Glitching through the ages (not final)

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 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 next generation of 8-bit consoles, like the Nintendo, 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, Super Mario Bros. 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 were able to defeat their opponents unfairly.

In a recent game of Halo 2 I managed to take advantage of a glitch (for research only, of course) and reach a very high building with the sniper rifle, where I could kill opponents at my leisure. To me they looked like little dots far below, running in circles, but I could zoom in and have a wide open opportunity for a head shot. After several minutes of carnage and a score of 25 to 4, my opponents weren't very pleased and had this to say:

Opponent 1: "Oh my gosh, check out the glitch whore."
Opponent 2: "Yeah, that's so lame, anybody who needs to do that to win is just... lame."
Opponent 1: "Gosh"
Opponent 3: (whiny child) "Gaaaawd. This sucks"
Opponent 1: "Every time I re-spawn I just die. Dude, you suck, I hope you die today. Go fuck yourself"

After that last sentence the opposing team left the game within seconds, taking a loss and giving my team a win.
Based upon my research, and having had been in their shoes countless times before, I am aware of what a problem glitching can be in multiplayer games. As a result of the widespread use of glitches to gain an advantage, game developers have resorted to updating games with patches that fix problematic glitches. These "patch" up the faulty code, preventing people from gaining an unfair advantage over their opponents, and are required to play online against real people.

However, glitching is not an intrinsic evil. Like any new knowledge it can be used for whatever purpose it's discoverer intends. With that, I leave you with an example of fun and harmless glitching. This appears to be a secret that the developers implanted into the single player mode of Halo 2 on purpose, and it requires glitching. On the level "Metropolis" there is a hidden weapon with vast power located far above the regular level on a building that is not accessible unless glitching is implemented. In this case the player has obtained the "overshield", making him resistant to damage, after which he utilizes the warthog and a rocket launcher to blast himself into the air.



Remember. Please glitch responsibly.