6 Classic Games That Are Way Glitchier Than Anyone Realized

Glitches. Sometimes they ruin your day and sometimes they give you a Mew and tons of cash from nowhere. They may seem random, but all glitches are simply the unintended consequences of the game following its programming when a player makes input that the programmer never anticipated. Chances are that when you played these classic games, you didn't encounter any of these glitches, but little did you know what madness lurked within your seemingly solid classic games...

#6 - Sonic 3 & Knuckles
This is pretty much the case with all of the original Sonic games, but with Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles being the last entries in the series on Genesis, you'd think that they'd have more of the bugs ironed out. Well... not really. There may just be some teeny tiny physics exploits and zips (places where you can get stuck in the wall and pushed rapidly to the side) that let you skip almost all of the level... on pretty much every level. Oh well, the games were pretty much just watching Sonic go to the right anyway. In the same vein, Mega Man 2 and several classic Kirby games also have zips, although not quite as epic.

#5 - Super Metroid
Sure, Super Metroid has its fair share of sequence breaks thanks to some tricky exploits (like maintaining momentum after going into morph ball, reaching running speed in less distance, etc.), but try equipping the Spazer and Plasma Beams at the same time and all hell breaks loose. What you get is a graphical mess, a reset of all defeated bosses, collected items, and opened doors, and, if you did the glitch in the wrong place, a straight up crash. Oh, there's also a debug code left in the game that gives you practically every item in the game if you hold the right buttons when entering the room with the golden Torizo. (More info)

#4 - Paper Mario
Most of Paper Mario's glitches involve falling out of bounds or clipping through things to trigger later chapters early. That, or jumping. Jumping is tricky business. That is to say, if you can manage to jump out from a loading zone and keep hopping the instant you touch the ground, all the way to a cutscene trigger (like one of the star spirit cards), all kinds of fun things will happen. Most of these out of bounds glitches and cutscene skips are pretty dang hard to pull off though. (More info)

#3 - Donkey Kong 64
It is often said that there are no walls in Donkey Kong 64, and that's not far from the truth. For a Nintendo 64 game, DK64 has a lot going on - it needs that RAM expansion pak, after all. The thing is, it might have more going on than it can handle. All you have to do is create enough lag, usually with orange grenades, and you'll be able to pass right through many walls during the laggy frames when collision detection isn't working. This, of course, means getting practically anywhere early. Apart from clipping through walls, DK64 has tricks for duplicating golden bananas, erasing a file without erasing the time played and golden banana count, and more. (More info)

#2 - Pokemon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow Versions
Everyone knows about Missingno., but not everyone knows how broken the original Pokemon games were in every other way. Let me just say that anyone who claims that the best Pokemon games are Red, Blue, and Yellow is objectively wrong. There are so many oversights and glitches relating to battling, that it's hard to believe anyone ever tried to battle seriously in these games. Beyond that, there are glitches that let you fly away from trainers between the time that they see you and actually battle you, allowing you to cause an encounter with basically any Pokemon or glitch Pokemon. Then there's the glitch in the Japanese version that'll let you switch items with Pokemon, walk just the right number of steps, go in a door, and end up in the Hall of Fame. There are far too many glitches to list, so have at 'em.

#1 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
It always starts simple: clip out of bounds, climb on some geometry you're not supposed to, roll into a bomb and slide backwards at high speed across Hyrule Field... the simple stuff. It's just when you start equipping items where they aren't supposed to go (the B button) and using bottles to overwrite values outside of the usual allowable range, that stuff starts getting crazy. One minute you'll have bugs (literal bugs in a bottle), then you drop 'em, then pick 'em up again, and before you know it, you'll have the medallions from dungeons you've never been to. Then there's the fun of wrong warping, which, if done right, can even let you go straight from the Deku tree to the tower escape after defeating Ganondorf. Fun stuff! (More info) (To be honest, this whole list could've been Zelda games. Pretty much all of them have at least one totally crazy game breaking glitch in them.)


What are your favorite glitches from classic games? Sound off in the comments! Also, check out just how far these glitches can go with the power of an emulator and inhumanly precise inputs.