Favorite out of bounds experience?

On the original LoZ: Link's Awakening (OG GB): screen warp glitch.

So in normal gameplay, the screen swiped when you transitioned from one screen to another. If you hit select at just the right moment, all the sprites wonked out and swapped parts, and you were warped into some kind of Koholint Upsidedown. Duneon layouts changed and became nonsense, NPCs grew arms out of their faces, enemies became even stranger...and it usually yeeted you to some random part of the overworld.

Doing it in caves and dungeons was even crazier.

I loved it when I was a kid because the randomness and unexpectedness of the warp was so exciting to me, as was trying to map out exactly what part of a given map would cause certain glitches and warps. This was like 93 or 94 so roguelikes weren't really a thing at all. I don't even think it was a term back then and if it was, I certainly didn't know about it. Nethack, Rogue, and Angband were my only experiences and I didn't like them as much as I liked LoZ back then.

It was such a fun glitch. Tried it with the DX version and this newest Switch tilt-shift version, hoping some kind of Easter Egg tribute to it would be there. Sadly, there was none. If it works in an emulator you should definitely try it, because it's one of the more "feature rich" out of bounds areas in a game.

Edit: oh yeah, and enemies would talk to you sometimes. They weren't supposed to, ofc, but whatever happened with the coding when you screen warped worked such a number on the game, that some enemy sprites would toggle NPC dialogue when you tried to attack them. Made it even more surreal.

Not per se out of bounds, but: near the end of portal, there is a puzzle where you are meant to get a block and climb on top of it to get into a tunnel. The first time I played it, I entirely missed the existence of the block. Instead, I found a chair (which was meant to be strictly decorative), and spent half an hour trying to get from it into the tunnel. (The chair was slightly smaller than the block.) Eventually I succeeded!

I spent a lot of time on vanilla WoW wall walking to various zones I wasn’t supposed to. Ironforge Airport, Dancing Troll Village, Hyjal (and then floating from Hyjal all the way down to Darkshore). If it existed I tried to get to it. Some of my favorite memories of that game were of wall walking until they removed it.

In STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, you can get out of bounds pretty easily on the Rostok map (Duty's camp) by walking along the moat near the entrance and jumping over the fence. Surprisingly, the map doesn't end there, and you can walk for a good few kilometers all the way to (and through) the Wild Territory, but the most unsettling part are the empty grassy hills that stretch out just south of it. There are no buildings, no landmarks, just a vast space that feels like it — or you — shouldn't be there. When I first got there, there was a thunderstorm going, so the atmosphere of walking through a boundless space with the rain roaring, the distant ambience of the Zone, and the occasional lightning strike punctuating the skies was unlike anything I've ever seen before. I get creeped out by inhumanly large scales, so it was my perfect nightmare in some ways.

I remember in the PS2 version of San Andreas you could jump over the door in the gym and fall into this out of bounds area that I think just had cells from the overworld, but it was just NPCs and items. The whole area had this creepy fog to it, so it was kinda like the backrooms but before the backrooms, you just wandering around this empty foggy void where you'd occasionally find a gun or NPC. I remember we cheated a jetpack into it and found you could traverse "layers" of the fog and find different groups of things on different layers. me and some friends spent like an entire night just exploring the eerie void of GTA san andreas.

One of my first consoles as a kid was the PS3 (I'm young, I know) and my brother and I would often play Transformers: The Game. We didn't realize it at the time because we were stupid or something but the game is very broken and clearly unfinished and as a result, most of our time was spent finding fun glitches to try out. One I remember discovering was in the first level when you're playing as Bumblebee. If you go to this sort of scrapyard and slowly drive up to one of the dumpsters from the side, you'll just pass through and fall into the ground. This one wasn't very interesting as you'd just respawn above the map once you fell far enough. Another one that I think my brother discovered was by the invisible wall on the northernmost side of the map. If a Decepticon were to attack you while you were driving up against the invisible wall at a certain spot, you'll pass through and be able to walk into the field. [Note: It's been at least five years since I last played the game to try these glitches out again and I might be forgetting or misremembering the specific setups for these bugs.]

It's a bit difficult to talk about going out of bounds in an unfinished game without mentioning the liminality of it all. The soundtrack for this area (and the game as a whole come to think of it, although we never made it that far) was unnecessarily eerie and with Decepticons blending in as normal cars that would attack you at any moment, it kind of had you on edge the whole time you played. Also, the fact that the game is very clearly unfinished means that the presentation as a whole just feels off in a way that's hard to describe, but I'm sure it's easy to see if you even just watch some gameplay footage.

Edit (and I typed this up originally on a thread that was deleted due to multi-posting so I didn't see it originally): someone else mentioned another Transformers PS3 game. Weird.

Finding an untextured wall in the original Doom and getting that 'hall of mirrors' effect was pretty wild at the time.

In inFamous: Festival of Blood (the standalone DLC to IF2), only the first island from the base game is playable, but it's possible to glitch your way to the second island. It was there, but most of it was low poly and without collision. What was cool though was that the railroad tracks still had their collision, so you could use the grind rail ability to explore this big, low poly, crappy texture version of the map.

Oh man. half my childhood was watching 240p YouTube videos on YouTube about the ways you could slip OOB on Transformers: WFC and then trying to see if I could figure them out myself.

I also found out a spot of my own, though looking back I'm sure someone must've found it before me. It wasn't a terribly hard one and the collision on the game was all over the place. (or at least it seemed to be considering how simple some of those tricks were)

The best parts were on online matches. I'm not sure if any of those got patched at all so it was really fun going out of bounds with a flying character and just killing everyone (or more like getting killed while attempting to). I was a total dick but it was fun.

I wonder if anybody's brought up community servers for it. I managed to snag a copy on Steam before it got de-listed, so I should be able to reinstall it. I also have my original PS3 disc but I bricked my PS3 trying to un-jailbreak it so that won't do any good.

Internet-comedy-streaming group LoadingReadyRun has a twitch show called Watch&Play where Graham digs up a selection of Steam shovelware and makes Alex play it. They've deemed out-of-bounds (especially below-the-map infinite voids) "the subocean" and they make it a goal to find the way into the subocean in as many games as they can.

Slightly off topic, but you may enjoy this youtube channel - BoundaryBreak / Shesez who explores OoB areas in video games! It's really cool, I've been watching to him for awhile.

Link:
https://www.youtube.com/@BoundaryBreak

In halo reach, you could get out of bounds in order to fly an enemy vehicle that you are not supposed to be able to use. The best part about all of this is that no glitches are involved.

You start off by picking up an explosive weapon with high knock back, but low damage in order to rocket jump onto the wings of a stationary plane. Once you are on top of the plane you will need to activate an item that makes you invulnerable in order to avoid being flung off of it once it starts moving. After jumping off of the plane you are now free to explore the roof of a fortress with reasonably complete geometry for something that is out of bounds after walking a bit.

In addition to gaining access to the out of bounds area you could use an emp pistol to gain access to a vehicle that isn’t in the built in level editor. This vehicle would later be added into the built in level editor of a rereleased version of the game about 10 years after the original game came out.

This video shows the entire process https://youtu.be/Jl3kOPLK9yI

While not the most interesting out of bounds experience, my most memorable experiences are glitching through/above buildings in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, THUG1, and THUG2 during online play. Not to get an advantage or anything, just because it was fun. Most sessions in that game were just glorified chat rooms while people goofed off skating or doing whatever. I even joined a few glitch clans so I could learn new ways to glitch around levels. We'd just hangout in our 3D chatroom skating and showing each other interesting glitches. Such a simpler time in my life.

As a child I must have spent quite some time in *Super Mario 64 trying to figure out the secrets of a glitch that let's you enter the castle's walls. This one is kind of surreal as you'll land next to the castle's main doors but from the inside without triggering the loading zone that would usually transition you to the interior scene. You're stuck in this tiny space unless you walk through the door in which case you'll be outside but also stuck as the outside geometry isn't fully loaded and beyond the door frame there is only vast blackness. You can only exit back through the door in which case you'll be stuck on the inside again. It's hard to explain that's why I linked the short video above. I guess technically you are inside the spaces that the game uses during the short cut scenes that play when Mario enters or exits the main portal. When doing so you can see him walking inside/outside so the map extends just a bit for the cut scene to work but obviously it doesn't load in the entirety of the level.

I've had a strange fascination with this as Mario is now trapped in a strange liminal space forever bound to exit through a door which leads to the other side yet still traps him. Now when I first discovered this I. thought it was some kind of hidden path to further advance the game or unlock more of the castle's secrets. Notably you can only perform this glitch once you unlock the cannon outside the castle necessary to launch you to the necessary height. And that only happens after you completionist the game with 120/120 stars. So it felt like something you had to "unlock" first to be worthy. And even the earliest Super Mario Bros games had places where the map designers let you go out of. bounds to bypass the challenges of a level, access a secret one or warp to a different world entirely. So it felt in tune with the Mario series.

Mind you this was in the days before wide spread Internet adoption were it wasn't so easy to corroborate information online. Sharing secrets or gameplay hints was part of the social experience of playing a game. Today if you are stuck on a puzzle you look up the solution online but back then we asked our neighbors, friends or class mates for a solution.

I also was simply a kid who still thought of a game's world in an immersive, fantastical way (as if the space really existed) rather than from a technical perspective (as a software program). Nevertheless I was just on the brink of being old enough to realize that what I had stumbled upon was probably more so an accidental behind-the-scenes visit more so than a genuine secret.

Sonic Adventure DX is busted beyond repair to the point where collision detection is merely a suggestion, this makes it is extremely easy to glitch out of bounds and go places you normally shouldn't be able to go.

Some of my favorite examples are accessing Sonic only areas as other characters such as Knuckles Big the Cate, or Amy. Lost World, Speed Highway, and Twinkle Park are especially easy to access with enough boundary pushing.

007: Nightfire

Somehow managed to glitch myself under/off the map a few times in multiplayer mode. In this particular instance, I was playing as Oddjob. My brother and I just laughed and laughed as I murdered him over and over from out of bounds with my hat, completely unfindable and untouchable but quite capable of killing him.

The other times I did it weren’t quite as fun, as it’s very hard to kill people from off the map with the more traditional weaponry, we typically had to reset the game after a bit. Still got a few minutes of feeling like a kid hiding in the retail store clothes rack though before revealing where I was (aka not on the map) and resetting.

I had Need for Speed: Most Wanted, one of the greatest street-racing video games, on PS2. In local multiplayer, most of the maps had the quintessential barriers to keep you "on track" for the circuit race; however, one map had a fenced off tunnel you could drive through and get outside the barriers. My brothers and I would spend hours exploring the entire city, although I'm surprised games didn't make a similar co-op exploration mode before.

Final Fantasy XIV:

It's not very common in FFXIV to find out of bounds tricks, but this one's actually surprisingly recent, though already patched out.

It involved abusing the New Game+ feature to reposition your character in an invalid place. This video shows the beginning of the process, but for some reason doesn't bother to show the rest, which is that afterward, you could line yourself up with a spot that was below the Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks zone and toggle New Game+ again to reposition upward.

Then, you'd be on the platform geometry that belongs to the Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks, but you'd technically actually be in the Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks zone. This means you could be up on top of the decks and looking down at all the players around the aetheryte and actually see and target them, unlike when you just zone into Upper Decks as normal.

From there, it was easy to bring more people up without showing them how, by way of BLU's Self Destruct and raise actions repositioning the resurrected player to the caster's location.

During my search for that footage though, I learned that another method I'd never seen also existed shortly after the NG+ method was patched. Don't know if it still works, but it's a good addition to this post to at least show what the intended result should look like even though its a different method.

Guild Wars 2:

This was popular about a decade ago, not sure if this is still possible cause I don't see people doing it any more, might just be irrelevant since there's flying mounts now and weren't any back when this was possible, but:

If you could get out of bounds (which actually often isn't the most difficult part, with crazy things like experimental rifles, teleportation guns, and the class movement skills available there's many spots where you either climb out around the edges or clip through tiny gaps in terrain model geometry), in some maps there could be a way to get into the water below, which you could use to swim to basically any XY coordinate.

Upon logging out and then back in, the game would want to put you at the same coordinates, but the "Z" (height) would be invalid, so it would keep the XY and place you at a valid Z above you, and based on remembering high places that were above other places where it's valid to stand, I think it would prefer the highest value to place the character.

In this clip, for example, they already start out of bounds and then access the water below.Around 1:52 they log out and back in to find themselves up at the top of the city.

There were a lot of places where people used to do this, but like I said earlier, flying mounts might've killed it off. I used to spend a lot of my time in the vanilla release doing OoB stuff in this game, though.

The Doom wad "My House"

If you type in IDCLIP (the no clip cheat) to try to get around some of the puzzles in the map it sends you to the "backrooms". This backroom is a seemingly endless set of hallways based on the internet backrooms, and it really sets off the creepy radar.

The other thing is there is growling that you can hear that seems to get ever closer as you try to navigate your way through this maze. This custom level someone made really deserves it's own post, and I won't spoil what happens, but you can return to the house from the backrooms.

I'd say by far the coolest out-of-bounds area I've ever seen explored on a video game is in Super Mario Land 2 for the Gameboy. Through a glitch in how pipes work, you can fall through the bottom of the level, and the area you fall into is actually the entire memory space of the gameboy, rendered as tiles you can interact with as mario. By breaking bricks you can change memory values, letting you reprogram the game, as mario, inside the game. This has led to speedrunners figuring out exactly which block you have to break to trigger the end credits scene. The difficult part of this was figuring out exactly how to navigate through all this glitchy garbage data without interacting with it and crashing the game. I think it was dotsarecool (now known as IsoFrieze) who originally mapped this out, but several speedrunners such as SethBling have popularized the route. People have now refined the route down to 2 minutes 34 seconds.

Dotsarecool has a great technical explanation of this glitch on his Youtube channel Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPzuYWbnln4

I got to test a car combat mmo called auto assault for over a year before it came out. The clan I was in did glitches and breaking the game on purpose. My gamertag plus what I was good at became a stamp of approval called panda proof. Was so much fun getting into quests and bugging out the quest lines because I got around blockers and seeing way outside the map. finding dev areas and content not even released in alpha was a dopimeine hit.
https://youtu.be/va0hqU9FVcQ

In WoW up until they redesigned Orgrimmar, you could get under the city and see it from underneath. I remember spending a lot of time there goofing around with friends

Technically not what you're looking for, but I do enjoy finding and exploring cut maps and environments that end up in the final game. A lot of old Square games would usually have "debug rooms" which let you manipulate the state of the game in various ways, which sometimes have environments made just for testing, some unfinished, or even some that only show up in cutscenes.

I actually don't care much for going out of bounds because none of the actual game is there; they may be a fun diversion but that fun wears off really quickly.

Tomb Raider II had this thing where you could run around Laura Crofts mansion. Somehow I managed to roll into a wall and sort of slide up into the ceiling to end up on the roof. I promptly fell off and died.

It was only my 2nd 3rd time playing and I was never able to replicate it.

In Battlefield 3's campaign, there's a few times where you can escape the areas meant for the campaign levels and run around out of bounds. What's funny is that the out of bounds areas in some cases are absolutely HUGE (just meant as backdrop obviously), and even have some seemingly cut vehicles that aren't found elsewhere in the game.

In the game Lego Island from 1997, there was a way to go out to sea. It was like a glitched invisible maze and eventually I'd be so far away that I couldn't see the land. It was pretty much just blue everywhere.

Fun game.

Destiny 2 when it first came out. One of my friends and I always liked looking for little places or things that could be broken or exploited in games. When D2 came out we started looking, and I ended up finding a spot, I believe on Earth, where you could just double jump through a hole in the ceiling and you'd be out of the map. From there we started basically jumping around the outside of the map seeing if we could find anything or get back in somewhere else.

The game would even respawn you outside of the map if you fell into the void and died. I remember finding a few more spots like that on some of the other worlds too, but we spent hours on that first one. I may still have clips saved of it.

I went back maybe last year and tried getting out of the map the same way, and they'd patched it.

The most memorable one for me was finding Shaymin in Pokémon Diamond before they were ever announced. I used an Action Replay to go through that rock, and then followed that long path of flowers that spanned the entire map. At the time, I was really young and didn't use the internet for gaming news, so I had no idea that Shaymin existed at all. To me, it was finding a completely new Pokémon that none of my friends had ever talked about.
Another memorable one was the invisible Delfino Plaza glitch in Super Mario Sunshine. I don't remember where I read about it, but it had really vague instructions. Finally getting it done then falling into that void was incredible.

I used to play Vigilante 8 on the PS1 with my younger brother. We found that if you just kept accelerating into the boundary of any map, you would slowly move through it, and eventually be released into the outer bounds of the zone. Since it was mostly a versus game, we spent most of our time trying to either get into that area or prevent the other from getting into it, as it basically could be exploited to get free hits on the other player. We also discovered that you could continue traveling through the out of bounds area until the game would eventually crash.

The one I always remember is Ultima 8. Got lost in the catacombs and just started climbing and jumping on shit. Ended up completely bypassing the whole bit with the Zealan gods somehow. Didn't even know that portion existed until a later playthrough.

I was once exploring Hyrule Castle in BOTW and on one there was a Door frame or something that wasn't loaded properly and I tried standing on it. Link started a falling Animation and suddenly i was out of bounds. I even found a sword there and was confused for a second, until i realized it was the sword from the Lizalfos i killed right before that. And while exploring down there Link suddenly started to float up, because there was Water there. I've also tried to get in bounds again, but couldn't figure out how. i think i just ended up teleporting out.

In the defunct MMO game Fer.al there was an area in one of the cities which was mostly finished and seemingly intended to be visited, but either was decided against or never had the chance to be added because the game shut down before getting out of beta (and I'm still mad about it but that's for another thread). However, an out of bounds glitch involving clipping through walls let you access it. If I'm remembering right it was a little waterfalls kind of area and honestly was a nice place to hang out.