What are some bugs/glitches/exploits that have actually made games better?

The Sims, being a simulation of real life, has had some absolutely hilarious bugs, and patch notes to fix them. Some of my favorites are:

• Sims "trying for baby" with the Grim Reaper

• The Grim Reaper being unable to reap certain Sims because of their band affiliation

• Sims who are on fire needed to attend graduation before they could put themselves out

• Sims always flee buildings when a meteor is coming, unless it's a school, because kids aren't allowed to leave. This results in all the kids dying (tell me that's not relatable to 5th grade you, haha)

A huge part of high-end competitive play for the Guitar Hero games was defined by... well, you can't really call it a bug, but let's say "unintended mechanic". This will probably be a little tricky to explain, so a lot of this is over-simplified:

The base gameplay of rhythm games is basically just "hit the right note (button) at the right time". Our timing isn't perfect, so all of the games have some concept of a "timing window", which is how early/late you're able to hit notes. Lots of rhythm games incorporate this into their scoring system, so that you'll get something like a "Perfect" for hitting a note very close to the right timing, a "Good" for having slightly worse timing, etc.

Guitar Hero didn't do that, and you'd get the same number of points no matter where in the window you hit a note. While playing the game, you'd also accumulate some "Star Power" that you could use, which would then stay active for a little while, and you'd get double points from all notes until it wore off. You'd usually use it a few times in each song. So the main way to get high scores on songs was to: (a) hit all the notes, and (b) use Star Power at the right times so you'd double the score of the most notes.

The duration of Star Power was based on musical bars. So for a really basic example, if SP lasted for 2 bars and the song had straight quarter notes at the time (4 per bar), you would expect to double the score of 8 notes before it wore off.

Here's a terrible diagram, where the | are the bar lines, * is the section covered by star power, and the small . is notes you'd get normal points from and o is double points. This is how you'd typically use it, you activate star power at about the same time as the first note, and then you get 8 notes during it:

    |       |       |
    ****************
. . o o o o o o o o . . .

The trick that people figured out was called "squeezing": you could use the timing windows to "squeeze" an extra note (or more) inside the star power by deliberately hitting it early/late. So if you played this section more like this:

    |       |       |
     ****************
. .  oo o o o o o o o . .

The first note and SP activation are pushed half a beat late, which means now the star power lasts until half a beat later, and the note that was previously after it ran out is now covered by it too. Someone that plays it this way doubles the score of 9 notes instead of 8.

This added an entirely new dimension of scoring to the game. Without it, there would have been a bunch of people tied for #1 on almost every easier song where hitting all the notes wasn't a problem. But squeezing made it so that there were a few extra opportunities in every song to get more points through exceptionally good timing (side note: "good timing" is actually "deliberately bad timing"), and sometimes being able to do it well would even mean that the best times to use SP in a song were completely different. The top of the leaderboards for all easier songs was almost always based on who was the best at squeezing.

It ended up being an essential competitive aspect of the games that they didn't even create on purpose.

Strafe jumping in Quake IIII Arena. It allows skilled players to to accelerate to incredible speeds by moving forward with the strafe keys while airborne. Mastery of this skill means you can completely control armor and powerups on the map. This contributes significantly to the game's notoriously high skill ceiling.

"Improve" is a delicate word, but in SC:BW the godawful pathing and technical limitations in the number of units you can have in a single hotkey were very important for balance. Dragoons, specifically, would be absolutely broken if they didn't path like they had Alzheimer's. Furthermore, the hotkey limitations made deathballing much harder.

Similarly, in Smash Brothers Melee, glitches like wave dashing were important movement options. More debatably, stuff like L-canceling raised the skill floor, which may or may not be a good thing.

Combos themselves were originally an oversight in SF2, now a staple of not only fighting games but beat'em ups and other genres.

Some of the essential game mechanics in DotA (and Dota 2) started out as bugs:

• denying
  Allies could be attacked when under a certain threshold of health. The allied attack damage could potentially kill them. Denied allies – heroes or non-heroes – do not provide the enemy with the experience and gold reward as they usually would, which could prove immensely advantageous to the team using this as a tactic.
• stacking camps
  There are several "neutral camps" on the map, offering non-aligned creatures to be killed for gold and XP reward. It was conceived as being one stack of creatures per camp: until you kill its previous inhabitants, no more stacks could spawn. However, it was discovered that this only mattered if the neutral creeps are still within the borders of the camp: if you lure them out (by aggroing them) just in time, you could have two or more stacks at the given camp. This can be beneficial to a carry with area-damage abilities: they could farm a lot more creatures in about the same amount of time, which would strongly increase their current gold and XP status, giving them (and, therefore, their team) an advantage.
• cutting lanes
  For each team, a stack of allied creeps spawns at base at 30 secs intervals and proceeds down the lane until they reach an enemy hero, creep, or tower. This could be abused by meeting the enemy creep wave early and aggroing them to follow you anywhere on the map, including under your tower which could help deal with them quicker. This also shifts the lane equilibrium, allowing your team to push the enemy lane easier, thus creating an advantageous situation.

All of these were attempted to be banned, only to be unbanned soon because of how well it integrated into the game. That said, currently in Dota 2 the very first lane of creeps cannot be aggroed out of their path, to prevent a very common tactic that could hugely upset the balance of power between the team from very early on.

Skiing in the Tribes series:

Skiing dates back to the beta of the original game in the franchise Starsiege: Tribes. At that time, players had jetpacks to move around the map, but had to run or use a vehicle to travel long distances. Many of the maps were large even compared to those in Tribes: Ascend, leading to fairly slow attacks on enemy bases. Early on, the players learned that if you spam the jump button while on the side of a steep hill, the game's physics would propel you down the hill and allow you to fly extremely fast across the map. When this technique was first used, it was widely believed that players were cheating somehow.

Players used the in game client side scripting language and greatly improved the efficency by automating the 'jump' command, sending it hundreds of times a second. These scripts became a necessity to download alongside the game, or code yourself. Some players believed that including 'crouch' commands improved their speed, made them harder to hit, or just looked funny.

Meanwhile, other players had already been using the spinfusor's explosive knockback to accelerate themselves. Used with Tribes' jetpacks which allowed them to fly, players could now travel across maps faster than they could with vehicles. Eventually, use of these methods became commonplace on Tribes servers and Skiing was born.

https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Skiing

I'm not sure that applies, but there was a Nascar game that I played on PC back in the 90s, and I always went the wrong way, destroying my car along with others. The game was way more fun this way!

I suppose the "exploit" here might be that you can play the entire race in the wrong way (against Nascar rules I'm sure!) and it takes a long time to completely wreck your car.

A long time ago I used to play a dumb little flash game called Transformice. It's this multiplayer flash game with 20 or so players per room. The basic gist is you're a mouse and you need to navigate through the level, get the cheese, and get back to your mouse hole. The maps are mostly user-created, and full of obstacles you need to get through. Each round one mouse is selected as the Shaman, and they're given the ability to summon objects and platforms to help the rest of the mice through the level, often creating bridges, elevators, etc.

Anyway, it didn't take long for people to exploit the physics engine. The game gives you a double jump, but people realized the friction on walls was such that you could jump into a wall, then off it, your double jump is reset, and you can effectively climb walls. Or, if you jump down off a ledge and hit the corner of a block you can transfer your downward momentum sideways and clear large gaps you wouldn't otherwise be able to. This allowed skilled players to complete a lot of maps without a shaman, and led to the creation of some really complex and technical maps.

The game was designed to be a fairly shallow kids game with fun cosmetic items, but soon became a highly technical and competitive skill based game. I'm not sure if it alienated the demographic they were looking for, but it ended up becoming really popular because of skilled players from video game forums like /vg/, facepunch, etc.

It's a small one, but made a big feature later on in the series: wall-jumping in Super Mario Bros. It's a minor exploit by allowing Mario to "land" on top of a wall-block that has another all-block on top, then quickly jumping in the frame that you're standing on it to jump again. I don't know if this accidental feature lead to the introduction of the feature in the New SMB series but I feel like it had some to do with it.

I think they were exploits-- I always felt the mechanics of Team Fortress Classic were made so much more fun with the ability to rocket jump and conc(ussion grenade) jump from one area to the next. It just felt silly but gave the game character.

Unfortunately the only players left mostly use some suuuuuuper intensive scripts that've just automated them all and took the fun out of the fuck-ups.

Tetris for the Gameboy / Gameboy Color has this one obscure bug where, if you have either one of the three songs playing during a game and you pause and unpause, the music gets an extra bass line. But only for the next "phrase", so not the entire song, but parts of it. You have to keep pausing/unpausing to get the whole song to do this. And imo this extra bassy version sounds pretty fun compared to the original!

Edit: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qewoMpRr1x8&feature=youtu.be&t=4

The Minecraft creeper model came from mixed up coordinates when developing the pig model.

Bunnyhopping/Strafe Jumping in the original Quake. I played TF2 with a guy who re-implemented this in TF2, and even ran a QWTF server for a minute, and this is one of the most important glitches in more movement-oriented FPSes. It was retained and kept as a feature in the Quake engine, and I'd wager affected Unreal somewhat.

Monster infighting in DOOM was important. Its glitches contributed significantly to speedrunning, and has led to some unique cases of monster suicide that can enable pacifist runs. In the DOOM community, retention of vanilla engine glitches is actually something of a factor for the accuracy of a given source port, and in a few cases I believe you can actually configure a port to put them back in because it's a game that plays pretty differently without them. There isn't anything wrong with playing an updated/bugfixed engine, though, it's just as fun.

Early FPSes are the only games I've spent any time studying, though, so I can't think of anything else right now beyond maybe one of the Mew glitches in the first gen Pokemon games.

So the legend goes: in the original Street Fighter, special moves such as Hadoken or Shoryuken were especially difficult to perform, as they required extreme precision in inputs and timing. When they worked on the sequel, Capcom added mechanics to relax the execution requirements; a side-effect was that you could input these special moves while still in the middle of a normal attack, creating unintended combos. We call this "special-cancelling" today, and it appears in pretty much every fighting game now.

I remember in the first Driver (or maybe 2nd?) there was a glitch that caused cars to fall from the sky and cause mass destruction. It was fun trying to replicate the conditions for the glitch and watch mayhem ensue.

I don't know if this is try but in Rimworld, workbenches didn't have a visual marker telling you you can put a chair/stool/armchair there for the pawn to sit in because that wasn't an intended mechanic. Players realized that putting a chair there for the pawn to sit on gave them a positive comfort thought and so Tynan, the developer of the game, made it official.

Wavedashing in Super Smash Bros Melee.

For the uninformed, a wavedash is a movement exploit where you do a diagonal downwards air dodge immediately after jumping on the next frame, which will make your character 'dash' forwards or backwards.

A wavedash is superior to a regular dash in two ways:

1. For most characters, their wavedash is faster than their regular dash.
2. Unlike with regular dashing which only lets you use a dash attack out of it, which often has a lot of lag frames and leaves you vulnerable, you can do a neutral, tilt or smash attack out of a wavedash.

The wavedash is such an iconic move that it's made its way into other platform fighters like Rivals of Aether, Brawlout and Icons. It's also the core game mechanic behind WaveLand, a platformer that implements this technique and uses it as its core mechanic.

Its removal in Super Smash Bros Brawl is also one of the main reasons why the hardcore Melee crowd often discredits the later Smash Bros games, though Ultimate has alleviated this stigma to some extent by allowing you to do tilts, neutrals and smashes within a frame of you stopping a dash - it also helps that SSBU is overall a decent competitively balanced experience compared to the previous games.

Unfortunately I don't know of any that haven't been mentioned. But I will say that whenever I think of glitching, I always think of these Skate 3 glitch videos. I nearly hyperventilate watching them because they're so hilarious.

K-Style in GunZ: The Duel.

K-Style or "Korean Style" refers to a series of glitches discovered by the game's Korean community, which turned GunZ from a rather mediocre and bland third person arena shooter into a surprisingly deep and mechanically intensive competitive experience.

These expoits are mostly delay cancellations, or combos which would let you do absurdly broken stuff like infinite wall running, or slashing/blocking at the same time. A full list of techniques can be found here.

The now defunct developers (MAIET) responsible for GunZ were particularly incompetent and tone-deaf in how they addressed this. They made several attempts to patch out K-Style over the years and backed down due to huge community backlash each time. K-Style was not present in the game's sequel (GunZ 2), which was the primary reason why the game flopped both within and outside Korea. In the end, it was server and performance issues surrounding another newly launched game (RaiderZ) that led to MAIET's demise.