Most Obvious Video Game Bugs

Somebody played these before they shipped. Somebody saw.

Entries
10
Category
Games
Updated
  1. A dark tank-like car parked on a rainy rooftop next to a gaming PC with a hot overloaded graphics card glowing red.

    10. Batman: Arkham Knight on PC

    Iron Galaxy / Rocksteady / Warner Bros. · 2015

    The outsourced PC port launched capped at 30 frames per second and stuttered badly enough that Warner Bros. pulled it from sale and offered refunds. Consoles got an 87 on Metacritic. PC got a 70 and a lesson about the Batmobile's need for VRAM.

  2. A wide grassy landscape with a tree half-buried in a cliff and a bicycle clipping through a rock, a choppy frame of motion blur.

    09. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

    Game Freak / Nintendo · 2022

    Frame rate drops, pop-in, characters clipping through cliffs, and an endless supply of viral clips. Nintendo apologized and granted refunds, and the games still sold 10 million copies in three days. The bugs, apparently, are part of the collection.

  3. A pair of red sneakers sinking halfway through a solid floor in a sunny tropical town, a spinning hourglass beside them.

    08. Sonic the Hedgehog

    Sonic Team / Sega · 2006

    Rushed for Christmas after half the team was split off to a Wii game, with developers ignoring QA bug reports to make the date. Broken camera, endless loading, Sonic slipping through the world. Sega delisted it in 2010 to protect the brand. Gotta go slow.

  4. An endless underwater level of coral and bricks looping into darkness, a single green pipe in the sand.

    07. The Minus World

    Nintendo · 1985

    Crouch-jump into the bricks at the end of World 1-2, clip through the wall, and the warp pipe sends you to World -1, an endless water level nobody escapes. The minus sign is just a blank tile. Miyamoto later allowed a bug that doesn't crash counts as a feature.

  5. A huge wooden club resting in the snow on a tundra, a tiny horned helmet flying high into the clouds above it.

    06. Skyrim's Giant Launch

    Bethesda Game Studios · 2011

    Annoy a giant and one swing of its club sends you hundreds of feet into the sky, ragdolling over the tundra until you land, usually dead. Reviewers logged plenty of other glitches, and fans built an unofficial patch fixing hundreds. Nobody fixed the giants. Nobody wanted to.

  6. A row of blank porcelain masks on a spaceship console, each slightly askew, under cold blue light.

    05. Mass Effect: Andromeda's Faces

    BioWare Montreal / EA · 2017

    A space epic whose characters' faces moved like they were being operated from slightly too far away. Players turned the cutscenes into memes on day one. Reporting blamed the Frostbite engine and short staffing. The franchise then went quiet for years.

  7. An arcade cabinet screen where the left half is a neat blue maze with dots and the right half is a jumble of garbled multicolored tile shapes.

    04. The Pac-Man Kill Screen

    Namco · 1980

    An integer overflow wrecks level 256: half the maze dissolves into garbage symbols and the level cannot be finished. That is why the perfect score is exactly 3,333,360. Pac-Man was never meant to end, so the code ended it for him.

  8. A sandy island shoreline with a jagged block of scrambled colorful pixels rising from the surf, a red-and-white ball on the sand.

    03. MissingNo.

    Game Freak / Nintendo · 1998

    Watch the old man's catching tutorial in Viridian, fly to Cinnabar, surf the east coast, and a scrambled block of pixels attacks. It also adds 128 to your sixth item. Nintendo warned it could wipe your save. Every kid did it anyway. Rare Candy does not grow on trees.

  9. An old game console smoking on a desk under neon lights, a returned game case with a refund slip clipped to it.

    02. Cyberpunk 2077 on Last-Gen Consoles

    CD Projekt Red · 2020

    On PS4 and Xbox One it was so broken that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store and offered refunds, and the NYT called it one of the industry's most conspicuous disasters. CDPR settled a class action for $1.85 million. The future, it turns out, needed more RAM.

  10. A Parisian cobblestone street at dusk with a row of empty tricorne hats floating at head height, no one beneath them.

    01. Assassin's Creed Unity's Missing Faces

    Ubisoft Montreal · 2014

    Revolutionary Paris, rebuilt in loving detail, where faces sometimes failed to render and left only floating eyes and teeth. Ubisoft apologized, halted season pass sales and gave the DLC away free. The French Revolution did not need to be scarier.

Honorable mentions

  • A wrecked red sedan in a bonus-stage parking lot, dented in a perfect chained sequence of fist-shaped marks.

    Street Fighter II Combos

    Capcom · 1991

    During bug testing on the car-smashing bonus stage, producer Noritaka Funamizu noticed extra hits could be chained if timed perfectly. He decided it was too hard to matter and left it in. It became the foundation of every fighting game since. Best bug ever shipped.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A shiny nylon duffel bag on a wasteland road next to a rusted mailbox holding an unopened box marked with a canvas texture swatch.

    Fallout 76

    Bethesda Game Studios · 2018

    Launched to Metacritic scores around 50 and a pile of glitches, then shipped a 50GB patch that added new bugs while leaving old ones. Bethesda also promised a canvas bag and delivered nylon. Eventually it got good. The bag took until 2019.

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