Your earliest memory of major bugs in a game ?

[eastyy]

With the past number of years games getting buggier and buggier I did wonder if anyone had memories of major or game breaking bugs in older games

Grew up with spectrum and amiga but tbh my memory of bugs is very hazy, i have to go to Dreamcast with Sonic adventures with having quite a few problems with sonic passing through bumpers and dying.

The game breaking bug i remember was Knights of the old republic for original Xbox, in a nutshell if a character was in stealth before a cutscene started if a character who has to interact with them does not have a high enough stat to see them in stealth mode the game does not continue....and i was not a happy person when that happened and been constantly saving games in multiple slots ever since

[kryss]

Duck Tales on the GB, where dying and falling off the right ledge in the Amazon level made you invincible.

[nonny]

Chaos on the spectrum...

[Cassius_Smoke]

The speccy obviously running through the whole tape for 30 minutes only to have stopped actually loading at the 5 seconds mark.

The other I remember is on Ghostbusters on the speccy, if you left it on the car select screen the car would turn into a black square that was the best car in the game.

[Asura]

Sonic 3; you could get stuck in some walls, and the manual even had some bull**** to try and excuse it.

[randombs]

Many moons ago, I rented Sonic 3 from the video shop.

Flying around as Tails, I got caught in a never-ending bumper loop on the casino stage. After a while Tails got tired but the bumpers ignored his fatigue and continued to mercilessly bump him to and fro like killer whales playing with a baby seal.

Try as I might, I could not win against this inescapable conservation of momentum to release my little friend from his prison and was forced to reset the Mega Drive.

But don't fear, dear viewer, for I was not perturbed!

I forged ahead with renewed vigour and reached the final boss a mere 30 minutes before the game was due back at the video shop(I was a penniless scribe who could not afford a late fee).

...FINAL BOSS DESTROYED!

My plucky foxen friend, humble to the last, chose not to pose victorious and instead accepted his fate as an unsung hero and began running towards whatever challenge lay yonder.

Forsooth! Lady physics enters stage right, side-kicking our sidekick with such force as to plant him thus. For his sacrifices, Tails was doomed to spend an eternity running on the spot. Neither advancing, nor retreating.

Time was running out and I had no choice but to reset once more. Reloading the save game transported me straight to the credits screen.

I never did see the ending for Sonic 3. I should check YouTube...

[DeathAdder]

Gameboy tennis, when if you missed the ball when serving and moved so that it hit you on the head as it fell back down, you won the point.

[Neon Ignition]

Less so the bad ones, more the good time ones. I don't remember ever really having issues with 2D games, 3D though was good for it especially the early days.

GTA3 was a gold mine but it always felt they occured in a way that somehow added to the experience.

I never experienced any playing Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness which apparently was rare so I remember the bugs via their absence there and quite enjoyed the game

[monel]

Not exactly a bug but intentional...

In Airwolf on the Spectrum some laser would kill you no matter what you tried.

I found out many years later they didn't finish the game and made sure you died.

That was pretty messed up. Finding out though I at least realised I tried everything possible to get passed it.

[Dogg Thang]

Lots of early memories of tape games not loading and so on but one huge bug later on has always stuck with me because the implications of it were so big but also it doesn't seem to be well documented (I have seen it mentioned a couple of times online over the years). There was a point in Myst on the Sega Saturn that would stop working (some in game buttons for a puzzle didn't work, if I remember correctly) but the bug was specific to early Sega Saturn models. I remember getting Myst replaced in the shop and the bug still happened and it was some guy in the shop that eventually got some info that it had happened to others and it was actually down to the Saturn itself. And as I had bought the Saturn in the same shop, they actually replaced my Saturn with a later model to get Myst to work. And it did work.

Edit: Just did a little search and found some people tormenting themselves over this back in 2016 - https://segaxtreme.net/threads/satur...problem.24132/

[Asura]

@Dogg_Thang's one about Myst reminds me of one of the most egregious bugs I've ever seen in a game - that in Age of Empires DS, if, as the first thing you do when booting the game, enter your name and it has 3 characters or less, it bricks the game completely and the cart becomes useless.

[fuse]

At first I was really struggling to think of anything specific; I think mainly because you forget about the minor things, no?

The more I think though, and cheating slightly, I remember using converter carts on the SNES used to be a nightmare. I had to return a US Secret of Mana because it just completely bugged out on me - save files would load in wrong locations, screens wouldn't scroll, graphics would glitch all over the screen. I never got to see the full ending of Final Fantasy 6 (... at least until Super Play printed it out) because of the infamous crash that happened with seemingly every converter on the market. I'm sure I rented plenty of games with minor bugs here and there, the odd crash and so on... but nothing that really stands out. The whole notion of 'cheats' definitely seemed to invite more than its fair share of bugs, for sure.

Going a bit further back though I feel like almost everything I played pre-console had a tendency to be buggy or incomplete in some way or another. That experience mentioned above of a kill screen (there's a donkey kong one coming up) feels familiar though. I think this was one of the appealing things about consoles at the time; aside from instant loading and fancy graphics, games started to feel like polished things with achievable end goals.

[tokyochojin]

Mario bros 1, jumped over the flagpole at the end of one stage and got caught in an endless castle loop until the time ran out.

[wakka]

A very early one that sticks in my mind was Monster Trucks by Reflections on PS1.

My memory of this is hazy, but I'm pretty sure that if you drove up the rocks flanking the course, it was pretty easy to end up either falling infinitely through the floor, your truck eternally spinning in place, or alternatively clipping out of the course entirely and driving on a platform of nothing to nowhere.

Don't think that one got a lot of bug testing. These kind of collision errors were pretty common in PS1 games though. I'm pretty sure you could clip through a lot of stuff in Tomorrow Never Dies on PS1, too.

The other big bugs I remember were the famous Pokémon Red/Blue ones. Obviously as most people know, the game was pretty rife with them. I remember finding out about a lot of them on GameFAQs, and printing out a big list of them to test them out.

A few particularly memorable ones in no particular order:

1) The Rare Candy cheat. This involved talking to some old guy NPC then flying to Cinnabar Island, then surfing up and down one side of it till the glitch Pokémon MissingNo. appeared. You ran away from it, then you had infinite Rare Candies. I think. If you caught MissingNo. it could mess up your game. As a kid I'm pretty sure none of us realised that 'MissingNo.' just means 'missing number' and all thought it was an actual name

2) Glitch City. Can't remember how to activate this one but it involved the Safari Zone. Once you'd done it you were in this strange place that was basically composed of random chunks of scenery and other bits of graphical assets. You could kinda walk around and explore, but there wasn't much to see and lots of invisible walls.

3) Pokémon cloning. This one was something to do with unplugging the link cable during a trade. You could end up with one of the traded Pokémon being duplicated in favour of the other, so you could get 2 Articunos, and stuff like that. You had to sacrifice a Pokémon to do it, so you'd use a random Pidgey or something.

There were tons and tons more of these though, and I bet lots of people on here are more knowledgeable about it. Those are just a few I remember.

[Mayhem]

Jet Set Willy, both the original Speccy and C64 port, had different game breaking issues.

Mario bros 1, jumped over the flagpole at the end of one stage and got caught in an endless castle loop until the time ran out.

This is possible? I've never seen or heard about it.