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"What's the difference between a bug and a feature?"
"Marketing."
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If a Good Bad Bug is particularly liked by fans of a game, it might be upgraded to the status of a legitimate feature in a sequel, update, or expansion. This is a refreshing attitude from game developers, who otherwise tend to take a zero-tolerance approach to the squashing of bugs—the exact opposite of the attitude usually taken by fans.

Of course, bugs that break the game balance usually aren't eligible for this, unless the game is rebalanced to accommodate them. Game Breaking Bugs are never eligible, of course, owing to making the game unwinnable. No-one likes those bugs.

See also:

  • Good Bad Bugs, where glitches can be used for gaining an advantage of the game or just pure entertainment.
  • Ascended Meme, where those related to the source material of the meme recognize it.
  • Ascended Fanon, where fan-suggested ideas and stories are written into the Canon.
  • Throw It In!, which is like this trope, but involves films and tv shows in production.
  • Violation of Common Sense, which most of these bugs tend to rely upon.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    4X 
  • Civilization brings us an unusual example, as the supposed glitch was later proven to not exist at all. The "Nuclear Gandhi" urban legend states that all leaders in the game are given an "aggression" rating from 1 to 10note , and Gandhi had the lowest starting aggression of 1 to reflect the leader's historically pacifist ways. However, when a nation adopts Democracy as their government, this reduces the aggression level by 2, which would underflow Gandhi's aggression so that it would loop back around to the highest aggression level possible and thus the erstwhile peace-loving Indian leader would suddenly become obsessed with building nukes and hucking them at anyone who so much sneezed at him wrong. In reality, Gandhi throwing around nukes had nothing to do with any underflow, but because it's such a memetic part of the series (and because India has nukes in real life), Civilization V recreated this behavior on purpose. He generally won't attack you first, but if you attack him then he'll happily nuke you in response.
  • Crusader Kings II:
    • The Conclave DLC modifies the preexisting Caligula's Horse event with Lunatic rulers to make the horse an actual Non-Player Character with "Horse" culture. Though Glitterhoof's "Horse" trait is supposed to both make him/her infertile and prevent him/her from being granted titles, players quickly discovered a variety of exploits to switch their dynasty to Horse culture (along with a whole lot of other nonsensical-in-context oddities, such as Glitterhoof plotting a murder or being made a concubine, that usually end up in the forum's Strange Screenshots thread). Upon realizing how funny the players thought the whole thing was, Paradox first announced they would not patch the bugs around Glitterhoof, then in Reaper's Due they added an additional horse and an event chain where you could make either of them immortal (which may lead to you being attacked by an immortal stallion, named Incitatus after Caligula's actual horse). Jade Dragon added cat and bear NPCs with whom you can do many of the same things. And then, when the Holy Fury DLC was introduced, it included the option to split each individual region into its own nation, modify religions, cultures, etc., including the option to shuffle cultures but make them Animal-Only.
      • Glitterhoof can be imported, sort of, into Europa Universalis 4. If you import a save file of Crusader Kings 2 with the Sunset Invasion DLC enabled (which will create several powerful Native American nations) with the EU4 save converter, the Falkland islands will be controlled by the nation of Trapalanda, an equine nation ruled by Queen Lady Glitterhoof.
    • Holy Fury's new duel system allowed characters to escape an incoming Curb-Stomp Battle by dropping an artifact from their inventory and making a run for it while the opponent got the artifact. This system forgot to make exceptions for armour. Paradox quickly took note, but instead of fixing it added a unique event text if your opponent decided to strip naked to escape you.
  • One bug in Crusader Kings III could lead to a woman in a same-sex relationship asking her partner if the baby is hers. This was apparently funny enough that the developers decided to keep it, but only for women with very low intelligence. Similarly, a bug where a character could plan and carry out an assassination plot against themselves was patched... unless the character in question was insane, in which case they can still do that.
  • Europa Universalis 4 early campaign converter to Victoria 2 would convert Greenland as "Secret Denmark." With the release of the Europa Universalis 4 DLC Conquest of Paradise, Secret Denmark is has a chance of being generated if the user makes a Random New World, which replaces the Americas with a random landmass and random nations. Secret Denmark has Danish culture but Zoroastrian religion.
  • In X3: Reunion, ejecting your shield generators then scooping them back up instantly recharges them. It was then kept in X3: Terran Conflict and its Expansion Pack because the trick is useless in combat (you have to stop maneuvering and back up in order to scoop up things you ejected from the cargo bay), and nobody wants to wait half an hour for their heavy capitals' shields to recharge on their own.

    Action Adventure 
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The bug catching net in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was not supposed to be able to reflect Aghanim's shots but its ability to do so led to a whole string of future ascensions in later games in the series, such as being able to distract Ganon with the fishing rod in Twilight Princess.
    • The 3DS version of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time contains many of the bugs from the original N64 release, such as the ability to enter certain areas that should be locked off to you. The original plan was to fix all these bugs, but many of the developers argued that the bugs were a part of how the game played and as such should be left in. In the end, any glitch that wasn't actively harmful (such as the Deku Nut upgrade being Permanently Missable) was left in as a deliberate feature.
    • Being able to avoid the self-damage from the Blast Mask (which creates an explosion centered on your face) by putting your shield up in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask probably wasn't intentional, but it was kept in the 3DS remake because it was so iconic. The remake actually tells you how to do it upon obtaining the mask for the first time. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom even recreates it in a new form by letting you fuse an explosive to your shield, so it makes an explosion right in Link's face when you block an attack without damaging him at all.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask both gave you the ability to either drop carried items (by standing still and hitting A) or to throw them (by running and hitting A). However, most players quickly realized it was far more convenient to drop things by tapping R to shield, as this also allowed you to drop items while moving. When The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker rolled around, the developers had taken this to heart and mapped "drop" to the R button.
    • In the original Wii version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it was possible to get Green Chu Jelly if a Blue and Yellow Chu combined. Green Chu Jelly was (supposed to be) a Dummied Out leftover from earlier builds where the game still had a magic meter, but the developers forgot the possibility of a Blue and Yellow Chu combining and providing the item, which has no text when obtained and no effect when drunk. This was fixed for the GameCube version (Blue and Yellow Chus combine to make a Purple Chu instead), but in the Wii U HD edition the glitch was embraced instead: Green Chus are encounterable and the jelly's flavor text points out "it doesn't look all that tasty" and "doesn't look like it will do much."
    • Hyrule Warriors: Characters that can use multiple different weapons can be glitched into using weapons belonging to other characters entirely, essentially making them behave like the character that their swapped weapon belongs to. While the glitch itself was patched after a few updates, in some of the missions in the Master Quest Map, Twilight Map and Termina Map, you can run into characters who use a different character's weapon and moveset.
  • In Phoenotopia, if you mash the attack button during a charged swing, you can do up to three double-damage swings in a row. This was initially an endless amount, but when the creator decided to leave it in (as a secret technique), he capped it at three swings for balancing reasons.
  • Prodigal: The Flare Knuckle is supposed only move forward by 1 tile, but players found that if they charge the pickaxe and then press the Flare Knuckle's corresponding button, it not only lets them move 2 tiles instead but also allows them to go through certain obstacles and enemies without taking damage, as well as allowing movement while charging it. This became popular with speedrunners and made some of the harder boss battles much easier, and the developers decided to leave it in; in fact, the Enlightenment dungeon in the game's last content update actually requires it in order to travel over 2-tile gaps.

    Action Game 
  • Devil May Cry:
    • The series' combat system was born from a glitch that was removed during the development of Onimusha: Warlords where enemies could be launched into the air and juggled with further attacks. It got cut for being out of character for the game, but Capcom decided that the glitch was too cool to not use somewhere else.
    • In the original release of Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, the player can unlock a "Super Dante" costume, which allows them to be in Devil Trigger form as long as they want. However, while other techniques that rely on the Devil Trigger gauge (DT Explosions, Quicksilver and Doppelganger styles) were still supposed to use up its power with this costume, a glitch gave them infinite use as well. For the Special Edition, while the glitches around Super Dante were fixed, a Super version of the "Legendary Dark Knight" costume was also added which kept the glitch's behavior, as an unlockable for beating the game on the hardest difficulty level.
    • Enemy hiking has been around since the original game but crafty players discovered that hopping off enemies resets Dante's air state, allow him to repeat actions in the air that can only be done once per jump. In the first game, this permitted the idea of "shotgun hiking", which involved shooting an enemy with a shotgun then jumping off of them and doing it again. By DMC3, this evolved into a full-fledged advanced strategy (in the original game it was a bit of a gimmick technique) with the addition of the Style system as Style moves and sword attacks could be repeated in the air endlessly as long as you kept bouncing off the foe (here it gained the moniker "jump cancels"). This got some genuine acknowledgement in DmC: Devil May Cry when some of the load screen combo samples show combos involving jump-canceled attacks. The original series also got around to acknowledging this when the Special Edition version of Devil May Cry 4 came out and Capcom released an official video of them demonstrating the technique on their YouTube channel (which, unfortunately, has since been removed).
  • In Freedom Planet, an exploit commonly used by Lilac speedrunners is the jump uppercut, where you jump and press up+attack within two frames of each other. In the sequel, Lilac's reveal trailer shows her using a modified version where the uppercut now works in midair.
  • In the NES game Ninja Gaiden, clever players could quickly unstick and restick to a wall to climb it, even if it had no ladder. The sequels added the wall climbing skill as a default ability and adapted the game levels around it.
  • In Robocraft, a glitch means that players can occasionally ghost through the bottom of the build hangar, leaving them unable to get back in. Instead of patching it, the devs added a code to the back of the ship, giving a special cosmetic item to anyone who happens to pull off the glitch. What's more, they're considering adding an airlock to the hangar so you can get back in after glitching your way out.

    Adventure Game 
  • During a phase in which thatgamecompany had trouble getting the ending levels of Journey (2012) to properly resonate with playtesters, one test ended prematurely when a glitch caused the game to seem like it was over right after you die in the snowstorm. The playtester found this false ending so profoundly moving it brought him to tears; this inspired tgc to put in significant extra effort to turn the actual ending into something equally moving.
  • Minecraft: Story Mode: The Farlands, which were just the result of a glitch in Minecraft proper, are an actual location in this world.
  • The Stanley Parable:
    • There were two Game Breaking Bugs in the original mod; you could close the door to your office, trapping you inside, and you can kill yourself by repeatedly jumping off of the scaffolding in the Mind Control room. Both these eventually became fully fledged endings in the HD Remix (Reluctance and Stop Moving, respectively).
    • There's also the ability to trap yourself by stepping out of the elevator before the doors close. In HD, you can do this with the door to the boss' office, enabling another new ending.
    • In the HD Remix, it was possible to climb over and fall to the bottom of the Mind Control Facility room, which left you stuck. You can still do this in the Ultra Deluxe re-release, but now the narrator chimes in after a moment, discussing the original bug, mockingly congratulating you for finding the 'bottom of the Mind Control Facility ending,' going on a tangent about how many players sent footage of the bug to the developers on Twitter, and playing a goofy secret tune before restarting the game.
  • When Disney Dreamlight Valley was in Early Access, one recurring bug involved various characters misjudging the weather or time of day, resulting in them commenting on things like rain during sunny days or early days during the night. This would eventually be fixed for most of the cast, but was retained for Goofy due to him being dumb enough for it to be in-character for him.

    Beat 'em Up 
  • Streets of Rage: The 3rd game lets you play as Mr. X's enforcer Shiva, a master martial artist. He's unfinished, so he has fewer moves than other players and he can't use weapons. The 4th game fixes the moveset issue, but he still can't wield anything—trying to pick up knives, pipes, etc. will make Shiva slap them away. Why? Well, in his own words:
    Shiva: I don't use weapons. I am the weapon.

    Driving Game 
  • In the North American release of Crash Team Racing, Penta Penguin, a secret extra character unlocked only by cheat code, was partially unfinished. Because of this he encounters various glitches such as being given Uka Uka affiliation in the HUD but having Aku Aku as his protective mask in the game itself and having placeholder voice lines, most notably "Penguin yay one/two." when boosting. In Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, he appears in the same capacity and is properly fleshed out as a character, but can still use both masks (acting Ambiguously Evil to justify it), and has "Penguin yay one!" as his catchphrase as a nod to his glitchy CTR appearance.
  • In Modnation Racers, there was a glitch that allowed you to 3D rotate objects in track editor. This is one of the few glitches that was never patched due to the creators really enjoying the creations that were made by this glitch. It even became an available feature on the PS Vita port.
  • WipEout Pure is an interesting case where the glitch got removed but acknowledged in-universe, rather than kept for later games. The Triakis ship had a bug in its programming that made it decelerate much slower than other craft in spite of its weight, allowing it to navigate corners much quicker than normal. In the next game, Wipeout Pulse, it handles corners appropriately and it is explained that Triakis actually won the league in Pure, but due to their "reverse-inertia deceleration" technology they were disqualified.
  • The F-Zero games have numerous glitches that allow your vehicle to either gain way more speed than intended or do some crazy aerial maneuvers that can sometimes completely eliminate the actual track from the equation. Most of these were probably not intended by the developers, but we do have two confirmed cases of the developers discovering physics quirks in testing and deliberately leaving them in.
    • In X, if you perform a side attack at the very edge of a half pipe track such as in White Land 2, it will cause your machine to gain a burst of speed as demonstrated in the beginning of this speedrun. This was confirmed in an interview to have been discovered by the developers in playtesting, and they thought that it was such a cool trick that had appropriate risk to it (you have to side attack into the edge of the track, risking falling off and losing your machine) that they kept it in as a way to reward expert players.
    • In GX, if you rapidly fall off and back on to the track, such as shifting off and on a section of the track with no rails, the game's aerial physics cause your machine to gain a sudden burst of speed. This technique is known in the community as Shift Boosting, and while there was no direct confirmation that the devs found this trick in playtesting like the previous example, there is indirect confirmation—one of the staff ghosts, the one for Sand Ocean Lateral Shift, uses this technique over the titular lateral shifts to set its time.

    Fighting Game 
  • A couple of bugs in The King of Fighters made their way into canon. One of them is Leona's respect for Chang (she salutes him starting with KOF '98; it cued some nice Wild Mass Guessing back in the day). Another one is Kim's midair super in KOF '94; it was definitely a bug that affected other characters with midair command moves in KOF '94 and KOF '95, but Kim's ability to do the Ho-o-kyaku in midair has been an intentional ability in many later games. There's also Heidern in KOF 14, where whiffing his Moon Slasher increases the damage of his next Storm Bringer, but nowhere near the levels of the glitch from KOF '94 where it can easily OHKO.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has a particularly infamous infinite combo for player character Zero known as "Lightning Loops", which involves using Sougenmu then repeatedly jumping and doing downwards Raikousen. It looked very stylish and was a very powerful combo, though it was hard to do, and Capcom tried removing it by changing the way Raikousen handles corners when Ultimate rolled around. Enterprising players found that it was still possible, just a little harder to do now. Project X Zone 2 then included the Lightning loops as part of X and Zero's super move. In Infinite, Zero retains the ability to do Lightning Loops, though they work a bit differently and are not nearly as devastating as they were in 3.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Baraka's "whirling dervish" move was originally the result of a glitch, but the developers liked it so much that it was eventually added to his repertoire.
    • There was a glitch where Johnny Cage's uppercut fatality would decapitate the opponent twice. Developers took this a step further in II, giving him his hidden triple decapitation fatality. It even got a Mythology Gag in 11, where his Deadly Uppercut is revisited so that the head doesn't come off, causing Johnny's camera crew to call for more takes until Cage decapitates them but their head gets stuck to his fist instead of flying off, prompting him to Rage Quit and throw it at the camera (with three onscreen takes happening, in an allusion to II).
    • Noob Saibot was Dummied Out of the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4, but made unlockable (although he lacked fatalities) in the console versions, and had a couple of rather glitchy alternate costumes.
    • The legendary "Ermac" glitch never actually happened, as it was actually a prank by Electronic Gaming Monthly, though it still owes its Ascended Fanon to glitches. "ERMACS" in the audit menu, where his name is derived from, is a shortened form of "Error Macros" and was effectively a bug tracker used in testing the game. Without glitches in testing there would have been no Error Macros and thus no Ermac, so close enough.
  • Roll cancelingnote  in Capcom vs. SNK 2 has become an accepted, if not vital part of high-level play. Capcom acknowledged the behavior was a glitch while the game was still in arcades but did not code it out of the Dreamcast or PlayStation 2 releases. However, the "EO" builds developed for the GameCube and Xbox do not have roll cancels.
  • Street Fighter parented many of the glitches that also ended up redefining a whole genre of video games:
    • Cancelling: Inputting a second command quickly before the character has finished performing the first one can lead to the second move occurring instantly, bypassing the recovery animation of the first. This technique is now the cornerstone of many fighting games, where it is possible to cancel attacks, throws, jumps and dashes into one another, to say nothing of regular combos.
    • Guile's "handcuffs glitch," where an opposing character would get stuck to him until he used the Invisible Throw to "unlock" them, inspired a special attack in Street Fighter: The Movie involving actual handcuffs.
    • Many combo-oriented games feature a variation of "Super Cancel" which can cancel any move into any other at the cost of the special gauge.
    • Cross-ups: In games where blocking is achieved by holding "back", a cross-up is a situation where it is difficult to judge the correct direction to block your opponent's attack, such as when attacking while jumping right over the character. Needless to say that initially this was just a design oversight, but later it was polished and promoted to another aspect of out-thinking your opponent.
    • Ryu's additional moves and supers in the Vs. games (changing movesets to those of Ken or Akuma/Evil Ryu, invisible/explosive/multi-hadoken) are inspired by glitches or modifications created for a pirated edition of the original Street Fighter II's ROM board, dubbed the "Rainbow Edition." There, characters could transform into other characters by hitting the start button, and fireballs had variable speed and could have their flight paths be manually controlled or rendered invisible by player input.
    • Most of Ryu and co.'s new moves in the Turbo: Hyper Fighting revision of SF2 were also inspired by those hacks. It also featured a faster game speed.
    • In the "Rainbow Edition" bootleg board, it was possible for Guile to cover the screen in Sonic Booms that zigzag up and down due to the removal of his Charged Attack restrictions. Fast forward to Street Fighter Alpha, where Charlie's "Sonic Break" super move had the exact same behavior as the hacked Sonic Boom trick.
    • The "invisible Dhalsim" glitch (where occasionally, after doing a Yoga Fire move, the character's sprite would become invisible, unable to take or deal damage) was later incorporated into Dhalsim's Yoga Teleport.
    • Cody's "Final Destruction" super move from Alpha 3. The move itself looks rather weird (if it connects, he will jab his opponent twice, turn away from and then back towards the enemy, and jab them twice again, doing this about four times before ending with a powerful string of attacks). However, it's actually a Shout-Out to a glitch from Final Fight where canceling out of a regular combo before it finishes by turning away from your target would let him destroy his opponents with ease. If used in X-ISM, this move changes all his attacks into his Final Fight attack strings instead.
  • By glitching out the character selection in Super Smash Bros. Melee, you could play as Master Hand. You would always crash the game by doing so, but you could. Flash forward 17 years, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate allows you to play as Master Hand, but only in one stage in the Adventure Mode.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Borderlands:
    • In the first game, Bloodwing won't attack if Mordecai can't see any enemies, even if they're otherwise in range. In Borderlands 2, dialogue from Lilith indicates that Bloodwing wanted Mordecai to watch her in action.
    • In Borderlands 2, Axton was originally intended to act flirtatious with Maya when reviving her, but due to a bug his flirtatious dialogue triggered regardless of who he was reviving. Gearbox responded by confirming in both publicity material and DLC dialogue that he's bisexual.
  • Counter-Strike has had several over its long life.
    • As players experimented with the original version, players messing around on level editors noticed that if a server's gravity and friction are set a certain way, angled rooftops acted like slick hillsides when your player was walking "up" them. Looking along the plane and strafing "up", then looking slightly "downslope" and then back along it, the character would ski/surf along the plane. This lead to specialized maps, and when a new version of the game running on the Source engine was designed, it was specifically designed to allow players to replicate surfing behavior. A small but devoted set of servers still operate these maps.
    • After an update to Global Offensive's version of the "Train" map, it was discovered that it was possible to stand on top of birds as they flew away, allowing players to reach unintended spots. This was patched out, but a sign telling players "Do Not Step on the Birds" was added.
    • Also from Global Offensive, there was a trick on "Overpass" in which two players could help boost a third player onto a railing, from which they had a clear vantage point over multiple of the map's chokepoints. This was discovered by the professional team Fnatic, who kept it a secret until they brought it out during the quarterfinals of Dreamhack 2014 to devastating effect. It was very quickly patched, and a "Do Not Climb the Railing" sign was added to commemorate the event.
  • Deep Rock Galactic used to have a bug where the weekly core hunt assignment would reset when you promoted a dwarf. The developers patched this out, but when the community requested it be put back in, they obliged. Now, whenever you promote a dwarf, you earn 3 overclock cores, no assignment needed.
  • Any number of weird bugs have been adopted by the Doom community in order to add bits of interest to their custom levels. Among these: making floors look like water, making enemies nearly invincible, and making "voodoo dolls" of the player character whose deaths will also kill the player (this was used in the final level of the TNT: Evilution half of Final Doom). Notably, several more modern limit-removing source ports fix these bugs, but also have options to re-enable them for use with mapsets that took advantage of them.
  • Early in Half-Life 2: Episode One, Alyx asks her robotic companion Dog "You did do the math, right?", right before being flung across a bottomless pit into the Citadel. Dog originally wasn't supposed to do anything, but during a run-through of the scene before the animations were finished, Dog inserted his head-shaking idle animation right after that line, and the playtesters loved it so much it was worked into the actual script.
    • Episode Two has a bug with a dumpster in which a fast headcrab zombie is hiding. If the player tosses a grenade in a dumpster, the grenade will be tossed back out. According to the commentary, this happened by chance in playtesting (the player is subtly warned of the zombie's presence by an event in the physics engine disturbing loose garbage in the dumpster; one playtester thought to toss a grenade in before the zombie ambushed him, and it was a one in million chance that the disturbance happened to bounce the grenade back out), and they liked it so much that they patched it so it would happen every time.
    • The Combine gunships have rather simple AI that sets them to shoot at the most dangerous thing they can see. This is supposed to be the player, as seen in how the gunships will gleefully ignore several AI rebels to ventilate you specifically, but what the devs hadn't accounted for was that rockets fired by the player at it, once they got close, would be tagged as an even bigger threat and shot out of the sky, forcing playtesters to guide their rockets in all manner of odd paths in order to hit them. This proved to be so popular that it was left in as a feature.
    • In an act of serendipity that ended up making the game more interesting, during the airboat vs. helicopter battle, the "mine spam" dropped on the player was originally due to one of the programmers accidentally making the helicopter shoot mines out of its machine gun instead of bullets. This was toned down and added in deliberately as the helicopter's Desperation Attack near the end of the battle.
  • Halo:
    • Halo: Combat Evolved had a bug in which, when the player looked all the way down, the character model's head would instead look straight forward. This got used heavily in machinima (most notably Red vs. Blue), since, particularly when used with pistols, it looked as though the character was at ease rather than constantly pointing his gun at other people. For later installments in the franchise, Bungie fixed the glitch, but added a feature that allowed a character to put his gun at a "rest" position by tapping down on the D-Pad. For the Anniversary remake of the original, running on the original game's engine, the old bug was deliberately left in.
    • In Halo 3's map editor Forge, people used glitches and tricks in order to place objects in ways they weren't supposed to be able to in order to make cool new maps. In Halo: Reach Bungie changed these tricks into features of the new map editor.
    • Possibly inspired by the Honor Guard Councillor glitch in Halo 2, one of the two types of hidden "BOB" Elites in Halo: Reach is white with a random armor type.
    • "Grenade jumping" was created by the fact that exploding frag grenades exert a physical push on its surroundings to simulate the concussive force of the explosion—this also happens to extend to players, who are subject to in-game physics (which is how one is able to be killed by debris flung by a grenade as well), and it was discovered that if a player is mid-jump above an exploding grenade, it can boost their jump significantly, to the point of possibly sending them across the map if done right. This was never patched out by Bungie, and it is in fact the only way to reach at least a couple of the unlockables in some of the later games, as well as the only way to get the "How Pedestrian" achievement in Halo CE: Anniversary.
  • One sequence in the Left 4 Dead 2 campaign "Hard Rain" involves making your way through an abandoned sugar mill. An odd glitch caused a larger-than-usual number of Witches to spawn in the building; the testers thought this was a stroke of genius, so Valve left the glitch in and wrote the Witch's fondness for the smell of sugar into the backstory.
  • After Gordon gets the power source for the ticket machine in My Friendly Neighborhood, a single Norman will appear. During testing, the game's creator found that, due to a glitch, shooting this Norman causes him to twitch, then explode into several dozen copies of himself. He liked it so much that he left it in the game.
  • Among other things, Painkiller pays homage to the traditional quirks in FPS physics and some secrets are hidden in ways that require you to take advantage of these. You need to be able to exploit the way the hitbox reacts to almost invisible protrusions in walls to climb them with constant jumping (Asylum). You must at times resort to bunnyhopping (even in circles!) in order to gain enough momentum to leap somewhere else (Castle, Colosseum). You must remember that doing a U-turn in midair is a perfectly plausible thing to do (City on Water). Even rocket jumping has its own hotkey.
  • Update 11 for PAYDAY 2 introduced a glitch where street cops dealt three times as much damage as they were supposed to, which could easily shred a player even on Normal difficulty (especially bad since it was concurrent with a glitch that broke armor values entirely). However, enough players liked the challenge the bug presented that sometime after the bug was fixed, the devs then introduced a rarer, more dangerous variation of the street cop armed with the much more powerful Bronco .44 revolver. Notably, these cops will occasionally spawn during assault waves on the higher difficulties, where street cops and SWAT units are otherwise entirely replaced by the much more durable FBI or ZEAL Team.
  • Quake had strafe-jumping, which was a bug at the time, but became so popular that it was later the trademark of its multiplayer component. An uproar went through the community as the mechanic was removed in one patch of Quake III: Arena, so a new patch featured it as... well... a feature, which was part of its success, along with a lot of other stuff. Quake Live even has a tutorial with many courses which rely on this.
    • Taken to a ridiculous extreme in Warsow, wherein the game engine was built from the ground up to accommodate movement tricks that started as glitches in Quake.
  • Slimes stacking up to escape their corrals in Slime Rancher was a "happy accident" that resulted of the game's AI telling slimes to seek out food when hungry combined with the game's collision mechanics while being in a confined space, according to the game's developer.
  • In the update that added "King of the Hill" to Team Fortress 2, when the round went into Overtime, the announcer would repeat her proclamation of "Overtime!" over and over every time the point's status changed at all, including whenever a player stepped on or off of it. This one was so popular that when Valve fixed it in the next update a day later, they added a server option that allowed admins to keep the buggy speech if they so desire.
    • Further, an October 13th, 2011 patch added a server option to re-enable a popular bug, "Taunt Switching", wherein players could press the inputs for taunting and switching weapons at the same time to have the first weapon's taunt animation play while holding the second weapon - for example, a Spy could pretend to fence with a revolver rather than his butterfly knife, a Heavy could twirl his gigantic minigun around his trigger finger, or a Demoman could take a drink from his grenade launcher.
    • The Sniper Vs. Spy update canonized the disguise kit+crouch+look up "Spycrab" pose (in which the Spy's model stretches beyond his animation skeleton) by having approximately 1 out of 10 taunts with the disguise kit use an alternate animation with the spy dropping into a crouch and making claw motions with his hands.
    • The Spy class itself was inspired by a bug in the original Team Fortress, where players would sometimes see other players with the wrong team's color.
    • Equipping a shield item to the Demoman allows them to right click to charge forward in a somewhat straight line - with very limited movement to the left or right. However, an exploit was found that if the +left or +right commands (turn left and turn right, respectively) were bound to a button and that button was pressed while charging, the turning radius would be much tighter, to the point that you could circle around to where you initially started charging in a wide enough space. This exploit, along with the innate high resistances of the shield items, and the ability to gain large amounts of airborne momentum through charging on certain sloped surfaces, was actually enough to see the loadout become viable in the competitive scene. The turn radius exploit was eventually removed, but it can be similarly achieved through alternate weapons given to the Demoman after its removal - the "Ali Baba Wee Booties" or "Bootlegger" Primary now gives a small amount of horizontal control, while the "Tide Turner" shield weapon gives up the high resistances of the other shields for full turn radius control.
    • The Demoman's melee taunt, originally, could have him drink from anything but a bottle of scrumpy; i-ghost, a contributor to Team Fortress 2, removed most of these taunts as part of a cleanup project, except when drinking from the Frying Pan, as it was deemed 'too funny' to remove.
  • A bug with jumping inertia in Starsiege: Tribes let skilled players reliably "ski" downhill at high speed to build up speed. When it was fixed, not only after player feedback was it quickly put back in, skiing became a trademark feature of the sequels, even being required at various points in the campaign of Tribes: Vengeance.
    • Lampshaded by this April Fools' Day post, which claims to have "fixed" the bug for Tribes Ascend even though by this point it was an absolutely critical gameplay mechanic.
    • Deserving of special note is the fact Skiing went from a glitch to the core game mechanic the entire franchise is built around. Ascend has wide-open, hilly arenas that would be unplayable on almost any other engine.
  • In ULTRAKILL, the ability to parry most non-Hitscan projectiles with your robot arm, sending them back exploding into your enemy's face, was always an intended feature. The ability to parry your own shotgun blasts with good timing, on the other hand, was very much not. But letting the player increase the power of their shots by effectively punching bullets as they come out of the barrel was just too cool to ignore, and was fully embraced by the dev as the "Projectile Boost" mechanic.

    Hack and Slash 
  • Diablo II's Hammerdins. Blessed Hammer is a nigh-useless spell on the non-spellcaster Paladin. Due to some bug, the Concentration aura (which should only be boosting physical attacks) boosted Blessed Hammer's damage. This created the Hammerdin, making a Blessed Hammer/Concentration combo a viable character build (with the right equipment, of course). Blizzard made sure it would continue to work properly in subsequent patches. Incidentally, this made Hammerdins into one of the strongest builds in the game (some would argue the strongest) and is a huge gamebreaker. Technically the bug was fixed in the expansion, then put back in on purpose.
  • Magicka:
    • The Teleport spell is normally only obtainable at the beginning of level 7, but it can be gotten (in multiplayer) in level 1 by laying mines at your feet and blowing yourself up and over a wall. The developers thought this was so clever they opted to leave it in.
    • Although not any specific glitches, one of the first major content updates for the game acknowledged the game's initial sorry state (so bad that they had to patch things daily for two weeks) by adding a Crash To Desktop spell, which randomly targets anything with less than 10,000 health - including the player who cast it - and instantly kills them, alongside several Visual Puns in a new robe (an old patchwork of several different pieces of fabric), sword (one that's broken off a few inches past the hilt), and staff (one that summons bugs as its unique ability).

    MMORPG 
  • Final Fantasy XIV's intended use of Dualcasting while playing as The Red Mage is born from the way players abused the system in previous Final Fantasy games, where they would use a spell with a short cast time to grant the dualcast bonus, then use that to completely skip the cast time for a more powerful spell that would normally take much longer to cast. The Red Mage's basic rotation is entirely built around this (and balancing white and black mana), starting with weaker spells that have a standard cast time and granting themselves dualcast with it, then using that to instantly cast a more powerful elemental or healing spell that would otherwise take at least twice as long to cast.
  • Almost from the get go in GunZ, ultimately becoming the basis for two widely popular combat styles that make use of a bug in the Sword/dagger that cancels animations, allowing for actions as simple as climbing a wall via dashing at it to multi-key combo moves. However, because of its wide acceptance by the community, many people will look down on or outright kick players who choose to play the game as it was originally intended. The developers opted to leave it in the game, as it was the cornerstone of its gameplay; it's become an official feature in Gunz: The Duel 2.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online: In Eregion, a rainbow can appear in the night sky. While definitely not intentional (not to mention physically impossible), it was considered such a unique and interesting sight by the players that the developers officially decided to leave it in, despite new players repeatedly filing bug reports over it.
  • The bank robbery/mayhem missions in City of Villains were originally intended to have the destructible environment scale with the player, however on initial release all the objects were unintentionally locked at fixed, low, levels. This bug became wildly popular because players now had a way of showing their characters becoming more powerful: the car that took forever to destroy at low levels disintegrated with a single attack at a higher level, and area of effect attacks caused massive destruction. The development team realized they'd accidentally hit on a good thing and left it as is.
  • When swimsuits were introduced as equipment in Phantasy Star Universe, they took up all three clothing slots. A bug allowed characters to equip two layers of clothing at once, which was mostly pointless, but allowed a few would-be fashionistas to wear a swimsuit top with normal pants (or, if their character was male, go shirtless with normal pants). A later patch made swimsuit tops, bottoms, and sandals separate items, making the mix-and-match easier.
  • In RuneScape, certain members-only items of clothing were made available. It was discovered that some of those items (the gloves) were actually usable on freeplay worlds (instead of being displayed as "member's objects" they were still wearable gloves). Because they could not be obtained on free worlds, some members would obtain them for low prices on their worlds and sell them to non-members for higher prices. They became a symbol of wealth on freeplay worlds, eventually forcing Jagex to keep it in.
    • An extremely early example (2001 or so) would be the now taken-for-granted feature that makes items only visible to the player who dropped them for about a minute before being visible to everyone else. It was originally a bug, but after it was removed, public demand brought it back.
    • The Falador Massacre of 2006, caused by an error causing kicked partygoers to be flagged for PVP in non-PVP areas (thus able to attack other players who could not retaliate), became part of the game's lore during the 2015 Invasion of Falador event.
    • The Arc update brought the Uncharted Isles, which had (among other things) unique skyboxes. Players quickly figured out that if you teleported away from the island, you kept the skybox. This was used for some fairly spectacular landscape photography before it was patched out... and the next update not only reintroduced the skyboxes as a supported feature, but added free camera mode and lighting filters to go with it.
  • In the same vein as GunZ, there's a number of techniques that have been created through player discoveries in SD Gundam Capsule Fighter. The most prominent one is MCA, or "Movement Cancel Action", which allows a player to cancel out a melee dash (where if a player is far enough from an opponent when they use their weapon 1, they'll dash to them) by quickly switching to another weapon, then back to the melee weapon. This results in a unit that quickly slashes at his opponent, but denies him a knock down and, thus, can kill him with ease. This has been left in the game ever since it was discovered on the Korean servers and, when the game updated to Generation 6, added parts that allowed units to earn bonuses for performing this.
  • Star Trek Online had one with the duty officer assignment "Investigate Rumors of <your faction> Intelligence", as in your faction's intelligence service is rumored to be infiltrating your crew. Due to the word "infiltration" being left out of the title, this led to many jokes about your faction being rumored to be intelligent. Cryptic fixed the typo, then put it back in when people complained.
  • Done since early development in Warhammer Online. Since exploiting collision glitches, finding ways around an Invisible Wall, figuring out ways to survive incredibly long drops or just discovering "holes in the world" had long been established as a hobby of MMO players, Mythic had their testing teams specifically look for these things. Instead of blocking them off in one way or another, they would instead put in little secrets and achievements. Which often involved things like detonation plungers that would give you a shiny achievement badge when clicked. As well as explode with enough force to land your corpse somewhere around the graveyard, but at least you didn't need to use your Book of Recall!
  • In World of Warcraft:
    • The Corrupted Blood incident, where players brought a debuff out of the instance it was supposed to be specific to by infecting their pets with it, calling them away, and then resummoning them in a regular area, later inspired an actual in-game event, the Plague Outbreak.
    • In Vanilla WoW, the paladin talent Reckoning gave the paladin an extra melee attack every time he received a critical hit, stacking up to four times (i.e. at four stacks, the next melee attack the paladin performs would result in 5 simultaneous weapon swings). Originally, there was no upper limit to how many times this ability could stack, resulting in a famous case where a paladin dueled a rogue 'til he'd been crit 10,000 times, then attacked a World Boss and killed it in one blow (while also bringing the server to its knees for several seconds as it tried to resolve 10,001 swings in an instant). This incident became known as "the reckoning bomb." The talent was quickly nerfed by limiting the number of stacks, but when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out a few years later, it included a quest in which you fired a cannon at scourge invaders in southeast Icecrown and could occasionally shoot an enormous area-effect weapon. The name they gave the enormous area-effect weapon? "Reckoning Bomb."
    • Hearthstones are devices which teleport you to your home base. They have a 10 second casting time, and taking any direct-damage at all during that time completely interrupts its use — this was done to prevent players from using it to get out of trouble. However, until the Cataclysm expansion, the paladin's ability Divine Shield gave him total immunity to all damage for 12 seconds, allowing the paladin to use his Hearthstone uninterrupted even while under attack. Since Divine Shield projected a transparent bubble around the paladin's body, this trick became known as the "Bubble Hearth." The duration of Divine Shield was reduced to 8 seconds in Cataclysm, however, taking the Bubble Hearth ability away and "fixing" this long-standing "bug" — but this caused such an outcry among paladins that, in the subsequent Mists of Pandaria expansion, a minor paladin glyph was added to the game that cut the casting time of your Hearthstone in half while you were under the effect of Divine Shield.
      • Bubble Hearth was given a Shout-Out in Heroes of the Storm as an activated talent that makes the user invulnerable for 6 seconds but forces them to cast Hearthstone, returning them to base. The character who gets it? Yrel, a Paladin from World of Warcraft.
      • It also gets a shout out in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. In the prologue of Knights of the Frozen Throne, Tirion Fordring challenges Frost Lich Jaina, but loses badly. Before Jaina can finish him, guess what he does? That's right, he bubble-hearths. Similarly, Sir Finley plays a card called Bubble Hearth in his Galakrond's Awakening encounter that saves him from lethal damage and ends the fight.
    • The Mists of Pandaria expansion added a glyph that allowed druids in stag form to be mounted by other players. Including... other druids in stag form, which allowed players to form whole stacks of stags standing atop one another. The bug was quickly fixed, but in a later patch Blizzard released the "Stackable Stag" item as a tribute, a pet that would attempt to stack itself with other stags nearby when the player is idle.

    MOBA 
  • Many, many features in Defense of the Ancients, which were either bugs in Guinsoo and Pendragon's original game or quirks of the old War Craft III engine, were faithfully ported into Dota 2, and some of them in Heroes of Newerth as well. To this day, the main difference between Dota 2 and League of Legends is that DOTA 2 kept them whereas LOL removed or fixed them.
    • In earlier versions of DotA, killing your own team's lane creeps completely denied the enemy of experience and possible gold bounty, resulting in huge experience gaps between those who knew this and those who didn't. It was changed to only deny a partial amount of experience, and ever since then denying has been a very important game mechanic.
    • Manipulating creep aggro is another important laning technique. You order your hero to attack an enemy hero on the other side of the creep wave so that enemy creeps aggro you instead of your allied creeps, which helps control the lane so that enemy creeps move closer to your side, near a tower, or let melee heroes get cleaner easier hits on them. Conversely, using your hero or summoned units to block incoming creeps so the creeps meet closer to your tower, allowing you to farm more easily and safely.
    • Orbwalking, which is usable by heroes with autoattack enhancing skills by manually casting the skill rather than having the ability on auto-cast while normally attacking, allows users to harass enemy heroes with your autoattack without drawing creep aggro. You can move your hero in between these skill uses, allowing you to chase more effectively while attacking.
    • Creep stacking — abusing the fact that the neutral creep camps (the "jungle") respawns are not triggered by them being dead, but by the absence of units in a certain area around their spawn point. Because of this, luring a jungle camp far enough away from its spawn point that another one spawns in its place, then letting it walk back will duplicate the camp. Repeat to create a large pile of nearly-identical monsters which you can proceed to farm very quickly with area-of-effect spells. An extremely important technique to increase gold flow, it was nerfed in a few ways in HoN, such as reducing creep aggro time to make stacking multiple camps more difficult and adding a hard limit of maximum stacked camps to 3.
    • Creep pulling — the long lane of each side is especially important, as there is a neutral camp close to the lane where you can lure them into your team's lane creeps, causing your creeps to aggro them until they're killed, allowing the lane to be pushed a lot further to your side and giving the heroes in your lane some more easy gold and experience.
    • The various interactions between spells and spell block/spell immunity. Certain disables will go through spell immunity but becoming spell immune after the fact will dispel them, for instance. DotA is very finicky about what magic immunity does or doesn't block or remove, whereas it's much more straightforward in HoN (Blocks skill effects typed as Magic, and removes negative, removable status effects).
    • When you specify a target destination for Blink Dagger or any Blink-type skill further than its maximum range, you blink only 80% of the maximum distance. It somewhat of a Scrappy Mechanic, though; this used to be in full effect in Dota 2, but it was changed to work this way only for the Blink Dagger.
    • Valve initially deemed the infamous fountain hooking bug (a combo of two characters' abilities that warps a target to certain death inside your spawn point) "too hilarious to fix", but changed their mind after it was used to decide a tournament match, and fixed it in the First Blood update.
  • Heroes of the Storm:
    • An update in 2016 caused Blackheart to skip numbers during the pre-game countdown on his battleground. When it was finally fixed, Blizzard also added a sound clip of him going "Uhhh..." that has a chance of replacing a number during the countdown. Fitting, considering he's The Drunken Sailor.
    • Cassia's Blinding Light blinds all enemies within a small area. For some reason, it also dismounted enemy heroes it hit despite dealing no damage. When the bug was fixed, they added a very small amount of damage to the skill since the utility was appreciated.
  • League of Legends:
    • Lucian's passive ability causes him to attack his next target twice after using an ability. But it turned out that if the enemy you attacked dies before the second hit, the second hit seeks another nearby enemy. This behavior was cleaned up a bit in a following patch and was made a feature.
    • Lee Sin used to be able to dash to wards. This was removed, then put back in.
    • When Anivia was in egg form, anything her player typed into chat was labelled as coming from "Cryophoenix Egg". This was removed, then put back in when players complained. Now the text comes from "Eggnivia".
    • Animation canceling was, at least originally, a bug that allows players to skip the end-animation of abilities or basic attacks, allowing them to use another ability or attack faster than if they allowed the animation to finish. Depending on the specifics, this generally allows the player to use all of their skills significantly faster, allowing for faster damage output and more maneuverability. In some cases Riot has removed animation canceling for specific champions or skills, while in other instances, such as with Riven, they have explicitly admitted that they consider animation canceling in balancing the champion, even making it easier to perform at times. Depending on who you ask, this may be either unfair bug abuse, or a legitimate part of the Champion's skill set.
    • One of the oldest examples in League of Legends is Nunu's channeling spell ultimate, "Absolute Zero" being cast in a bush. Normally, when a spell is cast from a bush, the champion casting the spell becomes visible to everyone. However, Nunu used to remain hidden while channeling his ultimate, that could be used to completely take an opposing team by surprise. It's immortalized as the Empire play, Riot once fixed the glitch, but by that time the glitch had become a staple of Nunu, and the resulting backlash caused Riot to change it back.

    Platform Game 
  • The Famicom Disk System version of Castlevania had a glitch that allowed Simon to keep climbing the famous staircase in the final level past where it ends. This became the route to an actual secret in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
    • Remember how players of the original NES game would hold the A and B buttons down after grabbing the Red Orb while waiting for the next level to start, causing Simon to repeatedly jump and whip at nothing? Nintendo did — it's one of Simon's victory poses in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate!
  • Celeste has many advanced maneuvers that originated from Good Bad Bugs, such as the Cornerboost, Demodash, Hyperdash, Spikejump, Wallbounce, and Wavedash, some of which are required to complete the Brutal Bonus Levels.
  • In the first Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers for the NES, on rare occasions thrown blocks would fly in a zigzag. It became a chargeable attack in the sequel.
  • In the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, a few of the Good Bad Bugs in the original PS1 trilogy are deliberately recreated.
    • The slide-spin jump/glitch high is faithfully recreated in the Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped games.
    • In the Tiny Tiger boss fight from Warped, you could cheese your way through the more difficult parts of the battle (in which Tiny sics a bunch of lions on you) by hiding out in the upper left corner of the arena. In N. Sane Trilogy, not only is this left intact, but the audience throws cheese at you whenever you do it.
  • In Everybody Edits, the fully black block which appears invisible on the Level-Map Display was originally available through a bug in early versions of Everybody Edits Flash. This involved clicking a precise row of pixels, which selects an invalid block without a texture to build with.
  • The final stage of Eryi's Action requires you to exploit a glitch to pass through an otherwise impassable wall.
  • In I Wanna Be the Guy, the Kraidgeif glitch was deliberately left in, though not intentionally programmed. It was tweaked to require shot counting and perfect timing or a lot of luck.
  • LEGO Star Wars had a coding oversight where any character with a red lightsaber was seen as a Sith-type and could move black LEGO bricks, which allowed for a Disk One Nuke of sorts where rather than waiting to unlock Darth Maul after Episode I, you could just create a custom-character with a red lightsaber and interact with black bricks much earlier than intended. Rather than fix this, LEGO Star Wars: The Original Trilogy taunts you by hiding the very first Minikit you see behind black bricks but not giving you a Sith until you unlock Darth Vader after Episode VI, effectively forcing you to use a custom-character for black bricks unless you want to wait until you've beaten the entire game. By the time LEGO Jurassic World came around, there were secrets that could not be reached at all by canon characters and actually required custom characters to obtain.
  • In LittleBigPlanet, there was a bug which allowed players to create objects thicker than three layers and put objects farther in the background and foreground than intended. Players used this glitch to create full 3D worlds and games of all kinds. The maximum intended layers increased from 3 to 16 in LBP3, and in addition, new tools and objects, such as a sliding ramp and a rail that can cross over many layers, were added to take advantage of the extra, now walkable layers.
  • A large amount of Artificial Stupidity and other tricks had to be exploited to win Championship Lode Runner. That and the difficulty of this game made it feel similar to some of the very hard ROM hacks.
  • Mega Man X4 had a trick involving Zero's dash and slash. Unlike X, Zero's dash stops prematurely if he attacks during it. Rapidly alternating Dash and Attack really fast makes Zero not dash at all and instead repeatedly do his basic starter slash, as opposed to following up with different 2nd and 3rd slashes for a 3 hit combo. The high attack rate made it very useful for being able to rack up damage and stop attacking any time instead of committing to the full combo. When Zero made an appearance alongside X as a pair unit in Project × Zone the rapid slash, with the same animation as the glitch, becomes one of his normal attacks.
    • Due to the way the animation for Zero's Kuuenzan works (Zero somersaults with his sword out creating a circular slash attack), many players essentially followed up on a Kuuenzan attack with the later part of the same attack by turning around during the move, so that Zero hits an enemy as the sword goes down then hits them again as the sword goes up by turning around. When Zero made a playable appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 he has both Kuuenzan and a reverse Kuuenzan in his moveset with the former able to cancel into the latter, recreating the turnaround trick.
  • Metroid:
    • Infinite bomb jumping. In the first game, while the developers had always intended for Samus to be elevated by her bomb explosions in order to enter hidden passages, they did not expect that players would learn that proper timing and bomb placement can allow the player to chain these explosions together indefinitely, allowing for Sequence Breaking. It had become an official, mainstay part of the series' mechanics by the very next entry, with almost every 2D game having its own rhythm for pulling off the maneuver and its main purpose still being purely as a sequence breaking tool.note  Super Metroid would even show it off in the Attract Mode, and Metroid: Samus Returns includes a new obstacle specifically made for the purpose of disabling bomb jumping in its presense in the form of a vent that sucks up any bombs placed close to it before they can explode.
    • Similarly, Single Wall Jump (where you wall jump constantly off a single wall) originated in Super, and only saw use again in Zero Mission. While it is possible to execute it in Samus Returns it requires far more technique.
    • In Super Metroid, there's glitch where the momentum that you have when running can be transferred into the morph ball by spin jumping and transforming into the ball with proper timing, known as the "mockball" or "machball". This even extends to the increased running speed offered by the Speed Booster, allowing for the "speedball". Metroid: Zero Mission would use the latter as the basis for being able to use the Shinespark while in Morph Ball mode.
  • Clipping through one-way walls, ceilings, and corners was a glitch in the original flash version of N that was removed in N+, but fans and the devs themselves loved the bug enough for it to be reinstated in N++.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the flicky birds that appear when the player destroys a badnik share the same palette as Sonic, so when Sonic transforms into Super Sonic, any flickies on the screen become golden like him. While this extends to Sonic 3 & Knuckles for the same reasons, it is acknowledged when Tails collects the seven Super Emeralds and becomes Super Tails. When he does so, four golden Super Flickies immediately appear onscreen and follow him everywhere, attack any enemy on screen, and turn back to their usual default blue when Tails loses his power.
    • There were glitches that let you turn Tails into Super Tails in Sonic 2 and the first-released half of Sonic 3 before the combined Sonic 3 & Knuckles added an official version of this form.
    • Several cross-media examples from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW):
      • Scourge the Hedgehog's green coloration is based on the "Ashura" glitch in Sonic 2, which turns Sonic green.
      • A morphing animation glitch from Sonic & Knuckles, commonly referred to as "blue Knuckles," inspired the appearance of Thrash the Tasmanian Devil; Nixus the Echidna (a guise of Walter Naugus) would later borrow from Thrash's aesthetic. Knuckles in Sonic Boom would paint himself blue (poorly) to act as Sonic's stunt double.
      • Surge the Tenrec and Kitsunami the Fennec are also inspired by the Ashura and blue Knuckles glitches, respectively. Fittingly, they're Oddball Doppelgängers of Sonic and Tails — "blue Knuckles" has his name displayed as "Tails" when he completes an act.
      • Dr. Starline, meanwhile, is based on the "Wechnia" glitch from Knuckles' Chaotix, which created a white Knuckles with the display name "***" (in other words, a line of stars). Starline is a platypus — echidnas and platypuses are the two main types of egg-laying mammals.
    • Sonic Frontiers has the Homing Dash, a technique in the Cyberspace levels where cancelling a Homing Attack with a Boost gives a significant burst of speed. While it was an unintended glitch, when director Morio Kishimoto discovered it, he thought it would be a fun technique for players to use and thus left it in, with the Speed Strats videos on the official YouTube channel even covering the technique. A proper acknowledgement was added in the first major update, with the game marking your clear time with an asterisk if you use it.
  • In Spelunky, there is a part where to continue to the bonus levels you need to intentionally die, where you respawn inside a statue. This statue is walled off with blocks resistant to explosions, with the intended penalty being that you cannot take any items with you. This is especially problematic for Eggplant Runs, which requires the player to carry an eggplant through the entire game and use it on the final boss - since a single player cannot take items through the statue, the intention is that multiple characters will have to carry the eggplant between them in co-op play. However, it IS possible to complete a solo eggplant run using the Ball and Chain item, a penalty item obtained by blowing up two of Kali's shrines - due to it being an obscure penalty for something most players would never do, it wasn't tested properly, and the developers forgot to mark the blocks around the statue as being immune to the Ball as well. As a result, a single player with the Ball and Chain can break the blocks around the statue, leave it, pick up the Eggplant, and go back into the statue. Since this is a lot harder than the intended way of doing it, the developers announced that they would not be patching the bug and had, in fact, added an additional animation to it for when it breaks.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Most of the NES and SNES games have slightly wonky collision detection which allows dedicated (or lucky) players to jump off walls if hit from the right angle. Super Mario 64 (and all of the 2D and 3D installments afterwards) canonize this as the Wall Jump and include puzzles or levels built around scaling two vertical surfaces.
    • The Minus Worldnote  in the original game was a programming error; however, there are many intentionally hidden stages that are unlocked via similar methods in later games.
    • In Super Mario Bros., Lakitu's throws were supposed to move horizontal as well, with variable speed and momentum, but a bug in the game makes them move straight up and down when thrown. Though this was fixed for the sequel, all subsequent re-releases and remakes of the first game have retained this bug since fixing it completely changes the gameplay and raises the difficulty considerably (the difference is maddening).
    • Not quite a gameplay mechanic, but another nod to the glitch - When Mario arrives in the Underwhere in Super Paper Mario, a Shayde tells him that some call it "World -1".
    • Also in Super Paper Mario, pinning a Koopa shell against a wall and continually jumping on it would (eventually) make you lose points, a nod to the classic Infinite 1-Ups instance.
    • Speaking of such, infinite one-ups were included in the New Super Mario Bros. games, to the point that one of the Hint Movies in New Super Mario Bros. Wii shows Mario executing the technique (the World 2-3 Infinite 1-Ups video, to be exact).
    • The infinite one-ups bug was so popular in Super Mario Bros. that the designers made the glitch possible to do in the very beginning of World 1-1 in the difficult Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.
    • The infinite one-ups trick is even referenced in one of the official iMessage stickers.
    • Again, also in Super Paper Mario, one of the Sammer Guys is named "Over the Flagpole" and talks about cheating. This is regarding a glitch in Super Mario Bros. where you... well, go over the flagpole.
    • Another Sammer Guy in Super Paper Mario is named The Negative One, which could be referencing, once again, World -1.
    • Though less of a bug and more of just an oddity, holding an item in Super Mario World made the swimming physics change drastically, inexplicably giving the player constant forward momentum and allowing them to swim down instead of up. This was nodded to in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, as holding a Koopa shell underwater acted like an underwater jet ski and constantly propelled the player forward; in addition, New Super Mario Bros lets Mario swim slightly faster if he's wearing a blue Koopa shell.
    • Not particularly something added into other games per se, but the Small Fire Mario glitch from the original game is the focus of one of the later challenges in the Wii U game NES Remix.
    • In the original Super Mario 64, by using the backwards long jump method, Mario can pass through the mirror in the mirror room and explore the area behind it. However, only emptiness waits beyond the mirrored door. In the DS remake, Luigi can use a Power Flower to turn into Vanish Luigi and walk through the mirror to enter the mirrored room, which is required to fight Chief Chilly and unlock Wario. If he passes through the mirrored door, Luigi ends up in complete emptiness, with the exception of himself, the door, and one of the castle's secret Power Stars.
    • A number of entries in the New Super Mario Bros series canonized a glitch in the original Super Mario Bros where having more than 10 lives prefixed the player's lives count with a crown. Said games max out the player's lives at triple crown, which equates to 1110 lives. Doing so grants the player an award icon on their save file.
    • The team working on Super Mario Maker found a glitch where Mario became extremely thin upon picking up a mushroom power-up. They liked this enough to make a new power-up exclusive to this game; the Weird Mushroom, which makes Mario's limbs long and thin, gives him the trademark physics of Luigi (high jumps, low traction), and adds some bizarre sound effects. It can appear in place of normal mushrooms in the Super Mario Bros. theme, but can be directly placed in levels if you unlock and clear the levels featured in the 2015 Nintendo World Championships.
    • The Double Cherry powerup from Super Mario 3D World, which gives you another of your character to control, owes its existence to a mistake made by a developer, where the game would spawn two player characters. Instead of just scrapping it entirely, the development team liked it and thought this would be an interesting concept for a powerup.
    • Super Mario Bros. 35 is not an emulation of Super Mario Bros., but a complete recreation, meaning that many of the glitches in the original game no longer exist simply because some weird edge case no longer applies in the new engine. However, the power-up double-jump trick still works, suggesting that it was deliberately implemented.
  • In Transformice after a player has jumped, they can not jump again until the running animation has triggered. Due to a bug, the running animation triggers if a player runs into a wall if they are also descending, thus allowing the player to jump again and climb vertical walls. The glitch was so popular that walljumping quickly became an essential part of the game, especially in the much later addition of boot camp mode.
  • Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair features Beetallion members hidden in the overworld that you're supposed to reach by finding secret exits in the levels. However, a number of them can be reached by unorthodox means in the overworld, circumventing the need to find the secret exits. Rather than patch these out, the developers, Playtonic, have tweeted out videos of fans showcasing these exploits and celebrated their creativity in finding them, giving these exploits their Approval of God.

    Puzzle Game 
  • In the original Tetris, the maneuver known as a T-Spinnote  was a bug. It has been included as a feature in all subsequent remakes, and is considered a basic move by Tetris tournament players. It has even been expanded with "double t-spins" and "triple t-spins".

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • "The Beach" in Achron is an unusual mechanical version of the Place Beyond Time - a gap between two "time waves" which is outside causality. Instead of removing it, the developers kept it, as it's hard to reach if you don't know the secrets and offers advanced strategic possibilities (you can use the Beach to smuggle units through hostile borders).
  • Age of Mythology had a bug with the Egyptian's late game Osiris abilities and technologies. One "Second Kingdom" let them have two pharaohs at once and his and Miracle 'son of Osiris' allowed transforming a Pharaoh into a powerful demigod. There was a bug in the original that caused it to occasionally result in getting two pharaohs and one son of Osiris. This was fixed in the expansion by making that combo always trigger.
  • Dawn of War II has the occasional physics glitch in the base game where an enemy corpse will go spiraling violently off into the stratosphere. It's most noticeable with orks. So, in later expansions Relic decided to make that a feature of how the ork psyker unit, the Wyrd Boy, always dies. It even became part of how the Wyrd Boy dies in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.
  • The Salvage Corvette from Homeworld was only supposed to work on enemy ships that had been heavily damaged, but thanks to a programming error it ended up capable of capturing any ship. It didn't hurt gameplay balance in single-player and the multiplayer community loved it, so it was left in, though it was fixed in Cataclysm, and HW2 went with a different mechanic altogether.
  • StarCraft: Mutalisk stacking was a strategy that exploited a bug in unit movement: by having a stack of fast-moving air units like Mutalisks and one slow-moving one on the opposite side of the map in one group, the Mutalisks would bunch together in a small space in an attempt to make formation with the distant unit, making them much harder to focus down. Rather than patch it out, Blizzard dealt with it by introducing new units to each race whose sole purpose is to deal with stacked air units through Area of Effect air-to-air weapons. This movement style was recreated in StarCraft II as the default way Mutalisks fly. StarCraft II ported other similar interface bugs and a few quirks of the old AI that had become part of the pro circuit.
  • Startopia had a bug in which a Polvakian Gem Slug could "freeze" while using certain facilities, and remain there, immobile, as its stats dropped leading to eventual death. The devs caught it, but found it appropriate that there were circumstances under which the hedonistic Gem Slugs would care more about pleasure than survival, and left it in.
  • Warcraft:
    • Warcraft II had a bug that allowed a player to get 100 extra lumber at the start of any game; this was so liked (due to allowing games to get going more quickly) that it became standard tournament practice to use it every game. When Blizzard remade the Battle.net version of the game, they fixed the bug but also had it start each player off with 100 extra lumber.
    • It's possible to build buildings faster in Warcraft II at the cost of extra resources by assigning workers to "repair" the building while it was under construction. Warcraft III made this an actual feature — each faction builds their buildings slightly differently, and this is the special perk for the Human faction.
    • The way air units move in Warcraft III is descended from Mutalisk stacking in StarCraft - the units clump together in a single un-focus-fire-able formation, then explode outwards when they reach their destination or are given attack orders.

    Rhythm Game 
  • The song "GAMBOL" in beatmania IIDX has one of the easiest charts in the game; however a bizarre bug caused it to have much tighter timing windows than any other song in earlier versions of the game, making it easy to clear but extremely hard to score well on it. On Happy Sky, the bug was finally fixed: the glitched version was moved up to the Hyper difficulty, while Normal now contained a fixed version. But then on the PlayStation 2 version of IIDX 11, the developers decided to troll players further by adding an Another chart; it's exactly the same as the other difficulties, except the timing windows were shrunk to the point where it's almost impossible to score well on it at all. Even worse, DJ Troopers' home version introduced Easter Egg codes that let players use the Gambol Hyper and Another timing windows on any song.
    • The song "SOFT LANDING ON THE BODY" had a bug where due to it time signature suddenly changing from 4/4 to 7/8, the BPM doubled from 159 to 318. The BPM doubling was kept in later versions, and has become so famous that other, intentional examples of sudden BPM changes are referred to as "sof-lan" after the song, a term which Konami themselves have adopted.
  • In Bit.Trip Beat, hitting the pong ball with the corners of Player 2's paddle will cause the ball to gain way too much momentum and go haywire, making the final boss trivial to beat. When the game was patched, the developers specifically didn't fix the bug because "it was a cool advanced technique".
  • The Expert chart of the DanceDanceRevolution song "bag" used to suffer from note quantization issues, as DDR's old engine didn't have proper 12th/24th/48th notes. This was fixed in X. However, X2 gave the song a Challenge chart, which intentionally replicates the broken note quantizations of the original Expert chart.
  • StepMania (especially 3.9 and "3.95" - the version used for In the Groove 2) had the infamous "negative BPM" bug which could be exploited to cause "warps" in a chart, which could be used for all sorts of interesting effects. The 4.0 branch unfortunately fixed this bug, but the fork sm-ssc (later merged back in as "StepMania 5") adds a new element called a "Warp" (along with "fake" arrows) which can be used for emulating this behavior in a more future-proof manner.

    Role-Playing Game 
  • A very interesting pseudo-example in Baldur's Gate: Whenever a key character in the first game was missing from a scene (which could happen because of glitches), they'd be automatically replaced by a debug character called "Biff the Understudy". In Baldur's Gate II, Biff became an actual character with his own subplot.
  • Deltarune:
    • Chapter 2 has a glitch during the Spamton NEO fight where if you pressed "Z" while holding down the "Enter" key, your SOUL could rapid fire "big shots." Rather than patching it out, Toby Fox added a variable labeled "FunnyCheat" keeping track of how many times you used the glitch. Later, another patch was added which causes Spamton to notice if you're using the glitch, riling him up and strengthening his hits.
    • There is a segment in Queen's Mansion where vases are rolling back and forth on wheels, and Swatchlings will fight the party if they are broken. Originally, "interacting" with the vases (via the button that interacts with objects, not touching them) would cause it to break and the Swatchling to disappear completely. Instead of fixing this, a patch made the Swatchlings and the wheels fly up and off the screen instead, turning it into an Easter Egg. The same applies for the Pipis that replace them in the Weird Route.
  • Disco Elysium allows the player to temporarily boost one of their four core stats by using various recreational drugs. Since your core stat determines the maximum cap for how high you can raise the skills in that stat, using drugs allows you to force yourself past levelling up limits. This was originally a bug, but playtesters liked it so much that it was made into a feature. It even gets referenced in the game's script - if you fail a specific Logic check when trying to determine the flaws with Titus Hardie's testimony, have gathered all the available evidence that makes the check easier to pass, and have hit your Logic levelling-up cap, your Logic skill will compliment you on having been so thorough and asks you if you've been smoking lately - maybe you can try this again after having a cigarette? (Cigarettes boost the INT stat, under which the Logic skill falls under - the check will only re-open if the Logic stat is levelled up. Therefore, smoking a cigarette would allow the player to boost their Logic stat past the cap, thus reopening the check.)
  • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, mercenary ally Krem spends his downtime in the local tavern, where his character model has a tendency of sitting on the back of his chair, standing around the chair, standing on the chair, everything except sitting neatly in his chair. The Trespasser DLC later canonized this via dialogue Krem has with Maryden, whom he had a crush on, by admitting he would stand on his chair in an attempt to see Maryden better during her musical performances. Funny enough, Krem's location in the tavern actually supports this, as the view of Maryden from his usual location is blocked by a staircase.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The Action-Adventure spin-off The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard has an infamous "jagged water" glitch in its oceans. In Morrowind, this glitch is referenced in an in-game book:
      "They walked farther and saw the spiked waters at the edge of the map. Here the spirit of limitation gifted them with a spoke and bade them find the rest of the wheel."
    • Skyrim:
      • The game has a few physics quirks, one of which causes a player, companion, or random target to fly hundreds of feet into the air after being hit with a Giant's club, in classic Blown Across the Room fashion. Though unintended, the designers decided not to patch it due to its popularity with players.
      • In "Fall of The Space Core", a semi-official mod that Valve made to commemorate the opening of the Skyrim Steam Workshop, the Space Core can be returned back to space by being within the impact radius of a giant's club swing. It screams "SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE" on the way back up.
      • In the Restoration magic school, there is a perk called "Necromage" which makes magic more potent against undead. Due to an oversight, that perk applies not just to enemy undead but also to the player if the player becomes a vampire, making the vampire player far more powerful. So much so that the main use many players have for the perk is to boost their vampire characters' power.
      • Any bug or glitch that isn't game-breaking is allowed to stay as long as it's funny (e.g. putting a bucket on somebody's head so they can't see you robbing them blind). The bug that cropped up during development where animals such as chickens would report crimes that they saw didn't qualify mainly because, while similarly hilarious, it would be unfair to players who didn't know about it.
  • In the Fallout series, players quickly learned that you wouldn't get blamed for killing someone if you reverse-pickpocketed a live grenade onto them; in Fallout 2, this was an easy way to get rid of those annoying child pickpockets in the Den without becoming a childkiller. Future installments canonized this as a game tactic; Fallout 3 keeps a running tally of "Pants Exploded" every time you do it (along with an achievement for your first time) and the Show Within a Show calls it "the ol' Shady Sands Shuffle."
    • Companions were added into the original game at a very late stage in development. As such they are Non Player Characters scripted to follow the player around. This lead to some rather idiosyncratic game behavior which has since become trademarks of the series. First off your companions, like all NPCs, are incapable of getting radiation poisoning. This is useful because it means that the player only needs to worry about getting radiation suits and Rad-X drugs for themselves. This made things much simpler than having to track the health of each party member, and was kept in the games even after Bethesda took over. Another thing was that all interaction with the companions had to occur through the conversation window; this meant that you couldn't directly access their inventory, which lead to cases where a companion wouldn't equip the weapon you wanted them to, and in some cases (if you didn't use the store-interface to provide them with an item of equal or greater value) refuse to give you an item out of their inventory. The developers loved this emergent behavior, since it made it look like the companions had a mind of their own, and matched up with the way that companions worked in Wasteland. Hence they left it in, and it remains in the series to this day.
    • In Fallout 4 guns with the Neverending legendary effect draw ammo directly from your inventory without needing to reload. Gatling Lasers, however, use long-lasting fusion cores instead of individual bullets, which makes the effect glitch and causes them to have unlimited ammo. Bethesda decided this would be a Game-Breaker and made Neverending Gatling Lasers impossible to acquire in the main game. However, for the Nuka World DLC, they added one named Aeternus that you can get by defeating the Rogue Knight in an optional side quest.
  • In Fate/Grand Order, King Hassan's Noble Phantasm cancels the death animations of enemies killed by it. One second they're there, the next only their drops remain. The players decided this was awesome and fitting for the greatest Assassin, so the developers left it.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The "Peninsula of Power" in the original game was a small, four-tile tip of a peninsula on the world map that was placed such that it protruded into an encounter zone meant for much later in the game, allowing players to fight much stronger monsters than they would normally be able to when they could first reach it. This one area was incredibly useful for early-game Level Grinding, and has proved so popular the glitch has remained in all subsequent remakes of the game. Other Final Fantasy titles also had small "Peninsulas" of their own due to similar oversights.
    • The Critical Hit Glitch. In the original NES release, each weapon had a dedicated critical hit rate in its code, but the combat engine would use the weapon's index number as the critical hit rate instead of the intended critical rate, which had the effect of critical hits becoming more frequent as you climbed the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness. For example, Thor's Hammer was intended to have a crit rate of 0.5%, but in practice had a crit rate of 18%. This bug has never been fixed in any remake of the game.
  • Makai Toushi SaGa AKA The Final Fantasy Legend has the infamous Saw Glitch. This weapon was supposed to instant kill any enemy whose defense was lower than the user's strength but instead it does the opposite: it instants kill enemies whose defense is higher than the user strength. And it works on the Final Boss. Not only the WonderSwan Color remake kept the glitch but it's been referenced in other SaGa games such as Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song (the tale of the Axe that Slew a God), SaGa Scarlet Grace, (the legendary Emperor's Saw, capable of slaying a God) and Romancing SaGa Re;Universe (The "Black and White Towers" event where Aishe attempts to kill the final boss of Makai Toushi SaGa with her chainsaw. He survives, but his life flashes before his eyes, complete with death by chainsaw.) and other Square Enix games (Final Fantasy XIII where the final boss Orphan is vulnerable to Vanille's Death spell once staggered).
  • In the original Famicom version of Final Fantasy II, the Ultima spell is bugged and won't power up as it's supposed to, leaving it doing a measly 500 damage. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted it fixed, but a programmer insisted on leaving the bug in, justifying it as Ultima being an outdated spell overshadowed by newer and improved ones, mirroring real life. Sakaguchi then tried to fix the problem himself, but the programmer ciphered the code's source. As such the bug remained, though it was fixed in remakes.
  • It's possible that the "Mime" job class introduced in Final Fantasy V was based on a fun glitch in Final Fantasy IV that caused Kain to copy the previous character's actions in battle. This is also possibly an origin for the Augment system in the remake.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • The well-known Vanish-Doom/X-Zone was a really easy way to dispatch any enemy that wasn't outright immune to Vanish, and it wasn't fixed in the PSX port, except for one case. Storyline-boss Phunbaba was programmed in the PSX version to be invulnerable to the Vanish spell, because Phunbaba could crash the game when being Vanish-Doomed because of how much it messed with the script. Even then, the programmers didn't get the "invulnerable to Vanish" part quite right, since he can still be given the Clear status effect another way. However, the Game Boy Advance version of the game thoroughly squashed the glitch on Phunbaba by making him unable to be hit with the Clear status effect at all.
      • Dissidia Final Fantasy references this glitch with the Banish/Death Skill which allows you to instantly win a fight with any enemy whose level is lower than yours.
    • The Phantom Train wasn't supposed to be vulnerable to Sabin's Suplex move - the game has a hidden value where enemies that are flying or too heavy could not be affected by it. Someone forgot to set this variable on the Phantom Train, which meant that Sabin is apparently capable of lifting a moving train off of its rails and slamming it back down. Even in later versions where a lot of other bugs were fixed, Square Enix left this one as is, because it's a once-per-playthrough experience that was too popular to omit. Final Fantasy VII gave Tifa the Meteodrive Limit Break as a Mythology Gag, which had this effect no matter how big the enemy was.
    • In the original Super Famicom version of Final Fantasy VI, a bug rendered any item as being equippable as a helmet, with Edgar's drill tool being the best option. Dissidia, already rife with Mythology Gags, saw fit to include a drill as being the headset equip for the 'Machine' equipment set. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles references this as well with the Drill being an artifact with the sole purpose of raising defense.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Tifa's famously huge breasts are a result of the PS1's rendering limitations; her concept art depicted her with a modest B- or C-cup at most and this was supposed to be reflected by her character model, but such detail simply didn't work with the technology of the time and the creators were forced to choose between modeling Tifa completely flat-chested (like they did with Aerith and most other female characters), or with an exaggerated chest to signify breasts. They chose the latter, and the results ended up becoming such an iconic aspect of the character that nearly all subsequent works set in the VII world very deliberately portray Tifa with a large bust, long after technology advanced enough to easily depict the originally intended size. Final Fantasy VII Remake would finally tone down her bust size to focus more on her legs - but only because she's very clearly now wearing a sports bra as part of her outfit so they don't get in the way, when she's seen in her dress while infiltrating Don Corneo's manor, it's clear her bust, while shrunken, has only been very slightly so.
  • In Improbable Island, at the start of a new day it gives you a message saying. "It is a new day! Strap your <weapon> to your back and head out for adventure!", but if you had no weapon it would just say "Strap your fists to your back" instead. This was removed in one update, but quickly put back in due to popular demand.
  • In The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, the translators encountered a weird text glitch that would sometimes cause random words to be blown up to two or three times their normal size, first seen in a sidequest where Estelle says, of Olivier, "He may be a total weirdo, but his gun skills are LEGIT!". The translators joked that, given who she's talking about, "total weirdo" should've been emphasized instead. Sure enough, in the Steam release, "total weirdo" appears at three times the normal text size, causing Olivier to call her out.
  • A glitch in the Paragon resolution of the Conrad Verner side quest in Mass Effect (where Shepard gently talks Verner into going home) flags both the Paragon and Renegade resolutions in the Old Save Bonus data. Mass Effect 2 ends up reading for the Renegade option first when importing the data, causing it to assume you went with the Renegade resolution (where Shepard threatens Verner into giving up on becoming a Spectre) and Verner to call out Shepard for having pointed a gun in his face regardless of whether they actually did it or not. In Mass Effect 3, you can encounter Verner on the Citadel, where he apologizes to Paragon Shepard for claiming they threatened him with a gun — he was under a lot of stress. Also, unlike a lot of similar glitches that happened that Legendary Edition fixed such as correctly registering an assignment as saving the hostages, this one is still there.
  • When the bosses started using Fixed Damage Attacks in the third Mega Man X: Mavericks game, it would cause an approximate amount of their remaining HP to show up by accident. The creator left it in since it was handy for the player to gauge their progress.
  • Mother 3 contains a scene where after speaking to you, a Mr. Saturn would state that he was leaving, and then promptly exit off the top of the screen. While developing the game, a bug caused the Mr. Saturn to linger just off screen such that after the scene was finished you could find him waiting. They liked it so much they kept it in and added dialogue if you attempt to talk to him again. The game's creator said he liked the idea that Saturn was content just leaving the screen.
  • Pokémon:
    • In Pokémon Red and Blue, the Pokédex number for 'M (likely the second-most-known glitch Pokémon after MissingNo.) is "000". Fast forward several years later to Black/White, and Victini's Unova Dex number is "000".
    • In a likely reference to MissingNo., when Sirfetch'd was initially revealed for Pokémon Sword and Shield, its appearance was a pixellated mess and its name, category and height were all censored with glitchy blocks of text, not unlike those found in the name of Missingno.'s brethren, such as 'M. According to the official Pokémon Twitter account, a Rotom was the cause for the corrupted data.
    • One not related to glitch Pokémon: the original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl had a visual glitch in the player character's bedroom that caused part of the wallpaper to have a zigzag pattern instead of the intended stripes.note  When the remakes, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, were announced, eagle-eyed viewers of the reveal trailer noticed that part of the wallpaper in the protagonist's room had a similar, more detailed zigzag pattern, this time on purpose.
    • There was a coding error in Pokémon Black and White that caused Heracross to be able to learn Venoshock (TM09) instead of Bulk Up (TM08). While this was fixed so that Heracross could learn Bulk Up in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, it has been able to learn Venoshock in every entry in the series since then.
    • In a similar vein, in Pokémon X and Y, Elgyem and Beeheyem could know Steel Wing (TM51), which shared the same number as Ally Switch in the prior generation. Ever since then, they have been able to know Steel Wing.
    • The Sheer Force ability is supposed to raise the base power of all damaging moves that have any additional effects by 30%, and ignore their additional effects as a drawback. However, if (and only if) a move is boosted by the effect of Sheer Force, several other effects that normally happen after attacking are unexpectedly skipped as well. note  Most likely, its programming doesn't just eliminate secondary effects, but all other effects besides dealing damage on the affected moves, as the same programming that cancels the secondary effects also removes the hidden effects every other move and ability has. After it was discovered, competitive players started to abuse the glitch by filling many of the Pokémons with Sheer Force's movesets with as many attacks as possible with secondary effects, and giving them a Life Orb. Gamefreak, either due to how widespread the glitch is among competitive players, or due to the franchise being infamously programmed in "spaguetti code", has never patched this glitch, and has even added some in-game trainers that abuse the glitch as well.
  • SaGa Frontier had, in its original release, two extremely popular glitches: the Junk Shop glitch (where trying to buy an item you couldn't afford in the Junk Shop in Junk allowed you to acquire items for free) and "Takonomics" (a method to manipulate the price of gold so you could sell it for more than you bought it for, named after QA tester Takahiro So, its discoverer). Square-Enix left both glitches intact for the Remastered version.
  • Super Mario RPG: Geno can learn a move known as "Geno Whirl", which does 9999 damage if performed perfectly, but for obvious reasons, does not work on bosses. The exception is the Climax Boss, Exor, due to a programming oversight (all bosses have instant-death damage preset turned off, but Exor is immune to all damage unless one of his eyes is taken out first, and the preset for not taking instant-death damage was accidentally put on the eyes, so once an eye is taken out, it makes him vulnerable not just to regular hits, but One-Hit Kill hits). The remake, completely remade from the ground, retains the glitch as a feature.
  • Lilith in Tales of Destiny was originally supposed to be a Dummied Out character, but a party glitch in the Japanese version allowed her to join the party at a very low level. She was immensely popular, and in the PS2 remake is an optional but official party member with a revamped moveset.
  • In Temtem, Loatle's Seppuku trait dooms the target when the holder knocks itself out. Originally, this was supposed to only activate when it knocked itself out due to overexertion, but due to a glitch, it was also activated by recoil damage. This was fixed in version 0.7.3, but people liked the original version so much that it was reverted in 0.9.
  • Smith is a talking horse in the main Ultima series and Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams. Originally, Smith was included in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and was to give a clue on how to beat that game, but the programmers forgot to add it into his conversation tree. In Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, Smith was given back his full dialogue and, up to Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle (where he almost gives a clue about the actual game), Smith has been giving out clues in the form of untimely information — he tells the player what they should have done to have beaten the previous game, not the current one.

    Roguelike 
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • In the original game, it was possible, with clever usage of the D6 and items that reduce its charge rate, to completely exhaust both "pools" the game could pull items from (a pool for the room the item spawns in, and a "general" pool if that one is empty). If another item is produced when the pools are empty, the game will freak out and create an "Undefined" item, with a sprite that scrolls through almost every item sprite in the game and does nothing upon pick-up. Come Rebirth, and one of the new activated items that can be unlocked is "Undefined", which has a sprite made up of parts of other item sprites and displays the same details the original item did when picked up. Item pools are still exhaustible in Rebirth (and, as a possible nod to the original glitch, the Undefined item is one of the easiest ways to do it), but it only results in a generic Heart Container item. In Afterbirth+, an achievement was added called "U Broke It!", which rewards the player for exploiting these tricks and receiving 50 items in a single run, which would normally be impossible.
    • The "Buttless Chub" glitch; one of the possible Womb rooms of the original game contained two Larry Jrs. and a Chub. Thanks to the limitations of the game, the Chub spawned without her third segment, leaving her unable to spawn maggots from it. The room still exists in Rebirth, and Chub is still missing her behind despite the new engine being able to handle it.
    • The Polaroid was a trinket that let you access The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in the Wrath of the Lamb expansion. Originally it was supposed to have a very low drop rate from Mom, but it was accidentally made to drop 100% of the time on release. Rather than patch it out, the devs let it be since the final area was no longer a secret. Come Rebirth, and it's now a passive item so it doesn't take up your trinket slot, and has a new Evil Counterpart you can take instead.
    • One trinket, the Liberty Cap, was glitched so that it sometimes gave the effect of the Compass item (which would reveal all special rooms on a floor) for a single room, rather than act as a random mushroom item. This effect carried over to Rebirth. Strangely enough however, the effect was later removed in Repentance, with the patch notes stating the trinket was "fixed" as if it were still a glitch.
    • Isaac's weird hitbox allowed him to walk diagonally in-between spikes and avoid taking damage from them in the original game. This is still possible in Rebirth, but it requires more precision. It was also made an explicate feature of some Devil and Curse rooms, which require you to walk between spikes to pick up items.
    • In the original version of the Wrath of the Lamb expansion for the Flash original, a rare glitch could cause Triachnid to replace Isaac as the boss of the Cathedral. While this was fixed in Rebirth, Triachnid is frequently encountered as a Degraded Boss in the Cathedral and his unlock method (defeat the boss of the Cathedral 10 times) is a nod to the bug.
    • Getting revived by Lazarus's Rags as Tainted Forgotten has Lazarus Risen appear as pile of bones with his head stacked on top of it, but otherwise functioning normally. This was originally a bug during development, but the devs found it funny enough to keep it in for the patch release.
    • For a short while, using the item Suplex just as Berserk was about to wear off with frame-perfect timing would instantly kill whatever you Suplexed, including Final Bosses. While this was patched out, pulling the trick off now will cause a massive explosion that deals tonnes of extra damage.
    • For whatever reason, in Patch 17.9 Baby Plum started using the joke death animation caused by the Easter Egg item G FUEL!, where a realistic missile is dropped on her and causes a poorly-cropped explosion, in normal runs. Instead of removing it completely, the following hotfix patch reduced the chance of this animation playing to 0.0001%.
  • In Noita, the world generation creates glitche copies of the game world repeating infinitely to either side of the main world. Players who discovered this started farming the Parallel Worlds for additional perks, health, and wands despite the game suffering increasing system instability as they move further away. The devs added a layer of Cursed Rock to keep inquisitive players out, but eventually began adding unique features to the Parallel Worlds including a special ending unlocked by gathering all the Orbs in the main world and two Parallel Worlds.
  • In Spelunky HD, the Ball and Chain that attaches to your character for destroying two altars wasn't meant to be able to break the Moai in the Ice Caves. Once it was discovered that it could do so, however, the developers had no qualms with leaving it in, and fixed the visual bug of the Moai not breaking into pieces like other terrain does when destroyed.

    Shoot 'em Up 
  • The arcade version of DoDonPachi Saidaioujou had a glitch where if your combo bonus exceeded (2³¹ - 1)/100, it would turn into 999,999,999 because the programmers correctly detected the overflow but used 32-bit fixed-point signed integers instead of 64-bit ones in the intermediate calculations. This would then send your score through the roof. When the game was ported to Xbox 360, the glitch was fixed, but Arcade HD Mode contains an option to restore the original glitched behavior.
  • The egregiously Nintendo Hard Gradius III AC had significant slowdown when there was a lot of enemies/bullets on the screen, which was practically required to navigate these bullet storms. The PS2 Compilation Rerelease subsequently included an option to emulate the lag/slowdown. This would influence other games, as intentional, hardcoded slowdown when bullet density reaches a certain point has become a widespread feature in Bullet Hell games.
  • Anyone who has ever played Space Invaders will recall that the enemy ships slowly speed up as you destroy more of them. This was due to an oversight by the original programmer — moving that many pixels aroundnote  loaded down the processor, slowing the game down considerably. As the ships were destroyed, the game had less processing to do, so it ran faster. He liked it so much that he left it in, and every Space Invaders game since has done the same. The significance of this oversight extends further than merely subsequent Space Invaders games — it introduced the entire concept of difficulty curves to video games.
  • The PC-98 Touhou Project games had a glitch where using a bomb very shortly after getting hit would cause you to not die. The Windows games intentionally coded this in, called it "deathbombing", gave it a more reasonable usage window, and some games like Imperishable Night actually made it a key feature.

    Simulation Game 
  • Animal Crossing (2001): Blathers will acknowledge a bug resulting from leftover code in the Nintendo 64 version that he did not yet exist in. Not as a feature, but as a dire warning. Blathers isn't yet licensed to identify fossils himself, so you have to send them to a place called the Farway Museum, and you can only do so after receiving a letter from them. The game will check if you have a fossil that isn't buried before it sends this letter, and will get confused if you dig one up but re-bury it, making the letter never arrive and leaving fossils permanently unidentifiable.
    "Oh! Hoo! One more thing. While you're waiting for your initial correspondence from the Farway Museum...
    ...you must NOT re-bury fossils in the earth. This is very important, you see. Vital! Terribly crucial!
    Don't ask me why! To be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure of the reasoning myself, wot wot!
    It seems that re-burying fossils creates some confusion about whether or not you're ready to receive that letter."
  • Hitman 2 was coded so that throwing weapons will always hit their target, and will steer themselves mid-flight to compensate for moving targets. Fans discovered that the ICA Briefcase was both very large and had a very slow travel speed, leading to surreal moments when it would float through the air and steer around corners in pursuit of targets. This glitch was fixed by increasing the travel speed of the briefcase. A later update added a new briefcase item that flew through the air slower than the original unpatched one, the ICA Executive Briefcase MKII, as a free unlock.
    • In Hitman: Blood Money, one item (a lobster plate) has the description "Allan please add details", a note for one of the programmers to add an actual description to the item. The players found it so funny that this phrase appeared in future games as Easter Eggs and the HD collection version of Blood Money, instead of adding an actual description to the lobster plate, just changed it to "Any details yet, Allan?".
  • In Play Station Home, it was possible to do a glitch in any home to clip through walls. By placing a Subway Cooler with the front against a wall and sitting on it, once you stood up, you phased through the wall. Doing this in the home "Cutteridge Estate" by putting the Subway Cooler in the room adjacent to a locked room allowed you to clip into the completely empty room. Eventually the glitch was patched, but if your Subway Cooler was still in place, you could see into the locked room, which was now covered in vibrant, green, Joker-esque paint all over the walls saying "GET OUT!" Eventually, Sony decided to do something more with the locked room, and the house was changed in an update; a crap-ton of padlocks and chains were placed on the locked door, but there were also games added to the home to get a few pieces of an incantation to blow the door open. This unlocked another game, and completing that unlocked the Demonic Cutteridge Estate home, which is much more overt with its scares, compared to the original's more subdued spookiness.
  • Stardew Valley:
    • NPCs have a single line of dialogue per level of appreciation when given a gift. Abigail's line for "liked" items is "Hey, how'd you know I was hungry? This looks delicious!", even though said items include several non-edible minerals and gemstones. Despite the developer's noted fast response to glitches, he not only left it in, but in a later update, he added post-marriage dialogue to Abigail further affirming her Extreme Omnivore tendencies.
    • When using a club, using the special attack (right-click on PC) and then mashing the regular attack (left-click on PC) will cause a bunch of hits to happen all at once, which can kill enemies very quickly. This was (presumably) not intended at first, but in the 1.4.1 update, the developer fixed an animation bug caused by this issue, but left the actual multi-hit in the game (referring to it as "the club slam repeat quirk"), which suggests that it has now become this trope.
    • There is a set of numeric codes for items. Using these codes for a player, child, or animal name will result in the player being given the corresponding item whenever an NPC mentions the name. Version 1.5 added the ability to change one's name at the Wizard's house, but also added a list of item codes to use and some some unique NPC reactions to item-code names.
  • In Startopia, it's possible for the mindblowingly rich and lazy Gem Slugs to have their own private, personalised bar and bathhouse. The only reason they exist at all is because happy Gem Slugs produce Solid Gold Poop. However, it's also very much possible for a Gem Slug to glitch and get stuck in their baths and neglect their health, eventually dying. The developers caught it early, but didn't patch it, instead leaving it in and explaining it as Karmic Death via Conspicuous Consumption. Given the price of the Slugpartments and the level of luxury you need to attract Polvakians in the first place, the death compensation (1000e) is a paltry sum anyway.
  • WolfQuest: Eagles were originally not intended to be able to drop fish, but could do so for some reason. The team decided to keep the bug and made it into a feature. You can carry the fish around and eat it for a slight amount of food value (less than a hare).
  • In the original Zoo Tycoon game, there was a rather odd glitch in which an emperor penguin in a proper exhibit (for penguins anyway) would kill any other non-penguin herbivore added to said exhibit. In the sequel, this is fixed, but messing too much in the genetic lab minigame that comes with an expansion pack will result in a psychotic rockhopper penguin with teeth, red glowing eyes and a taste for dinosaur meat. Placing any other animal (or a particularly annoying guest) in the same exhibit as the creature will result in an untimely demise, even a T-Rex. And you can't sell it. EVER. If someone offers you a penguin to adopt, DON'T accept!

    Sports Game 
  • In Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08, there was a glitch nicknamed the "Jesus shot" which meant that in the right conditions, a ball hit into the water could still be played, complete with the golfer walking on water to hit it. Prior to the release of the 2009 edition, EA responded with a live-action recreation of the shot, claiming "It's not a glitch. He's just that good." Then, in the 2010 edition, the first bonus challenge was to recreate the scene, earning the achievement "Levinator25", named after the person who discovered the glitch.
  • In Madden NFL 15, a typo meant that Christian Kirksey's height was coded as 1'2" instead of 6'2", resulting in an action-figure-sized Kirksey running around the field alongside full-sized players. EA quickly embraced the glitch, holding a weekend Ultimate Team Challenge in which players could challenge the "Tiny Titan", and conducting a mock interview with a shrunk-down Kirksey (who himself found the glitch hilarious).

    Survival Horror 
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach has Camera Canceling. Normally the Faz-Cam is used to temporarily stun animatronics in order to sneak by, but a well-timed flash of it can actually cancel their attack animation to prevent a Game Over. Rather than fix it, the developers have claimed it is an intentional Easter Egg.
  • Resident Evil 4 had the Striker Glitch, wherein if you carefully timed it so you paused on the instant before the Striker's laser sight appeared during aiming, and then swapped to another weapon, Leon would run at 1.5 times the speed. Resident Evil 4 (Remake) has the "Striker Charm", a Rare Random Drop that makes Leon run 8% faster.

    Third-Person Shooter 
  • Gears of War: The Boomshield first introduced in Gears of War 2 only allowed you to use your pistol while holding it, but players discovered a glitch allowing them to use any weapon with it. It got patched out quickly, but two games later, Gears of War: Judgment allowed use of any weapon with the Boomshield with no glitch necessary.
  • Super Monday Night Combat has Rampage Jumping. One of the playable characters, Cheston, is capable of activating a skill that caused him to pound the ground in mid-air, causing him to rocket forward quickly. The developers liked it enough that instead of removing the glitch, they added additional skill drain when RJing to balance it out. A similar physics glitch results in incredibly fast movement speeds when moving off of ledges, over jump pads, or even using mobility skills in mid-air. Consequently, the old "low mobility" label on Enforcers was removed, since only the Gunner at the time really lacked a way to zoom across the arena.
  • Splatoon:
    • In the first game, there was a movement exploit where if the player is swimming in ink, holding down the sub weapon button or using it to come out of swim form allows them to stop on a dime or rapidly change the direction they're moving in. This became known as "sub strafing" by the competitive community and could only be done with a handful of sub weapons. In subsequent games, all sub weapons are able to do this, with it even being mentioned in the patch notes for Splatoon 2 Version 3.0.0 regarding Ink Mine (which until that update, was the only sub in that game unable to do the technique).
    • A variant, once again regarding the first game. Splatoon 1 allowed bombs to damage players through walls in Walleye Warehouse. While the glitch itself was of course removed, it received a nod in one of the conversations Off the Hook have about the stage in Splatoon 2:
      Pearl: 'Member that one time you got splatted by a bomb through a wall here, Marina?
      Marina: Me?! I'm pretty sure YOU'RE the one who got splatted!

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Advance Wars:
    • In Advance Wars: Dual Strike it was possible to get no CO in charge of your army via a glitch. The result was a character with Andy's theme, no bonuses or penalties, and the game could crash if you attempted to use your CO Power. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin makes choosing no CO an actual option, and it even pops up in a mission where your in-game army with no commander is trying to Hold the Line until Will shows up with reinforcements to take command.
    • Advance Wars By Web has "Boosting", the ability to move a transport, then move an infantry into it, then out of it again to gain one extra movement range. You can even do this with multiple infantry in one turn with one transport. Originally it was caused by a glitchnote , and this wasn't possible in the actual games, but by the time the mods found a fix for it Boosting had become such a mainstay tactic to increase the rather piddly movement range of infantry that they elected to keep it.
  • Disgaea: In the first four games, characters could only throw lifted objects / people in a straight line; however, when switching directions, there is a small window to confirm the toss and thus toss them diagonally. By Dimension 2, characters now had a throwing radius around themselves in whatever direction they wished.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics had a glitch with the Blade Grasp ability that allowed the character to block bullets with it, too. This glitch was kept when the game was re-released.
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden: In the original game, there was an oversight pertaining to how the Nosferatu spell's hard-wired 50% hit rate interacted with the programming of the Final Boss's immunity to damage from anything other than the Falchion after falling below a certain HP threshold (The game tries to make any non-Falchion attack miss, which works, unless you're using Nosferatu). In the game's remake, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, not only is this persistent vulnerability to the Nosferatu spell is retained, but the final boss gets a special line of dialogue if he is defeated in this way as opposed to the Falchion.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, enemies on Hard Mode all get stat growths equivalent to a few extra levels. This is also the case for recruitable units that appear after the first turn. Units like Rutger, Milady, Percival, and Zeiss become insanely powerful as a result. Later games tended to simply turn this into a feature, though hard-mode bonuses tended to be hardcoded to be lower instead.
  • Magic: The Gathering Arena used to display a null prompt if it couldn't remember the name of a spell or ability, most commonly encountered by copying a spell with the card Expansion/Explosion. A later update would replace null prompt with the art of the card Totally Lost, noting that Arena had totally lost what was supposed to go there.
  • In Super Robot Wars, whenever Elzam Branstein would use an attack or do something that triggered his theme in the first game he appeared in, his theme would override anything that was playing in the background, even final boss music. The reason for this is that themes have their own priority, with higher-priority songs overriding lower-priority ones. Elzam is initially fought as a boss, thus his theme has higher priority than the player characters' - when he later joins you, a glitch causes player-theme priority to be added to his boss priority rather than overriding it as it should. The fandom found this hilarious, due in no small part to his theme being awesome, and Banpresto has deliberately included it in every SRW game where he appears since. It even overrides Komm, susser tod in the End of Evangelion route from Alpha 3. It doesn't, however, override Source Music, such as The Beautiful Blue Danube being blasted from a battleship's speaker system, or the protagonist of Macross 7 performing a literal Autobots, Rock Out! session. Somehow, this just makes it more awesome.

    Wide-Open Sandbox 
  • Stunts/4D Sports: Driving has the sixth gear bug, invoked by racing at full tilt in the fastest car in the game and going over a ramp, accelerating to half the speed of sound and remaining that way until you let go of the throttle. This was done on purpose in many user created maps.
  • Crackdown sported an Agency SUV which could not only jump with super-hydraulics at the highest level, but also drive up walls. According to the dev team, this function was created completely by accident, but was left in the final game since it wasn't truly a gamebreaker. The DLC includes a Dune Buggy that is especially designed for wallclimbing.
  • Dragon Quest Builders 2 ascends a famous glitch from the game it's a sequel to, Dragon Quest II, in which it was possible to trick the game into thinking the Sword of Ruin was both equipped and unequipped at the same time, granting its enormous attack bonus without the drawback of its curse. Performing the same glitch with the Sword of Ruin and the Falcon Blade in Builders 2 instead combines both weapons into an Infinity +1 Sword that's far stronger than either component.
  • While developing necromancy for Dwarf Fortress, Toady accidentally created undead from the skin and hair of a killed monster, as well as its skeleton. He figured it made as much sense as skeletons and zombies, and kept it. Nowadays undead skins and hair are among the most dangerous of all DF creatures, since they have no vitals, don't need to breathe, and don't bleed out from massive damage — short of cave-in, atom-smasher, or encasing in ice/obsidian, they cannot be killed. There was also one update where Toady fixed the "glitch" where meals made entirely of booze would melt below room temperature - rather than the glitch that lets you make meals entirely out of booze in the first place.
  • Elite Dangerous has several of these, but a quite prominent one is the neutron star boost: When neutron stars were introduced in an update, a player could super-charge their ship's frame-shift drive ("warp drive" if you will) by traversing through one of the magnetic field cones expelled by the neutron star. Originally it was intended for this super-charge to allow for a jump that's 25% (ie. one fourth) longer than normal. However, due to a mistake the boost was 400% instead (ie. four times)! In other words, it allowed players to do jumps that were four times longer than normal. The developers quickly fixed the bug, but a massive player petition campaign convinced them to reverse the fix and return the neutron star boost to 400%. (This does not really break the game because neutron stars are rare and super-charging the frame-shift drive with one is slightly dangerous.)
  • An update added the Captain's Quarters to EVE Online, which include various virtual screens bombarding one's avatar with videos. Some nifty people located these videos in the game folder and fiddled with them a bit, to change them to videos they liked. Eventually, CCP made it very easy to do so without needing to change any of the game data.
  • Goat Simulator does it on purpose. The game is full of deliberate bugs and glitches, probably to evoke the fun of finding physics glitches in more "serious" games. One of the selling points on its Steam store page admits that anything that doesn't crash the game is "hilarious and we're keeping it".
  • The entire Grand Theft Auto franchise is one. It started life as a pretty normal racing simulator with police who pull over racers. However, the AI for the police was far too aggressive and started slamming into racers. Playtesters had much more fun dueling with the police than doing the racing, so the developers made that a core gameplay component. And a franchise was born.
  • In Minecraft:
    • The creeper's model was that of a failed pig model. The model failed due to Notch attempting to make the pig model longer horizontally, but he botched the coding and it made the model grow longer vertically instead, which also made the legs look weird in that position. Notch liked how creepy it looked and dubbed it the Creeper.
    • When the pistons were added, people soon realized that they sometimes got stuck in an incorrect state and need to be "updated" to make then snap back to their expected state. Ingenious people managed to transform this glitch into so-called block update detectors that significantly expanded the ways redstone mechanisms can interact with the rest of the game world; this inspired the creation of the observer block in a later update. Another, unrelated glitch with the pistons made it possible to propagate redstone signals arbitrarily far within a single tick (0.1s). This enabled the players to circumvent the intended 150m/s limit. This later capacity was expanded in the next update, making it significantly easier to transmit instantly both edges of the signal.
    • Green-robed villagers, which were unused at first, could be spawned using commands but would not offer any trades since none were implemented for them. While they were removed temporarily in 1.8 due to a game crash bug when attempting to trade with them, they later came back in 1.11 as the Nitwits, with their lack of trades becoming their defining feature, and were carried forward with the major village overhaul in 1.14.
    • The Nether is supposed to be a gigantic cavern, which means it's the only one of Minecraft's dimensions that has a physical ceiling, capped off with a layer of bedrock. It was possible to clip through the bedrock and end up on top of the Nether-roof, but at that point you were stuck, since it was above the build height limit, and since the entire area was a flat plane of bedrock, there was no way to get back down. However, in Minecraft Java 1.2, when the build height limit was changed from 128 blocks to 256 blocks, the roof of the Nether was never lifted higher. This meant that players could now build on the Nether-roof, which immediately meant it got a lot more attention. The Nether-roof became essential for things like gold farms and Nether hubs, since there are no blocks to clear out, and no areas to spawnproof (nothing spawns on bedrock). Getting onto the roof was always tricky and required the use of various clipping and bedrock-breaking glitches, but in update 1.15, Mojang made it so Nether Portals in the Overworld could be linked to a portal on the Nether-roof, and the height of the Nether was not changed when the entire dimension got an overhaul in version 1.16.
  • No Man's Sky has a popular exploit called the Dash Jump, where the player performs a melee attack while running to get extra momentum, and simultaneously use the jet-pack to get up in the air and maintain said momentum. This allows the player to essentially achieve Video Game Dashing. Hello Games and fans loved it so much that in the newest update, NEXT, it was given a slight boost in effectiveness, and given its own unique animation.
  • Roblox had a glitch in 2008 where you can wear 2 or 3 hats at once. It was eventually made a feature.
  • The PC game Spore includes some glitches that have been left in, such as the ability to create invisible limbs and therefore make parts on the created creature float in midair. Another glitch made it possible to create asymmetrical creatures, and a later patch upgraded this to an actual feature, with a simple keybind to get the previously tedious effect. Though, asymmetrical ships, vehicles and outfits tend to look better than creatures themselves.
  • Terraria: "Hoiking" was originally a bug where something can be pushed when interacting with a sloped block, allowing for fast travel if sloped blocks are chained together. The developers became aware of this, considered it a feature, and purposefully left it in the game for its beneficial uses.

    Other 
5-Volt: Hey! What on earth are we going to do with this giant bug?
Wario: Hmmm... I say we leave it alone. It's grimy and stinky and messed everything up. Which makes it perfect for my level!

    Non-video game examples 
  • Dotfiles in Linux/Unix systems are hidden files that can be used to define and declare how certain programs and systems on one's machine should work. As this article explains, they came from an oversight. Within Unix (which Linux is based on), two files were added to each directory, a '.' and a '..'. The former would reference the current directory, and the latter would reference the directory above. The `ls`command was then updated to ignore anything that started with a dot. While the intention was just to ignore the '.' and the '..', other programmers discovered they could create "hidden" files by prepending them with a dot.
  • In the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, including the stories made by Carl Barks, Huey, Dewey and Louie would sometimes be mistakenly drawn as four ducklings instead of three. This led to Epileptic Trees about a mysterious fourth nephew, getting the Fan Nickname of Phooey. In the 1999 comic Much Ado About Phooey, it was eventually explained that some kind of weird electric/physic mishap caused by lightning would cause a clone of the three boys to momentarily appear, and the name "Phooey" was canonized. It would get referenced again in DuckTales (2017), where one episode has Dewey reveal he occasionally dreams that the brothers have a fourth sibling named Phooey.
  • The early history of rock and roll is littered with broken vacuum tube amplifiers creatinig fuzzy, distorted sounds, and musicians tampering with their equipment to try to replicate it. Examples include The Train Kept A-Rollin, Rumble, Don't Worry, and The Fuzz.
  • There's a web-enabled tool for creating fonts called Fontstruct. There was a glitch that enabled you to stack bricks you use to create fonts. In the version 2.0 update in 2010 they made it an actual feature.
  • Traditional automatic transmissions using a fluid coupling and planetary gearset "creep" when in gear and not held against the brake. Continuously variable and dual-clutch automated manual transmissions don't have to, but are designed to anyway since that's what drivers expect in a two-pedal transmission system.
    • Designers have learned that without the precise low speed control from this creep or from feathering the clutch on a manual, a car becomes almost impossible to park. Even electric cars have added a creep feature despite having direct drive systems and the ability to turn power on and off at any time.
  • A glitch on the adoptables site UniCreatures replaced the sprite for Flarius (a standard fire-breathing dragon) with that of Caprine (a goat). Shortly afterwards, the mods released a new creature: the goat-dragon Capricious.
  • Serious example with costly consequences: during the dark ages of early CPU designs, some CPUs either wouldn't do what they were supposed to do when fed certain instructions, or yielded completely unexpected results. This in turn forced OS programmers to anticipate those glitches to make their side of things work as designed. This phenomenon came full circle when the CPU designers were later forced to incorporate the bugs of the early CPUs just so those dubious OSs would work properly. And so on and so forth. This has been one of the reasons why the x86 instruction set (used by Intel, AMD, and others) is so ludicrously huge; it contains tons and tons of Ascended Glitches.
  • It doesn't stop with the metagame between CPU designer and OS programmers. Suppose you have a huge set of data stored in an obscure and outdated system, the kind that has been out of production for more than a decade. You want to retrieve that data to store in a shiny new system. So you grab an instruction manual and build an emulator to emulate the environment in which the system used to run. When you actually run it, the old system promptly crashes and lets out a strange-smelling puff of smoke (which is probably your data). Why? It's because the programmers of the old system didn't actually build their things according to the reference manual but to the behavior of the real boards-and-cables environment they had in hand. No wonder the system choked inside your environment.
  • This was one of the main reasons why Windows Vista had so many problems with older software being incompatible. Vista cleaned out a lot of the bugs and glitches from previous iterations of Windows, which may have sounded great on paper, but a lot of Windows software had been built around those bugs and glitches. Most notably, Vista no longer automatically gave administrative rights to every user account — something that many programs had taken for granted on XP and earlier versions of Windows. A lot of software needed to be patched to account for these changes.
    • Compatibility mode in an operating system or browser is essentially this: turning on compatibility mode adds intentional bugs that replicate the behaviour of unintentional bugs in previous versions so software and websites designed around (or based on) those bugs works correctly.
  • Just before the filming of the first regeneration on Doctor Who, it was discovered that a vision mixing desk was faulty in such a way that adjusting a specific control would overexpose the image. This was seized upon to create the iconic shot of William Hartnell's face dissolving into Patrick Troughton's, and by doing so, influence the visual look of almost all the other regenerations. Originally, the intention had been to have the Doctor collapse with his cloak over his face, and just pull it back to reveal he'd turned into Troughton.
  • The early electro-mechanical pinball game Contact did not include a noisemaker of any kind. As a joke at Pacific Amusement, one of the employees wired a doorbell buzzer to the Contact Switch on a demo table — every time it was hit, owner Fred McClellan thought his phone was ringing and tried to answer it. When the bell proved to be an attention-getting device, it was added to all subsequent machines.
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons first edition monster manual, a typo had Mummies powered by positive energy instead of negative like other undead. This distinction was uncorrected long enough for Dragon Magazine and the fandom to pick it up and run with it, enough so that mummies being positive energy creatures was a central point in the Van Richten guide to Mummies. Many fans never knew this started as an error until it was "fixed" in 3rd Edition.
  • Animation-to-fanfic example: In Lucky Star, the fish that Kagami nabs at a summer festival is later shown to be living in a pond with nothing but rocks in it. Whether this was a shortcut on the animators' part or based on the assumption that such will suffice for a goldfish, it becomes a plot point in a fanfic titled Starbound.
  • In Wreck-It Ralph, Vanellope is an in-universe example. She's a glitch because Turbo tried to delete her code when he became King Candy, but through the movie she learns to control her glitching so that it's actually helpful to her. At the end, when the game resets, she actually keeps the glitch as a special character power and players in the arcade love using her because of it.
  • Beat the Drums of War referenced a mistake by Cryptic that went memetic. Star Trek Online has long had a mistake in the title of a doff assignment, "Investigate Rumors of Klingon Intelligence". This was meant as "Klingon Intelligence has infiltrated your ship" but led to jokes about Klingons being rumored to be intelligent. Including one made by Eleya on Lae'nas III in-story.
  • Hard Candy's marketing seized on the aftermath of color correction: Elliot Page wore an orange hoodie during filming, and after color correction his costume appeared to be red instead. Seeing the writing on the wall (Page's character is a Little Red Fighting Hood), the advertising campaign heavily featured the red hoodie and played it up as symbolism for Little Red Riding Hood.
  • In Vinesauce Tomodachi Life, the live-streamed nature of the series means that several errors the game has caused have been incorporated into the narrative in some way.
    • In Episode 30, Vinny is watching Clown hang out with a few other islanders, and sees him appear to walk through one of them. He decides that this means Clown is actually a ghost, and it's since become the most well-known aspect of his character.
    • Twice, once in Episode 28 and again in Episode 54, the game ends up crashing while Vinny is playing, before he was able to save. Vinny has implemented this into the story by saying those crashes are actually "dimensional splits" that divide the island into separate continuities. This also fleshed out one character, as both times, Isaac was connected to the crashes in some way, which has caused him to be characterized as a chaotic Reality Warper with an allegiance to Jesus (who has also been connected to the crashes).
  • The 1980s game show Press Your Luck had a game board with eighteen screens with values that almost always changed at the same time, but half of the screens would occasionally change out of sync with the other half. Its revival, Whammy, actually implements—and amplifies—this behavior. While the screen values always change at the same time during Whammy's first round, the screens change independently from each other at semi-random intervals in the second.
  • When Subaru tried to put their EJ engine into the Impreza WRX model they noticed they did not have enough room for a proper, equal length exhaust header setup. Having no choice they decided to use a less optimal unequal length headers. This reduced power and torque, but produced a very distinct burbling sound. WRX became a Cult Classic among car enthusiasts for its performance, rallying achievements and of course the sound. After Subaru moved to the next generation FA engine, it finally had room for equal length headers and decided to use them. Cue cries of Ruined FOREVER for the fandom and aftermarket companies selling (way less efficient) unequal length headers for the FA.
  • A certain early IBM monitor-based terminal had an interesting bug: When downloading a new symbol set, the screen would flash green streaks, sometimes called "Green Lightning". This was intentionally not fixed, and in fact later versions of the terminal had that feature designed into it, because it served a useful purpose: telling the user that the terminal was not frozen, merely engaged in work that the user could not immediately see.
  • Glitches in video game consoles that resulted from hardware limitations tend to be replicated in video game emulators and source ports, often optionally, for fans who believe such glitches enhance the game or for purists who wish to emulate the game as closely as possible to how it worked on the original hardware. Things like sprite flickering, slowdown when too many sprites are on the screen (which could serve as an impromptu Bullet Time), and scanlines from old CRT televisions (which somewhat blurred pixels like a primitive form of anti-aliasing and is often preferred to the crisp blocky pixels on newer LCD monitors) are found in almost all emulators.
    • Popular early emulators of 8-bit and 16-bit consoles tended to take a lot of shortcuts to get the games running at native performance, but such shortcuts introduced their own glitches or hiccups that were for the most part, harmless. Due to their popularity, these were also used to develop ROM hacks, and some ROM hacks relied on these emulation quirks. It got to a point that running the ROM hack on a more accurate emulator, such as the cycle-accurate SNES emulator higan, doesn't actually work.
  • Fitting for a Web Comic that heavily incorporates video game elements in its worldbuilding, story structure, and characterization, Awful Hospital got a small one of these in the form of '1['. On Layer 850, a typo in the page's HTML caused the letters '1[' to appear in the upper left of the page, and in the few days before the next page was uploaded, commenters made it into a meme. On the very next page, a character lists off several mysterious, poorly understood entities throughout the range, including "1[ ...Now there's a NASTY bugger". We've yet to see if it'll get more than that one allusion, but still.
  • So called "broken colors" could be considered a form of this. They occur when your eye sees a combination of wavelengths of light and can't really classify them, so renders them as a non-spectral color, with brown and grey being the most common. Essentially, it's your eye giving you an error message.
  • Some biologists think the female orgasm is actually a vestigial response that's hung around, as unlike the male orgasm it doesn't seem to play any role in reproduction (aside from further incentivising the act, of course). Most women aren't about to complain though.
  • Trying to make Microsoft Sam say "soy" makes him say "schwa" instead, and typing "soi" instead doesn't fix it. Later versions of Microsoft Windows come with text-to-speech voices that pronounce "soy" correctly but deliberately pronounce "soi" like "schwa."
  • While writing The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien kept writing "dwarves," which he described as "a piece of private bad grammar"—at that time, "dwarfs" was considered the only correct plural. He opted to leave it in, however, and one sign of his influence is that nowadays you're far more likely to find people spelling it his way.
  • This is essentially how evolution works. Random gene mutation may result in physical changes in descendants. If the mutations don't result in its death before it has a chance to breed, it can pass on this mutation to future generations. If the mutation is beneficial, it makes the organism even more likely to survive and produce offspring, until eventually it's a standard feature of a breed.
  • BattleTech: In his first encounter with the Clans, Phelan Kell's targeting computer alternately misidentified a Clan Timber Wolf (a design at the time unknown in the Inner Sphere) as a Marauder (abbreviated MAD) and a Catapult (abbreviated CAT) and spat out the identification MAD CAT MAD CAT MAD CAT MAD CAT MAD CAT.... During the debriefing, the Mech was referred to as "the Mad Cat", and "Mad Cat" later became the official reporting name for the Timber Wolf.
  • TV Tropes itself has one with its Video Examples. Each video can only be associated with one trope, so if a clip fits multiple tropes, you'd normally have to upload multiple copies, one for each trope. However, one video can have multiple media sources. Some users noticed that there was nothing stopping them from adding tropes to a video's media sources, which would make the video appear on multiple trope pages. Originally, this was frowned upon, with videos that did this having the extra tropes removed, but it's now allowed, with such tropes appearing in a separate "Secondary Tropes" section.
  • When trying to animate the park at the end of A Bug's Life, a glitch kept causing rocks to float in mid-air. They ended up using this in the Buzz Lightyear video game at the start of Toy Story 2.
  • The Pokémon Scarlet and Violet fanfic Penny Saves Paldea is based on the premise that invoked the game's numerous technical issues are the result of the Paldea region being in danger of being erased from reality.
  • The Final Fantasy VI Peggy Sue fic Second Chances is based around an actual Game-Breaking Bug that reverts the world map if you die under specific circumstances in the Opera House.
  • Muppet Babies (2018): During an animation review, Matt Danner saw that someone forgot to push the "fur button", resulting in a hairless Animal. The crew could not stop laughing at it, and Producer/Art director Chris Moreno dubbed the character "Blerph" and gave him his own model sheet. Blerph was officially incorporated into the show in the Series Finale, "The Muppet Babies Show" as part of a Freeze-Frame Bonus; he can be seen in the bottom right at the end of the Muppet Show opening recreation (between Wanda the Wacky Alpaca and the Beaker Balloon).

 
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AG Baby Bear

As NC points out, the microphone is clearly not up to par, but the commercial tries to say it's baby bear talk.

How well does it match the trope?

3.94 (16 votes)

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Main / AscendedGlitch

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