Home consoles have been around for decades, allowing people to explore digitally rendered worlds in their own living rooms. For as long as there have been consoles, however, there have been people who push the limits of games, finding holes in the code that produce odd, surprising and even humorous results. This process of intentionally seeking out these programmer errors and exploiting them is known as glitching.

Pac-Man on the Atari was a controversial game that displeased many fans because of it's rushed production and poor quality. However, that didn't stop people from finding a glitch that allowed a player to beat the game easily, locking the ghosts in the portal permanently.



Later, when the Atari had lost out to the new generation of 8-bit consoles, like the Nintendo, new games offered a new world of glitching. Super Mario, perhaps the most popular game icon of all time, had several glitches in it's first sidescrolling rendition. The ones shown in this video are representative of the types of glitches that were common for many Nintendo games, including walking through walls and defying death.





The Playstation, released in America in 1995, was the first console able to create complex 3d environments and as a result glitching ascended to ever more complex levels. The Playstation 2 improved upon the graphics of the PS and glitching became more entertaining as fairly realistic environments were demonstrated to be nothing but computer code.




As video games became playable over the internet and it was possible to compete with anyone, glitching took on a new role. Glitches allowed people to gain an advantage over their opponents in matched games. By finding a shortcut through a wall in a racing game, escaping to an unreachable section of a map in a shooter game, or taking advantage of physics glitches to attain invincibility, players are able to defeat their opponents unfairly. As a result, game developers have resorted to updating games with patches that fix problematic glitches.