The 50 Worst Video Game Glitches

Image via Complex Original

Assassin's Creed

The guards in Assassin's Creed occasionally get down with what at best is an oddly placed glory hole, and at worst is simply making rough love to a rock wall.

Team Fortress 2

The rare Spy Crab can be found by simply equipping your disguise kit, crouching, looking straight up, and walking around. Actually, it's not that rare, now that we think about it.

Smurf Rescue in Gargamel's Castle

Get to the end of the game and walk back out of the final chamber for Smurfette to give you a little incentive to come back and rescue her. In reality it's just a graphical hiccup, but boy did our adolescent minds run wild.

The Sims 2

Building relationships has always been an important part of the Sims games but this particular family has issues that may jeopardize that. We suggest ordering takeout.

Far Cry 2

Apparently committing suicide by running headlong into a parked Jeep is preferable to a haircut from our Bowie knife. Come back! We just want to clean up the edges!

The Thing

We've never played the thing—is your AI partner supposed to keep following you around, shooting enemies and repairing electrical circuits after he's gunned down?

Grand Theft Auto IV

Blocking a vehicle's front seat doors and then attempting to carjack it has a dual effect; the driver won't be able to get out, and you won't be able to get in the front seat. So naturally you get in the back and the innocent civilian chauffeurs you around as you fire automatic weapons out the window.

Skate 3

This is why you always wear a helmet! The glitches in Skate 3 would be the perfect safety precaution public service announcement to show kids in school. This can happen to you!

Resident Evil 4

Pathfinding is hard, especially when a Spanish parasite is eating your brain from the inside out.

Super Metroid

A simple quirk of the game's limited physics allows you to reach such goodies as super missiles and the ice beam earlier than intended, making for some very speedy speed runs.

Red Dead Redemption

John Marston pimped out his wagon with hydraulics before hydraulics were even invented. Now if only you could drive a car in this game…

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Before this glitch was patched out, we felt like the big bad wolf mixed with Rambo every time we knocked down this base with a few swipes of our knife.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Here's another glitch we can attribute to that wonderful thing called physics. Any swing set in the game will send you and your vehicle rocketing through the sky, which leads us to believe there must be a lot of missing children in Liberty City.

Donkey Kong Country

This old school glitch allows Donkey Kong to get his freak on with a sparkly, gray, possibly metallic version of himself in the game's very first level. Bow-chicka-wow-wow.

Crysis

If the real Jaws had had this much gumption, that movie would have been a hell of a lot shorter.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Rimalus Bruiant is like one of those schizophrenic mothers who drowns her kids in a bathtub—he loves his dogs so much that he just can't bear to see them living in such a mixed up, messed up world. Poor Rena isn't about to let him take them away from her, though. Wow, that was dark.

Age of Conan

If you didn't know better you might think this chick was just dancing—we've seen worse in a game, after all. But nope, she should really just be standing there.

Dragon Age: Origins

This actually has the potential to be really terrifying if you're not expecting it. Imagine you're in the middle of a conversation with whomever, when all of a sudden BAM! giant head.

Mass Effect

Honestly, we're not sure who seems more idiotic in this video—Kaiden, who looks like he's chasseing through a production of The Nutcracker—or the moron lending his voiceover talents to the clip.

Call of Duty: World at War

The poor guy looks like a dog having a dream he's running—only he's dead. Maybe he's climbing the stairway to heaven?

Duck Hunt

Plenty of old games had kill screens, but Duck Hunt's seems particularly devious—did Nintendo purposely design it so that level 100 (or "stage 0", as the game calls it) would be impossible to clear, or does the game just freak out because they didn't program anything past level 99? Probably that, to be honest.

Goldeneye 007

Goldeneye was rife with cheats, secrets and glitches, but one of the most amusing could be achieved simply by tilting the cartridge physically. Characters—including planes, for some reason—proceeded to spin in crazy patterns, like they were being sucked into a black hole resting in the middle of their pelvis bones. Then poof, and everything's back to normal.

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez was an incredibly buggy game, but there's something in particular about an enemy's top half doing somersaults through its own legs that really tickles us. Now if only we could learn to do that in real life—think it's in the Kama Sutra?

Battlefield 3 (beta)

This bug was only found in the beta, but we're glad some players got to enjoy it while they could. All we know is if we had seen that monstrosity crawling toward us on the battlefield we would have thrown down our weapons and ran the other way.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim's giant enemies can seem a little overpowered at times, but that's not the only reason you shouldn't take on two at once. The game's physics seem particularly finicky, and adding a 15-foot monster with a club the size of your body to the mix is just asking for shit like this to happen.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

There were a plethora of issues in Skyrim when it launched, so most gamers were happy when Bethesda promptly followed up with a patch. That's because patches normally fix things without adding more bugs. Unfortunately, this one caused dragons to start flying backwards, a totally ineffective strategy for burning down villages.

Fallout: New Vegas

We expect Bethesda games to be buggy—those open worlds are huge, and it's impossible for them to catch everything. But when the very first scene in the whole game results in this, you know you've got a problem.

Super Mario 64

We've seen some pretty impressive things, but this Super Mario 64 speedrun—while no doubt tool-assisted—takes the cake. Get it? Because Peach bakes Mario a cake at the end. Ha.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Morrowind was home to tons of awesome bugs, but there was one in particular that really made the game better. By using the Soul Trap spell in unintended ways, you could make the effects of any other spell permanent. In this clip, the player summons an army to do his bidding, but you could also perma-buff your stats, create permanent indestructible armor, and levitate forever. The possibilities were game-breakingly awesome.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Alright, this is the last Skyrim physics glitch on the list, we promise. We just couldn't resist this sabretooth tiger's hypnotic aerobatics routine, or the 30 Rock joke we knew we'd be able to make.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

If you were looking for Mei Suen to see if she had any more missions for you, well, you're going to be disappointed. On the other hand, if you just wanted to stare at her tits, you're in luck. Because that's all that's left of her, apparently.

Diablo

Duplication bugs can be particularly useful, especially in a game like Diablo, where inventory management is key. If only they'd leave it in for Diablo 3.

Final Fantasy VI

Activating Cyan's unofficial psycho mode is easy: have him cast "retort", then put him in imp mode and kill him before he can attack. When you revive him, he'll go nuts, continuously attacking every enemy on the screen until the battle is over. Yes, this even works on bosses. By the way, does anyone else think this is the best Final Fantasy?

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

In a game about jumping from high places, it's a pretty big deal when your character defies gravity to float in midair. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Halo 2

The infamous BXR was positively ubiquitous among hardcore Halo 2 players, and as such, absolutely ruined the game for anyone else. Bungie was avid about cracking down on the practice, which allowed players to get off a glitchy melee-shot combo that almost always resulted in an insta-kill. All you had to do was press "B", "X" and "R" in quick succession.

Quake 3

Unlike the BXR in Halo 2, the strafe jump in the Quake series has been embraced since it was first discovered in the original Quake. Much like "snaking" in the more recent Mario Karts, strafe jumping allows you to move faster by jumping diagonally. It's a pain in the ass, but it gives hardcore players a competitive edge.

Grand Theft Auto III

GTA 3 had a ton of bugs, but considering the stupid Dodo plane couldn't ever take off, we were more than happy to settle for a flying tank. The momentum from its large cannon would carry it clear off the ground if you took it over an arched bridge. This is why we prefer the old GTAs—number four didn't even have tanks!

Big Rigs

Big Rigs is one of the worst and glitchiest games ever made. In this clip, the truck clips through a bridge, then warps to a mountainside, where it appears to reach a terminal velocity of several trillion miles per hour and then crashes the game.

Bioshock

Ragdoll physics can make for some pretty crazy postmortem movements, but this infamous video from Bioshock seems like more than just coincidence. What's this game rated, anyway?

Halo 2

Super jumps were either the bane of your existence or your favorite tool for getting ahead in Halo 2 multiplayer. They were present on nearly every level, if you knew where to look. All you had to do was run into a wall and then jump to a specific point on the map's geometry, and you'd be rocketed to some unreachable, usually advantageous perch.

Mass Effect

Crank up the volume for this one—unless you're at work or the kids are around. It's not so much that one character got stuck on another. It's what the two are saying. Apparently they've gone crazy for some perfectly logical reason, but taken out of context it just sounds filthy.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

This is what happens when you allow a duplication glitch into a game with real-world physics. It's too bad 10,000 plummeting watermelons don't have more of an effect on that dedicated fan guy—he was fucking annoying. The residents of Imperial City seem equally unfazed.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08

This glitch from Tiger Woods '08—in which TW walks on water to get a better shot—got so much attention that EA followed up with their own response video, featuring the man himself. We knew he was hiding something!

7. Rocky Horror

The Angry Video Game Nerd delves into the many, many things that are wrong with Rocky for the PS2. Our favorite is probably when the fighters sink through the floor and reappear as piles of discombobulated body parts.

Goldeneye 007

Changing the control scheme to "Goodnight" (they were all named after Bond women) in Goldeneye and plugging in a second controller allowed you to shoot during cut scenes using whatever weapon you were last holding. In this video, Bond ends the level with the golden gun, allowing him to take out Baron Samedi again just before the credits roll. And yeah, you could do it during any cut scene. It was fucking awesome.

Pokemon Red / Blue / Yellow

Missingno. was the coolest thing ever when we were in the fifth grade. The glitch was simple to pull off, but it had amazing consequences—you could duplicate items (99 rare candies for everyone!) or, if you were less lucky, erase your entire save file. Too bad we never found Mew under that truck.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo's peculiar loading system—which often caused players to warp around a level as different portions were loaded—also caused this incredibly fun glitch on the level "Assault on the Control Room". When the grunts are frozen, you can throw all manner of bullet or explosive at them; cross back over the threshold, and it all goes off at once, making for some very unhappy grunts (but a very happy us).

Red Dead Redemption

The donkey woman is only the beginning. Also included in the ranks of Red Dead's bizarre "manimals" were the cougar-man, the bird people, and, of course, the gunslinger dog. That last one even has a speaking role—he rolls through an entire quest with you!

Super Smash Bros. Melee

One of the most highly coveted glitches ever was only discovered some eight years after the Melee's release, after millions of players had resigned themselves to the fact that it was simply not possible to play as Master Hand. Only it is possible, and it's easier than you might think. Just follow these instructions and you'll prove once and for all that you're the master of Super Smash Bros. Only no one will ever want to play with you again.

Pokemon Red / Blue / Yellow

We always knew Mew wouldn't be hiding under some dirty truck! This is an honest-to-goodness, real way to catch Mew in Pokemon Red, Blue or Yellow. Sure, it's a glitch. But it requires no doctoring, no special events, no gamesharks or action replays, no mods—it's what we always dreamed of discovering as a kid. Our only regret is that it came too late for us to become the Poke-kings of the schoolyard.