Game glitches can be scary, hilarious, memorable and unpredictable. They are fleeting interruptions, momentary mistakes. In increasingly lifelike game-worlds, they are sledgehammers against the fourth wall between the environment and the player, where artful imitation comes crashing down with a well-placed code-burp.
In the Glitch Studies Manifesto, critic and artist Rosa Menkman describes a glitch as “a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form.” These experiences can be unsettling or funny – sometimes both – and as Zak McClendon recently argued in Wired, they can go a long way to lending open world games a sense of messy charm.
Crucially, they put a stick in a spoke of a game’s illusion. For a developer who’s spent months carefully crafting an imitation of reality this might sound like a very bad thing, but for a player sitting through a po-faced narrative, glitches can be immensely empowering. They take control away from the creator and open up the possibility for subversive play. See a glitch and you know you’ve gone off track, off-grid, and that feels both liberating and terrifying.
With the release of Fallout 4, players got a new glitch-friendly playground from Bethesda to explore. With that in mind, here are some of the best game glitches out there. Want to be pampered and funnelled through a story? Patch all the bugs. Don’t want to play by the rules? Then stop worrying and learn to love the glitch.
Fallout 4
Gangly, human-orangutan hybrids!
Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Garrulous Frenchmen!
Red Dead Redemption
Mad carts!
Sims 3
Spaghetti baby!
Heavy Rain
Shaun!
PES 2010
https://youtube.com/watch?v=scGNJTk36vM
Crumpled Ronaldo!
Skyrim
Swimming villager!
Pokémon Red and Blue
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-tOyBahKkbk
Missingno!
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Showdance alien!
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments
Creepy Watson!
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Original publication by Thomas McMullan: Source article