa B is called "Marisa Bugged")
  • In the Combat game packed in with the original Atari 2600, running your tank into the inside of a corner—usually a corner of the screen—will teleport you to the opposite side.
  • In Tank Pong, after one player successfully kills the other and his tank is still in motion during the "death sequence" (i.e. the "dead" opponent spinning), if the victor's moving tank touches the wall bounding the playfield, his tank will suddenly start sliding rapidly along the wall, warping around off the edge of the screen and back out the opposite edge, until the next round begins. If the same victor's tank touches the beaten tank while doing so, he also takes the spinning tank with him in that joyride.
  • In any Tank game, having both players' tanks positioned one right in front of the other (i.e. one Tank's gun right on the other's rear) and touching, and having both move forward, will cause both to suddenly begin spinning rapidly in a circle (and passing through any nearby wall or barrier).
  • In After Burner Climax, after lighting the afterburners for a while they would automatically turn off and your plane would slow down to cruising speed. By deliberately throttling back from the standard middle position and then shoving the throttle forward again periodically, you could maintain afterburner near-continuously. This was not removed from the XBLA and PSN releases.
  • In the original Escape Velocity, one can suppress planetary defense fleets entirely by hiring enough escorts to achieve the cap on the number of ships in a system.
  • In the original arcade version of Raiden and its PS1 port The Raiden Project, switching main gun right before or during a boss battle will cause the game to ignore the current settings of the Dynamic Difficulty and reverts bosses to their lowest health value. It is particularly easy to cheese the 3rd boss this way as destroying its front section always spawn a weapon power up.

    Third Person Shooter Games 
  • Red Dead Redemption 2: In a Hostage Situation where Mary-Beth is held at gun-point, if the player pulls a Shoot the Hostage Taker using an explosive Trick Bullet, the game will only track that you hit the target, and proceed on as if she was rescued despite Mary-Beth walking around with her head blown off from the explosion! He then asks her "You alright, Mary-Beth? That was a close one."
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • The ability to run at 1.5 times Leon's normal speed by switching to the Striker, raising it and then quickly equipping another weapon before the laser sight could activate (useful but cautiously used in speedrunning). This even got a Shout-Out in Resident Evil 4 (Remake) where the Striker charm increases Leon's running speed.
    • Ashley's ability to suplex enemies by whacking them with a door. It's also possible to open locked doors from the wrong side with the TMP equipped to bypass entire "find the key" Fetch Quests, pressing L + R before every Press X to Not Die moment which (most of the time) makes the other button prompt appear, and being able to push Ashley through the scenery by getting her into a corner and pushing against her when she ducks (useful for keeping enemies off of her).
    • The gimmick where Ashley scolds you for looking up her skirt is set to trigger any time Leon's eyes aim up in that direction - even when he's been knocked down by an enemy or his severed head rolls between her legs.
  • Resident Evil 5 had a glitch where you could load guns using the inventory... even if they were the gun you had out. In multiplayer, this allowed skilled players to reload near instantly, circumventing the weakness of many weapons and making chaining combos together a lot easier.
  • Saints Row series:
    • Saints Row had, in the words of Cabel Sasser, "the world's most awesome bugs." He even composed a medley about them.
    • Saints Row 2 has a slight glitch having to do with reloading. Usually, your nameless protagonist will reload dual SMGs by spinning them in his/her hands and keeping them at his sides. Sometimes holding down the reload button makes the game act as if you are still firing while you are in a reloading animation, meaning it looks like the guy you took out in front of you was killed by some crazy richochet.
    • Go at a high speed and ram a gas station pump. You'll blast off farther than the Team Rocket trio.
    • Saints Row: The Third has a bug where, on occasion, the D4TH Blossom SMG just fires from its total ammunition without the Boss having to bother with replacing magazines - normally this requires spending a ludicrous amount of money on upgrades.
  • Mafia has several. For instance, while the civilian population's driving AI usually works fine, it sometimes fails amusingly, leading to 'drunk drivers' barely managing to stay on the road and eventually crashing into obstacles. Also, try getting out of e.g. a racing car and stealing a car from gangsters. They will in turn get into your abandoned car, pursue you with it, and die horribly as their AI can't cope with a car that fast.
    • Another incredibly useful exploit: Reload your weapon and immediately perform a sideways roll to have your weapon be instantly-reloaded without having to wait for the reload animation to complete.
      • Amusingly enough, Grand Theft Auto IV has this very same glitch.
      • And Resident Evil 4. Unfortunately you could only dodge when you're being attacked, and most enemies don't give you enough of a warning to use this bug reliably.
  • Gears of War's final boss General RAAM is extremely difficult for two reasons, his handheld minigun and his shield of kryll bats. Mercifully, it is possible to trick him into standing behind the last cement block to the right of the platform where he appears, where he stops moving and does not target you with his gun as long as you don't stick your head up from cover. Getting him into this glitch spot is tricky and the other sources of damage can still get you on insane level, but this trick is enough to bring down an impossible fight to an almost manageable one.
  • Oni has a fair few bugs, both good and bad. A lot of the bad ones (such as enemy Mooks' inability to sprint or dodge weapons fire) are fixed in the fan-made Oni: Anniversary Edition. They left in the bug that resets the rate of fire setting on weapons when dropped. Feel like annihilating someone with four clusterbomb shots in under two seconds? M1-E-Q-M1-E-Q-M1-E-Q-M1.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising has the Play Dead+Jump glide combo. Play Dead causes your death animation to play (A Smash Brothers style explosion and a gravestone popping out where you were). This doesn't really fool anyone because the actual death animation also involves being knocked back several feet into the air and the gravestone lasting for more than just a second. It also doesn't work as well as a get away tactic because your invisibility goes away almost immediately once you start moving around. But the game doesn't count Jump Glide as moving, allowing you to zip across the map invisibly.
  • Splatoon had a glitch on the Piranha Pit map where, due to object placement in some modes, you could bend your character's neck at unreasonable angles. This happened because the game had no code specifically to handle posture when attempting to enter a niche shorter than they are tall (which could only happen on that map).
  • Splatoon 2:
    • The game had a useful glitch in Hero Mode where you could re-collect XP- and cash-boosting meal tickets redeemable at the Crust Bucket food truck. They'd still show up grey and nominally give you one Power Egg, but at said truck you could find extra tickets in your collection. Players would exploit this mechanic to grab as many tickets as possible and make grinding easier. However, it got patched out in version 1.1.2; players will now have to unlock all upgrades and then spend an additional 1500 Power Eggs for a random meal ticket instead.
    • In Salmon Run, if a round ends with a team wipe, the game doesn't formally end the round until the final player's death animation finishes. Players quickly discovered that the game's drowning animation was a few seconds longer than the normal death animation, leading people in a tough spot to deliberately jump off the stage rather than die to the wave of enemies in the last few seconds of each round, guaranteeing that the clock would run out before their death registered.

    Visual Novels 
  • Melody had a glitch up until the release of the final version in which only the expensive perfume would get the player onto Amy’s romantic path rather than a set of three choices.

    Other 
  • There was an online Martian Rover Sim in 3D, which had been designed as part of the mission's publicity. The Sim was designed to show how the rover would move and collect samples. It also had some speed settings which, instead of speeding up the whole simulation, increased the speed of the rover, allowing some really stupid stunts. You could take the rover to the edge of the map, where there was a small wall, climb it, and head out into the wide red yonder, which caused the rover to drive upside down through the air, among other things... Not bad for an educational resource!
  • Microsoft Sam has a very interesting way of saying "soi" and "soy". This sound has come to be referred to by some as the ROFLcopter.
    • The bug with "soi" appears to be that it's pronouncing it as if it were a French word (which it is), so it comes out "swa", but what it's doing with "soy" is just bizarre.
  • In the Google Earth flight simulator, if you hit the ground, you die. However, if you start on the ground, don't take off and be very careful with the controls, the game doesn't register you hitting the ground and dying. Because of this, you can, among other things, taxi a propeller plane through/out of/into the Grand Canyon/Mount Everest and taxi an F-16 on or even under water.
  • The still-alpha Windows-clone ReactOS got a bug in its hard disk driver that caused it not to register and prevent access to disks - or it would have, had the Plug-n-Play infrastructure not been so screwed up that it set everything up anyway.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • The stack operates in a "Last In, First Out" manner. This means that the last ability put into the stack, played in response to something, occurs first. This can be exploited by spells that have a "leaves play" effect and some other effect. Often, these "leaves play" effects undo the previous effect, but if you somehow remove the card from play in response to its other effect, the card will leave play without undoing anything, and then the initial effect activates and never gets undone. This can remove lands, creatures, cards from a player's hand, and life permanently. If you remove the exploitable card from play by returning it to your hand, you can even repeat the effect!
    • "Patched" with more modern variations on these cards that are worded so that that trick doesn't work anymorenote . This has the effect of making formats which only use the 'fixed' versions of these cards much less dependent on exploiting weird rules interactions, but can be pretty confusing when playing older formats (including Modern) where it's also legal to play the older cards with very slightly different wording which does allow for silly stack trickery.
  • Merge Dragons lets you watch a few videos a day to gain an additional chalice each to use to play levels. The button then vanishes, not to return for a while. Normally, you have to wait an hour to get another chalice. But if you tap where the button was, most people now find that it still gives the popup to watch an ad anyway, and if you pick yes, it still shows the ad and gets you your free chalice. There doesn't appear to be a limit to this for players that are doing this at the moment. Since repeating levels is the only real way to get premium currency without paying for it (through an RNG process), this bug is extremely helpful to free players.
  • Certain more recent Tamagotchi models have a trick with a pencil and a screwdriver that lets you access the device's debug menu, which allows you to choose any pet you want, including those that were Dummied Out.
  • YouTube:
    • The official iPhone and Android apps for the site both have exploits that allow you to view 18+ videos without an account. They also have exploits that allowed private videos to be viewed by anyone, such as when Team Fortress 2's "Meet the Spy" video was leaked a few hours earlier than its intended release.
    • YouTube has a hilariously broken auto-caption transcribing system that never fails to completely mangle whatever you ask it to add subtitles to. Most of the problem seems to come from the fact that the system tries to translate every sound it hears into dialogue, which then becomes a complete mess. It has provided numerous hilarious captions and even one case of Ascended Fanon in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series. note 
      • While it has improved over time, it refuses to swear (at least, it won’t say “fuck”). This can cause amusing gaps.
  • Some forums have bugs where a person's post can be shunted a few minutes (or even hours) back or forwards in time and end up appearing in the wrong place. While this can be amusing enough as it is it is even better when it's a forum about a time travel game.
  • Family Feud on the SNES was very buggy in terms of what it would accept as the correct answer. The game usually just checks if the first few letters of your answer matches any answer on the board or if they're in the same order regardless of what other letters are between them, so sometimes entering gibberish, swear words, or just about anything else could match something on the board even if your typed response is way off the mark. Milked for all it's worth in this TAS, and discovered hilariously in this Game Grumps clip.
  • In Grand Theft Auto, pressing the horn button while on foot would make the player character fart and belch. This action can still be done if the player is killed.
  • Someone on Facebook discovered the Thai ideogram ส็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็ does a neat format-breaking trick, so it spread quickly.
  • Similarly, someone realized that you could abuse combining marks in Unicode to make characters stack and overlap. Th̢i̢s ̢uńlea͞s̨he͏d̛ t̕he ͞ni̡ghtma͟ri͡s҉h́ Zalgo ùpon̕ t̕he w̶o҉r͏l̢d.̀ H̵̕͜͟͝e̢҉ ̛͏̴̕c͘͢ò́͜͢͞m҉̢̛́é̸͟͝s͡.̵͢͞҉͢.̵̀͘.̵̀͢͞͞
  • In Vampire: The Requiem, there's an in-universe Good Bad Bug with the third tier of the Coil of Blood (which causes a vampire to receive three points of Vitae for every two Vitae they actually drink). The bug is when two vampires who know it use it on each other, allowing them to harvest theoretically infinite amounts of Vitae. It's well-known and generally banned due to the almost inevitable consequences of the ensuing Vinculum.
  • One online Pokémon battle simulator will sometimes get stuck on processing a move in a battle against an NPC, forcing the player to refresh the screen and turning back the clock to the last action taken by the player. Very helpful if the last thing the NPC did was knock your Pokémon out.
  • In the TRS-80 game Starfighter, pressing a number key 0-7 accelerates you to a pre-selected speed of 2^(number) - 1. Thus, pressing 3 accelerates you to speed 7, pressing 4 accelerates you to speed 15, etc.. It didn't take the players long to discover that if you pressed two number keys at the same time, you'd accelerate to an intermediate velocity — and that holding down all the number keys 0 through 7 at the same time would accelerate you to speed 254, faster than any spacecraft you'd ever encounter.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Bar Rescue, one of the bars that the show went to somehow managed to drop a grilled cheese sandwich into a fryer. The resulting fried grilled cheese sandwich was enjoyed by the host of the show and the staff of the bar, who then put it on the menu.
    • Apocryphally, a similar error may have been responsible for the French dip sandwich (a steak sandwich with onions, served with a side of broth for dipping). According to the story, a cook dropped a French roll in some beef broth or drippings during a busy lunch rush. Not having time to remake the sandwich, he served it to the customer, who loved it and started asking for it to be made that way.
  • The robot used for Google Street View images was programmed to recognize human faces and blur them out for the sake of privacy. Amusingly, it sometimes can't tell actual faces from representations of them, so it will blur the faces of religious monuments, mascots, and other large statues.
  • Steam sometimes messes up the prices of games during sales, resulting in the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm games being on sale for $5.61...with its original price being erroneously listed as 184 quadrillion dollars. Though being part of a Long Runner Anime & Manga franchise, it probably feels like it costs that much.
  • My Handy Design, a third party Amazon vendor, used an A.I. to determine popular image searches, print them on iPhone cases, and sell them online. Something went wrong with the algorithm they used, and the end result was thousands of unlikely phone case designs with overly specific listings like "Adult Diaper Worn By An Old Man With A Crutch Cell Phone Cover Case iPhone 6".
  • The setting of The Ballad of Edgardo had a city called Haven. So long as a character is inside the city, their Spirit (the game's equivalent of mana) is automatically filled up to the maximum amount they can hold. There's a perk available during character creation which gives the character no maximum on the amount they can hold, but nobody had ever taken it (except for the narrator who neglected to read the description properly) because it had the crippling downside of locking the character out of all elemental attacks, leaving them stuck with the Non-Elemental "Raw Spirit". Raw Spirit, despite not being resisted by anything, was so weak that spending the same amount of Spirit on an elemental attack would usually still do more damage even if the target resisted it. Any character relying solely on Raw Spirit would therefore be next to useless in a fight... unless, of course, they happened to have an unlimited amount of Spirit to spend on every attack.
  • The '90s children's educational game Secret Writer's Society was discovered a few months after release to have a bug causing the game's text-to-speech feature to read a list of obscenities instead of the on-screen text if the "Read" button was double-clicked instead of single-clicked. The group RTMark claimed responsibility for the bug as an act of deliberate sabotage to demonstrate how foolish it is to rely on a computer program to educate your children, which passed on into software legend. In 2018, however, RTMark co-founder Igor Vamos confirmed that the whole story was made up to add a provocative air to what really was just the most stunning glitch with a swear filter imaginable.
  • Netflix has a bug that can swap the description of shows. Pictures of kids' shows with descriptions of adult shows and movies quickly became a meme.
  • In New Game!, the in-universe video game Fairies Story 3 has a few.
    • A scripted sequence involves bandits attacking the protagonist and Sophia (a minor NPC based off the main character of the manga), and reinforcements will continue to arrive until they kill Sophia. While beta testing, Aoba's best friend Nene finds a way around this; by leading Sophia into a corner of the forest, positioning the protagonist so that he's between Sophia and the bandits, and then continuously attacking, the player can prevent her death. Unfortunately, it's impossible to advance the story, since the sequence ends with her death.
    • Nene also finds out that under certain circumstances, it's possible to look up the characters' skirts and see their panties. Shizuku ends up making this an Ascended Glitch.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: Vanellope can use her tendency to glitch out to pass through obstacles on the track, including other racers. When she becomes a playable character in the end, some players work out how to do this when playing her, and because it's Difficult, but Awesome she quickly becomes a favorite.
  • The 2020 release of Microsoft Flight Simulator featured a few interesting ones. Apparantly, a building in Melborne, due to a typo, had 212 floors, rather than its real world 2. The result needs to be seen to be believed. It is being called the "Melborne Citadel", after the Half-Life 2 building of the same name. There are other fun bugs in the initial release, like the Irish cliffs of Moher which have the nearby road melted into them and a complete inability to correctly deal with palm trees.
  • Game of Life: Towards the end of the game's path, there is a space called "You're a grandparent!" It is entirely possible to land there despite not having any children.
  • The Steam Train playthrough of Skyrim relies heavily on these in order to feasibly complete such a long game in only 13 episodes (About 3 hours, give or take), with Ross using speedrunning tactics like using wooden plates to clip through walls, running forever in spite of the Sprint Meter with torches, and climbing sheer vertical cliffs with a horse, much to Danny's sheer bemusement and delight.
    Danny: What?! What, wha— what?! Explain what just happened!
    Ross: So the hitboxes in Skyrim are really finicky. The walls are like totally fucked. So if you put a plate between you and the walls the game just kind of approximates where you are between the character and the plate, and for some reason since the plate's hitbox is slightly bigger and goes through the wall it glitches and just knocks you through the wall.
    Danny: So what you're telling me is if you fucking carry bowls around you can walk through walls? That is the stupidest most awesome thing I've ever heard!
  • On the Commodore 64, Raster Interrupts broke a number of established rules of the system. Normally you could only have one color in the border at one time, one text color, one background color, two colors per cell (or four on Multicolor Bitmap Mode), only 8 sprites, and sprites overlapping in the border, but by abusing Raster Interrupts you could utilize multiple colors at once, draw many more colors per cell, and have sprites in the double-digits that went anywhere on the screen. Basically, since the device "draws" the screen one line at a time, you can use machine code to interrupt this process mid-way and then send new instructions, which allows you to do all sorts of trickery. This was, and still is, abused mercilessly by the game developer and demo scene.
  • ChatGPT, being a learning AI, is designed to take text and convert it into usable information based on context. To stop users from exploiting it, there are various safeguards in place where the bot will refuse to display information if the given text is deemed offensive or NSFW. However, by exploiting the AI's roleplaying feature to trick it into acting like someone else and figuring out the right prompts, it's easy to break it and have it write some very NSFW stories.

    This Very Wiki 
  • This bugged forum thread. Somehow made entirely out of mismatched fragments of posts from somewhere else on the forums, it reads as a Word-Salad Humor. And says it has only one post despite all of this.

    Real Life Examples 
  • The 1981 Cadillac El Dorado had a balancing problem which was corrected by installing a steel plate underneath the driver's seat. This saved Frank Lawrence "Lefty" Rosenthal from a car bomb attempt, which served as the inspiration for a scene in Casino.
  • Harley-Davidson is well known for engines which vibrate a lot due to the lack of a counterbalancer, owing to their design heritage going as far back as co-founder Bill Harley's original engine designs from the early 1910s to the 1930s, so when Harley gathered feedback from riders for their then-upcoming Milwaukee-Eight motor, the counterbalancing system used on the Milwaukee-Eightnote  was found to be so effective that it cancelled out all vibration from the engine, leading to complaints from riders who felt that the new motor didn't feel like what a Harley should. As the vibrations have since become a part of Harley's brand image, the company reportedly made the balancer a little less efficient in order to appease veteran riders.
  • Electronic novelty items that speak or sing while moving a part of them, such as singing fish. The fact that a fish on a plaque is flapping its tail to the music and lipsyncing is funny enough as it is to many people, but let the batteries get low and they get slowed and off-keyed when they try to move themselves. The effect can be pretty funny or Nightmare Fuel depending on your sense of humor.
    • Some synthesizers, like the Hing Hon EK-001, can sound like they're dying if they're low on batteries, too.
    • This happens with the old edutainment toy Speak n' Spell, but that's a Bad Bad Bug.
    • The Simon memory game would actually run faster (and its notes would play higher) if the batteries started to get weak, making for a more difficult challenge. However when the batteries were really weak, the device would no longer work properly and would simply become a light show.
    • Many talking watches and clocks do this when battery power is scarce.
    • Many modern toys have circuits to detect when their batteries are low and cut themselves off completely instead of soldiering on and scaring the kids.
  • Genetic mutations. They may produce traits that hinder an individual's chance of survival, or an extremely adaptive trait or a whole new species, and sometimes both at once. Or even traits that do nothing at all, such as eye color.
    • Sickle cell disease is not a very pleasant condition to have, being a defect in the gene for oxygen-carrying hemoglobin that results in misshapen red blood cells. These sickle cells are less capable of transporting oxygen and prone to getting painfully stuck in the patient's blood vessels. However, being a carrier for sickle cell (having only one copy of the recessive mutation) makes you resistant to the malaria parasite, which is by far the likeliest explanation for why the sickle cell trait hasn't been selected out; regions where malarial mosquitoes are endemic and those where the sickle cell trait persists, are largely coterminous.
  • The Cowpox virus. Being affected by this benign disease makes one immune to the far deadlier smallpox. This observation and subsequent successful use of a preventive treatment against smallpox inspired the development of vaccination.
  • Brothers Will Keith and John Harvey Kellogg were Seventh-Day Adventists who oversaw the operation and bookkeeping of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were in the process of cooking wheat for granola before being called away, but came back to find it had gone stale. Not wanting to waste anything, they decided to roll and bake the mixture anyway, and in doing so accidentally invented bran flakes. These proved so popular with the patients that Will Keith decided to set up a breakfast cereal company; the rest is history.
  • The Winchester 1897's external hammer meant it lacked a trigger disconnector, which was never considered a problem as the gun operated as intended. However, it meant that you could fire the shotgun simply by holding down the trigger and pumping the action, a phenomenon known as "slam firing". This essentially meant that its rate of fire depended on how fast you could pump. Dangerous at a shooting range, life-saving in the trench warfare of World War I. At least, if you weren't on the receiving end.
    • This was such a horrific thing to be on the receiving end of, that Germany actually accused the United States of human rights violations for using the shotguns to clear trenches, citing the part of the Hague Convention which restricts the use of cruel and unnecessarily painful weapons. Note however that, in the trenches, your one other option was a trench knife that would undoubtedly cause a ragged wound that would then become infected in the filthy conditons. Compared to that, the shotgun was downright humane.
  • Quantum tunnelling. There's a finite probability that something thought impossible in classical physics, like an electron moving through an insulator, can happen. It's because of this that flash memory and electron microscopes work and, for that matter, the Sun keeps shining.
  • The TRS-80 color computer, back in the 1980s, had a glitch where the computer did not know if it had already written color to a pixel. This flaw allowed a far greater color palette because multiple color instructions could be written to the same pixel, which then displayed much the same as blending colors on an artist's palette.
    • The fact that the NTSC color signal causes artifacting as a whole. Computer programmers were initially frustrated that it made text borderline unreadable at 80 columns with some color combinations due to the burst overlap causing blurring to the text, which doesn't happen on RGB monitors. However, they soon discovered that by carefully placing their pixels and choosing their colors, they could create colors that were never in the computer's palette to begin with. And the kicker is, this bug is a fault with the way NTSC signal works, meaning it was exploited by every single computer system with a color limitation but output to TV- documentations show that the trick has been used on the Apple ][, Atari 8-Bit Computers, Commodore 64 and even PCs. Unfortunately, this didn't work for people in PAL regions as PAL was widely advertised to be immune of artifacting (although in truth, it was simply immune to the NTSC method- it has it's own color-mangling problem as outlined below). These techniques faded away as video chips gained more colors and computer makers switched to cleaner RGB connections.
    • The ZX Spectrum had a similar possible effect, due to the way PAL encoding works. One popular demo (published on a tape magazine) squeezed over 300 colours from the Speccy's 8-colour palette.
  • Gary Gygax bought a bag of cheap plastic toy dinosaurs to use as miniatures in the new fantasy-based tabletop war game he and his friends were messing around with. Several were so badly-crafted that they not only didn't look like dinosaurs, but they didn't look like anything that could possibly exist in the real world. Rather than throw them out, Gygax made up names and abilities for the glitch-marred toys, ultimately adding three iconic monsters—the bulette, owlbear, and rust monster—to the Dungeons & Dragons game.
  • According to the founder of musical instrument maker Roland, the TR-808 drum machine was built with a large consignment of defective transistors between 1980 and 1983, which contributed to the machine's distinctive sizzle sound. Since then, attempts to replicate the sound have proven unsuccessful due to the fact that modern transistors are too perfect.
  • The Keurig 1.0 allowed a user to dispense plain hot water for tea bags, noodles or whatever you needed hot water for by doing all the steps to make a beverage with a k-cup, just by not inserting the k-cup into the receptacle. The Keurig 2.0 now has that as a standard option, asking you if you want to simply dispense hot water if you don't insert a k-cup after closing the receptacle.
  • In the '50s and early '60s, electric guitarists strove to eliminate feedback and distortion in favor of a clean sound. The emergence of heavy rock in the mid-late '60s prompted guitarists like Dave Davies, Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix to exploit feedback and distortion for ever-louder sounds and changed rock and roll forever.
  • A key part of the Mellotron's (a tape-based forerunner of the modern sampling keyboard) distinctive sound is that all of the recordings of an instrument were made in isolation from each other, resulting in some very powerful string sounds.
  • A lot of guitarist Tom Morello's technique comes from his exploitation of various mistakes he makes during practice and rehearsals, and the eccentricities in his equipment (most notably, his use of the first-generation Digitech Whammy, a harmoniser pedal notorious for its poor tracking).
  • The HP-41C is a programmable calculator which allows the user to program complex sequences of operations into memory to be executed with a single keypress. Some users discovered that pressing a key at the right time during programming, before the calculator is expecting it, will put the program editor in a glitched state that allowed parts of instructions to be overwritten with other data. By using this technique, which became known as synthetic programming, to "corrupt" a program in deliberate ways, one could program the calculator in ways that otherwise weren't possible.
  • The original revision of the famous Commodore SID sound chip had an imperfection in its implementation where audio from the three waveform generators are mixed incorrectly, as well as a flaw in the filter implementationnote . As it turns out, these flaws combine to give the SID chip the ability to produce PCM sound clearly with its PSG. When a revised version of the SID chip that fixed all these flaws was later released, it was found that PCM audio reproduction became muffled.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Good Bad Bug, Useful Bugs

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Halo Infinite physics glitch

After the Master Chief is struck by a plasma grenade while driving a Ghost, Halo Infinite's ragdoll physics glitch out, causing Chief's corpse to be catapulted into the atmosphere while spinning and T-posing.

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