From Fallout 4 to Pokémon: The weird and wonderful world of game glitches

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! 

Next: Check out the Bad Sex Awards for games.