What are some of the most interesting glitches in video games?
I've found a fair few glitches that I find really interesting, and I'd be pretty interested in seeing some more pixel vomit too. For the ones I'll be listing, they are in old games but are very interesting.
Everyone's seen the MissingNo. glitch, but a far less famous (although in my opinion, more interesting) glitch is the Super Glitch. If you've got an emulator, I'd recommend doing a save state and messing around with it - it's results vary a lot.
A glitch available in quite a few games is arbitrary code execution. It's pretty interesting in general, as people can do loads of things, from loading up homebrew to replacing maps. Most of the time it is rather difficult or time consuming to do, but it's still fascinating to see.
This one technically isn't a glitch at all, but teleporting in SRS-based Tetris games is pretty cool. An actual glitch in Tetris (NES version) is pentrises don't clear all lines, which can make pretty interesting stuff happen.
EDIT: I nearly forgot about The Big Skip in Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. I recommend watching a speedrun from AGDQ, it only goes over it very briefly in the tasvideos page.
If you enjoy learning about Glitches, OoB tricks, Speedrun tech, Game secrets, etc. then I can recommend a few YouTube channels that focus on those that are worth checking out:
Summoning Salt's World Record Progression / Speedrunning History series.
Shesez's Boundary Breaks / Out of Bounds Discoveries / Off Camera Secrets series.
Gamechamp3000's VG Myths series, where he imposes artificial gameplay restrictions on himself, like beating Super Mario Odyssey without jumping, and then uses speedrun tech, glitches, etc. to accomplish that.
Pikasprey's Soft Lock Picking series, where he intentionally softlocks his games (mostly Pokemon) and then figures out ways around them.
Birgirpall's We Broke X Game series where they intentionally try to break games for fun, often with hilarious results. Sadly they don't upload much anymore. :(
And of course Games Done Quick's VOD channel, which is the Mecca of speedrunning.
Thank you, I'll be sure to check those out!!
NP! I know I didn't really answer your question directly, but you should definitely be able to find some interesting glitches in all the playlists I linked. And to actually answer your question, if I did have to pick my favorite "interesting" glitches, they would probably have to be the legendary shenanigans that the TASBot crew regularly pull at GDQs. E.g.
TASbot plays Pokemon Red (which Ars even did an article on)
TASBot plays Super Mario Bros. 3
TASBot plays Brain Age
Etc.
p.s. Another fantastic channel I forgot to mention earlier is Retro Game Mechanics Explained that goes through how a lot of these old consoles glitches used in speedruns actually work and does it in a really visually interesting and easily understandable way. I think you will get a kick out of that channel too.
I think it’s important to distinguish between glitches that can be triggered by people (or bots) playing the game and using the traditional inputs and things like arbitrary code execution where you’re using outside code to cause the change. I’m not ready to argue a moral difference, but my Protestant work ethic has things to say on the topic.
Thank you.
The only bits that are traditional input in the post is teleporting and the big skip, however ACE is possible with traditional input (SethBling once did a flappy bird implementation by hand) in some games. The pentris glitch is possible with traditional input, however not to the extent done in the TAS.