Glitching through the years

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.

Mario, perhaps the most recognizable gaming icon of all time, consumed my days as a child. I would play often, and when I wasn't playing I was discussing strategy with my friends. Once, in the third grade, my friends and I were engaged in an esoteric conversation about the benefits of shooting fireballs at turtles, when a fifth grader approached us. He looked down and explained in his mighty voice that fireballs were for weaklings. Why use fireballs, he exclaimed, when you could walk through walls, become invincible, or even warp to the final level?


After a lengthy discussion and several jaw dropping revelations, the fifth grader agreed to come to my house where he would show my friends and me how to delicately circumvent the rules of the game and emerge victorious. Among the tricks he taught us was one where the player could gain 100 lives, enough to complete the game with ease, by jumping on a turtle at the right time and place. Another glitch involved walking through a wall to reach a hidden area where the player could warp to the final level. At the time I was surprised that a person could break the rules of seemingly intact games, and this newfound power thrust me into the world of glitching. I have actively pursued programmer errors ever since.




As I grew older, games became more advanced and glitching ascended to higher levels. No longer was I limited to walking through walls on a side-scrolling game like Mario, I could now explore 3D environments and exploit the physics and computer behavior of games to achieve amazing results. In the game Rush 2 my friend and I discovered that it was possible to escape from certain levels by gaining speed and hitting a well placed jump or ledge. While this glitch didn't benefit us in any way, it was fun to discover the limits of games.




I got my Xbox when I was in high school and was thrilled to be playing games like Halo, a first person shooter. My friends would come over to my house and we would spend hours competing against each other, sometimes playing one vs. one, or upping the stakes and engaging in a team battle. While this was fun, we were limited to one TV screen, one Xbox, and ourselves. However, Halo 2 came out several years later and was equipped with online capabilities. Now I could sit in my basement and battle with my friend across the internet as he sat in his basement.

As we began to play online we soon discovered that our proficiency at glitching gave us an advantage over other players. We could escape to building tops and wreak havoc on the opposing team, to their dismay, or carry extra weapons and unload clip after clip of ammo into enemy forces. By taking advantage of subtle errors in the code we were able to win almost every game. This didn't last long however, and the developer issued a "patch", or an update for the game that fixed many of the problems, as well as a warning that threatened to ban glitchers. Despite developer efforts, gamers are constantly discovering new glitches and developers are continually updating games to prevent them.

Ever since then I had refrained from glitching in online games for moral and selfish reasons (namely, that I didn't want to be banned), but 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 more aware of what a problem glitching can be in multiplayer games.

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. He then sets the warthog on a bridge, hanging the front wheels over the edge. By standing on the corner of the warthog and firing a rocket launcher at the ground the player is blasted up into the air, far higher than is allowed by the game physics under normal circumstances.

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.