Terrifying Video Game Glitches

[Jaxxoon R]

What are some of the scariest glitches/technical mishaps you've come across while playing a video game?

A couple of years ago I tried to play A Link to the Past on a Super Nintendo. As soon as the Triforce assembled in the intro, the entire screen all of a sudden filled with garbage and the game made this creepy moaning noise. Suffice to say, it scared the living hell out of me.
So I threw the game in a corner and haven't touched it since.

And just today I tried out Tomb Raider II for the Playstation. I was flailing around the Mansion getting a kick out of the awful controls and camera when suddenly, almost immediately after I grabbed the zipline, the screen went black. After about three seconds the screen came back on, and then that creepy-ass teleporting butler walked into view and the screen started flashing on and off repeatedly.
What makes it even worse was the fact that just before that happened I'd quipped about how Lara "Looked weird".

[scifista42]

Ghost monsters in Doom are terrifying. When a revenant becomes a ghost monster, you can spam BFG at him however you like, he still lives, chases you through walls and shoots you. Your only hope is mere splash damage, so you must shoot rockets into a nearby wall to damage the monster. "All-ghosts effect" is rare, but even more scary, because all monsters become ghost monsters then, and you too.

[Darch]

This video shows some weird ones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdcIh6rmYa4

[mrthejoshmon]

I encounter had so many!

In Fallout 3 I had a Radscorpion corpse fly at me at about 50 MPH, I was attacked by a bunch of spiked raiders (They had elongated triangular arms and legs) and teleporting Deathclaws. Also I have had dead bodies have full blown conversations with me, I have had random body parts fly around the map like ghosts (passing through objects and floating) and I have had decapitated heads blink at me.

I had my old Driver 3 (Driv3r) crash on me mid game and emit a very loud buzzing noise which caught me off guard.

I had the Mattias character model in Mercenaries 2 grow an elongated (and terrifying) face.

In Half-Life a soldier was lynched by a barnacle, upon unintentionally saving him he then had no weapon and was next to 100% unkillable. The soldier would bumrush me shouting the usual taunts whilst melee attacking me whilst I couldn't do jack shit (I found out that they can be gibed).

In Halo 3 I had a spartan with no gamertag in the game sliding around who would murder everybody, although it could be killed it just kept coming back (also, the game was full for both teams), people have dubbed these guys as "ghosts" but I think it is just some guy running his xbox off of a dongle.

My old Doom PSX copy will play random noises instead of actual noises, this can be hilarious some times and creepy most of the time.

Dead Island: Riptide had corpses growl at me as well as the entire map disappearing making the screen go weird colors, the FPS to drop to about 1 and the only sounds replaced by my characters grunts and screams of pain (as this glitch repeatedly kills you).

Saints Row 2 had all the insides of the civilians faces (eye models, mouth models) show through the skin texture which resulted in some horrifying looking monstrosities walking all over.

I have had all sorts of freaky shit go off to me, some I don't even remember.

[Obsidian]

That Sims 3 one is horrific. 8-|

Also I managed to find a void glitch in MediEvil: Resurrection a while ago: no internet guides or anything. :P

[dew]

Nothing beats the creepiness of the melee range overflow at the maximum border of Doom's playable area. You get out into the void, which is creepy enough, then you blindly follow a single direction for quite some time, then all of the sudden monsters scream and slash you to death even though there's no one around! Even the explanation is creepy - all of the map's monsters are in your melee range because of the overflow. It's the ultimate gangbang.

[vtm]

dew said:

Nothing beats the creepiness of the melee range overflow at the maximum border of Doom's playable area. You get out into the void, which is creepy enough, then you blindly follow a single direction for quite some time, then all of the sudden monsters scream and slash you to death even though there's no one around! Even the explanation is creepy - all of the map's monsters are in your melee range because of the overflow. It's the ultimate gangbang.

this happened to me when i was little, i used noclip in MAP13 and went out of the map,i decided to see how far i could get, when suddenly i started to hear the monsters were active and i started to take damage, i didn't got scared when it happened i was amazed, now i'll go to the wiki to see the explanation of it.

[Doomkid]

Old SNES consoles are capable of making some damn demonic noises if they're unclean or rusted. On my old SNES I had as a child, I put in Mario All Stars, and I noticed only one channel of the music was playing on the menu screen. Didn't bother me, at least the thing was working.

I selected one of the games and the screen just instantly cut to black and started making this awful, AWFUL noise, with a Yoshi sound in the background, which didn't even make sense since Yoshi isn't in any of the 4 games. I guess his SFX are stored somewhere within the rom as a leftover. (lol, this seems like the lead in to some stupid ass creepypizza.)

Needless to say, when you're about 10 or 11, this kinda shit freaks you out. I never attempted to play that system again. Shame I didn't keep it in retrospect, it was my 'childhood console'. A couple years later, a Doomer named Alvis replaced it for me for free, which is probably the nicest thing an online gamer has ever done for me. I sold that one too (dumbly) and now have a Super Famicom with an adapter - It's never glitched up on me, I'm happy to say.

The 'ghost monster' glitch in Doom also scared me as a kid, It happened on the lift in Bloodfalls with a shotgunner.

In some weird way, I miss being able to be scared of game glitches. The only scare at this point though is "Oh shit, I hope my game still works right!"

[Jaxxoon R]

Was it the "Bwiim-Bwem" sound he makes when you mount him, or the "BOW" sound he makes when spitting? The latter is a pretty generic sound effect, really. If it was the former, you could have been playing All-Stars + World. If not, maybe your explanation is correct.

[Quasar]

Sitting in the dark in the house alone playing Metroid Prime on the Game Cube. Heading into the Furnace in Chozo Ruins, rolling through the tunnel as morph ball, suddenly the game freezes - BLRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!

That sound sends a chill through my soul every time.

[Doominator2]

I strange glitch happened when I played Morrowind a long time, so I was messing around with the construction set not really knowing what I was doing, so I started the game, and in Balmora,on one side of river there where the normal people walking around doing their thing, and on the other side (where Caios Cosades house is) it was empty and know one there,so I went to the corner club and again no one was there, but when I went to the lower part of the club there where some ash zombies, so I used a calm spell (The spell was already ready to use) and the ash zombies just stayed there doing nothing, it was already creepy, but when I spoke to them they said stuff like "Why cant you hear us Dagoth Ur".

[Blastfrog]

I was playing Jak 2 a few years ago and it failed to load the next chunk of geometry. Unfortunately I was moving very fast on a hoverbike and couldn't stop in time before falling.

Not terrifying, but still an annoying bug.

[geekmarine]

I remember a friend and I were once playing Double Dragon 2, and a weird glitch helped us beat the game. I think we had gotten to the stage where you have to do a bunch of platforming on conveyor belts (why did anyone think platforming was a good thing to add to a brawler? - just an aside), when the game semi-glitched from a bump or something. We were afraid we'd have to restart the game, but aside from a minor graphical flicker, everything worked fine - except our lives had been replaced by random characters. We couldn't remember how many lives we had, but since the game still worked, we pressed on, noticing that the characters that had replaced our lives counters would change every time we died. We didn't think too much of it - it seemed the game was still tracking our lives, even though it wasn't displaying them correctly. However, after several deaths, we never got a game over - an we knew we couldn't have had more than two or three lives each. We had no way of knowing how many lives we had left, but we went on the assumption that it was either a large number or we actually had infinite lives, because several deaths later we still hadn't gotten a game over. We kept playing the game, eventually reaching the final boss and beating him thanks to our seemingly limitless supply of lives.

Looking back, I could only hazard a guess that when the game briefly flickered, the internal memory had gotten a tad scrambled and our life counters were replaced with a very large number - the random characters were the result of the game accessing random memory to load the graphics for the counter (you know, reading past where the number graphics were stored in memory because it had run out of number graphics). It was kind of a neat cheat, though, the one-in-a-million fortuitous glitch that actually helped you - though given the nature of the glitch, I'm fairly certain it can't be replicated.

[NuMetalManiak]

I remember trying to replicate the "black hole" thing in Super Smash Bros Melee because I found it to be insane when I first saw it on a video.

[Linkrulezall]

Rocky on PS2/Gamecube can pull off some pretty scary shit:



And then there's what happens to the sound on level 3 of Lollipops from Action 52:

And the music on its own:

[Doomkid]

Jaxxoon R said:

Was it the "Bwiim-Bwem" sound he makes when you mount him

Yeah, the mounting sound effect. It wasn't the +World version, which is why it's so odd. The SNES that Alvis sent me was bumped with that same cart as well and made the mounting sound, although the game didn't freeze or do anything creepy and it was years later, that's why I assume the sound is saved somewhere in the ROM. I wouldn't be surprised if all SMW sounds were saved in there, actually, like when Tanooki Mario spins for example, it makes the same noise as the cape in SMW.

geekmarine said:

It was kind of a neat cheat, though, the one-in-a-million fortuitous glitch that actually helped you - though given the nature of the glitch, I'm fairly certain it can't be replicated.

On a related note, me and my friend Andrew were playing Super Mario World when we were much younger, and we got so many lives on one of the Forest of Illusion maps, that the counter glitched and said "BO" for our lives. We thought it was pretty hilarious back then :P The counter was fixed when we entered the next stage to say 99.

Linkrulezall said:

freaky Action 52 music

That's pretty unsettling music for a "kid friendly" game. As if Action 52 isn't bad enough.. I guess it's just the result of the game reading random lines as opposed to an actual music track? I wonder if it's different every time.

[Linkrulezall]

Doomkid said:

That's pretty unsettling music for a "kid friendly" game. As if Action 52 isn't bad enough.. I guess it's just the result of the game reading random lines as opposed to an actual music track? I wonder if it's different every time.

From what I can tell the game somehow manages to corrupt the way it interprets sound between levels 2 and 3 since the sound glitch keeps going forever until you reset, even if you beat level 3 and go back to level 1 it still persists.

[Clonehunter]

Recently the Old Republic pulled a weird one where everyone had matte black eyes. Given the amount of expression characters have and how big their eyes are, it's a fairly disturbing effect. I didn't notice it at first as my character doesn't have visible eyes anyways and I was talking to some Sith, and believed it was intentional to her design, until my side character started to speak, with those black eyes catching me off guard.

Otherwise, haven't had many "terrifying" glitches before in games. Although in PS2's Racer Revenge, if you KO every pilot as Wan Sandage, except for Dud Bolt, he'll go stealth. Since he's already programmed to be aggressive, you'll usually find yourself being beat by an invisible racer you can't really see.

[Platinum Shell]

Doomkid said:

That's pretty unsettling music for a "kid friendly" game. As if Action 52 isn't bad enough.. I guess it's just the result of the game reading random lines as opposed to an actual music track? I wonder if it's different every time.

Reminds me of the text screen music in Mock 2 made by Hyena (does he still come on?) and co. If I remember it was some program that created MIDI's by randomly mashing together notes.

[Pencil of Doom]

Sodaholic said:

I was playing Jak 2 a few years ago and it failed to load the next chunk of geometry. Unfortunately I was moving very fast on a hoverbike and couldn't stop in time before falling.

Not terrifying, but still an annoying bug.

That didn't happen to me.
Maybe because Jak 2 Renegade is an update.

[Wagi]

[Quasar]

Doomkid said:

Yeah, the mounting sound effect. It wasn't the +World version, which is why it's so odd. The SNES that Alvis sent me was bumped with that same cart as well and made the mounting sound, although the game didn't freeze or do anything creepy and it was years later, that's why I assume the sound is saved somewhere in the ROM. I wouldn't be surprised if all SMW sounds were saved in there, actually, like when Tanooki Mario spins for example, it makes the same noise as the cape in SMW.

A small number of SMW assets are in the original All Stars ROM. I found these myself a few years back when trying to determine the minimum number of changes you'd have to make to a vanilla All Stars ROM to add SMW to it (like, checking if SMW was secretly already included but unfinished in the original or if support had been planned for it but removed in the first build due to time constraints or what have you).

As far as I can tell, it's just development junk, like how the Wario Land tiles are left in Metroid Fusion's ROM just because it was based on the WL GBA game engine.

You can force the "game to start" index to 4 (it normally ranges from 0 to 3) in the original All Stars version using a GameShark code. The game makes a JSR to an out-of-bounds jump table slot, and ends up displaying a black screen and making a bizarre sound effect before hanging the emulator :P

[mrthejoshmon]

I was playing Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey recently, I preformed the infinite grenade glitch in a secret area on the first level and after going to the next loading point trying to use a grenade would turn Abe into jumbled sprite puke and freeze the game which left the room eerily quiet.

The feeling of what the fuck just happened mixed with completely no volume made me feel uneasy (also being the only guy in the house didn't help).

Also, there was what I called "the god Scrab". This Scrab usually passed through a wall and cause some serious pain for me in supposedly safe areas.

And on a less weird note Duke Nukem 3D graced me with a absolutely wonderful glitch that now leaves me very afraid of the games doors that for some reason enjoy fucking me up, I now play the game very cautiously around anything with Build engine hinges.

[BaronOfStuff]

Racing Mega Man 3 on NES, and Gemini Man decides to just fucking disappear mid-jump during the refight. So much for winning that race, now I just assume he'll disappear every time I play the fucking game.