- Not a Game-Breaking Bug in the true sense of the term, but one that applies to 100% Completion. In the original N64 version of Banjo-Kazooie, all items collected in a level except for Jiggies, Mumbo tokens and extra honeycomb pieces will reset upon the player dying or leaving the level. The team that ported the game to Xbox Live Arcade changed this so that both notes and Jinjos will be saved by the game's autosave feature. The problem with this is that there's a mini-game in which you have to do a jigsaw based on a moving image of Banjo exploring an area of a level, and the moving image is made using the in-game engine. What this means is that if the jigsaw-Banjo picks up a note in the N64 version, it resets afterward, but if he does it on the XBLA version, it's lost forever and isn't added to your total. Infuriatingly, there's achievements for completing all the moving image puzzles and for getting all 900 notes, meaning that if you didn't complete the whole game before doing the jigsaws you'll have to start again right from the beginning if you want the last achievement. The real kicker in this whole scenario? A month after the glitch was first reported, a patch was made to fix it...and it didn't work for existing saves. You had to restart the whole game to get 100%.
- In the first game, if you lay two eggs into Leaky the Bucket from a ledge above and then jump near a Yum-Yum clam nearby while Leaky is speaking, if the Yum-Yum clam attacks you, the game will crash on the spot.
- During the final battle with Gruntilda in the first game, if you fall off the tower and let Grunty hit you just before you hit the death barrier, the game will softlock because Banjo is stuck in his pain animation indefinitely and floats around the tower aimlessly, forcing the player to reset the game.
- Downplayed in a glitch in Terrydactyland in Banjo-Tooie (it doesn't break the game, but it forces you to reset it). As a big T. rex, two of the things you can do are scare away a guy blocking the entrance to a cave, and press a switch to temporarily open a cage containing a Jinjo. Get unlucky enough to scare the guy away just as the timer for the cage runs off, and when the short cutscene indicating you the cage has closed again is over, you won't be able to move and will have to reset the game.
- In Hailfire Peaks in Tooie, be careful using the Snowball Transformation in tandem with the Honeyback Cheato code. The snowballs size is based in proportion to its health, and the only way to get it smaller and travel through some doorways is by decreasing your health—you do the math. Worst of all is if you go into Sabreman's tent just before the snowball grows to its full size, the subsequent growth spurt will trap you inside of it and force you to reset the game.
- In Nuts and Bolts, if you're unfortunate enough to hit poor Clanker's eyes during Banjoland's Act 4 mission "Spring Break!" the Disc will become unreadable. It's unknown if this happens in the Rare Replay rerelease.
- In Bubsy In Fractured Furry Tales, the final level has a checkpoint where if you don't kill the enemy on top of it before dying, you will be caught in a loop of dying immediately after respawning until you game over.
- In the Celeste modding community, the Brokemia Helper (a resource required for many mods including the Strawberry Jam Collab) tried to do an April Fools' Day joke that added fake "Crab Sides" to the game. Unfortunately, it turned out that pressing the "Crab" button made the fake sides appear over your C-sides, and if you tried to actually play them, it was liable to overwrite your C-side data or delete it entirely. In the worst case, it could make even the vanilla game become unplayable due to messed up save data. This led to the whole crab gag being patched out.
- Claws of Furry: On the digital downloadable version of the game on the Switch, at least, there's a chance that, when the game tries to load the next level, an error will occur that makes the software shut down.
- In Cool World on the NES, there's a glitch where, if you manage to store up at least ten lives and then die, it's an instant game over.
- Densetsu no Stafy 4: On the New Game Plus, there is a mole enemy in 6-3 who steals pearls from you. When you defeat it, single-point pearls are spilled on the floor amounting to the stolen pearls. If you attack it once it's stolen enough pearls, the game will crash.
- The Donkey Kong Country series:
- Donkey Kong runs into these nasty glitches more than once. This video
shows a number of glitches from the first Donkey Kong Country game, most of them harmless, but the one starting at 8:47 is decidedly nasty. Rambi gets glitched as the cave is opened, and the game freezes when he tries to exit. On restarting, the environment is a mass of flashing error, rendering the game utterly unplayable. An ominous annotation near the start of the segment says the glitch was tested on an actual Super Nintendo and altered the system - whether he's just talking about the emulator or if it was tested on an actual system is unknown. Fortunately, unlike the Castle Crush glitch from the next game, this one requires enough set-up as to almost never happen by accident.
- An extremely serious glitch can occur in Donkey Kong Country 2 on the vertically-scrolling Castle Crush stage. There is a barrel near the beginning which can be grabbed and broken without being thrown. A demonstration of the glitch can be seen here
. The glitch can cause the game to crash in some cases, but this could end up being worse than a simple restart or even losing save files (which is another potential result of the glitch). In some cases, the glitch's effects are so severe that they can corrupt the entire game even upon a reboot, due to it corrupting the game's save data beyond all repair. This isn't completely unfixable, but will require some sort of external method for clearing the cartridge's SRAM, such as opening the cartridge, then removing and re-inserting the save battery. An example of the broken game can be seen here.
This glitch was reportedly fixed for the Wii and 3DS Virtual Console versions, but showed up again with the Wii U and Nintendo Switch Online versions.
- All three of the SNES games have Copy Protection that throws up a screen telling you piracy is bad. However, there's a small chance of running into the screen on a perfectly legitimate copy. If this happens, you have to reset the game. Hope you saved recently!
- Vertically-scrolling stages in some Country and all Land games have a comparatively minor, but still frustrating, bug. If you fall too far or too quickly, the game will think you fell down a Bottomless Pit and expel you from the stage minus one life (this is more common in Land because of the smaller screen size).
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze had a rare glitch that prevented the player from advancing to level 3-4 after completing 3-3. The path would open up, but Donkey Kong couldn't move. While this didn't happen to most people, those that encountered the glitch had no way of completing the rest of the game. Fortunately this was fixed in a patch.
- In Donkey Kong 64, there are several:
- There is an obscure bug with the "Sneeze Alert" mechanical fish in Gloomy Galleon. If you get the Sniper Scope late in the game, then later go to the fish, the spinning fan lags, but not the timer. This makes the Golden Banana here impossible to get at this point without a workaround. The workaround is to disable the Sniper Scope while you are waiting for the fan to finish spinning
, but due to the sheer obscurity of this bug, most people won't know to do this at all.
- An even nastier thing happens if you try to use any Gameshark code in the game — Donkey Kong will spasm out of control throughout the whole game, even in the opening. Also, your cartridge will be permanently damaged if you save. How damaged are we talking? Bad enough that you cannot pick up any items and you drop dead from taking a single hit.
- There is an obscure bug with the "Sneeze Alert" mechanical fish in Gloomy Galleon. If you get the Sniper Scope late in the game, then later go to the fish, the spinning fan lags, but not the timer. This makes the Golden Banana here impossible to get at this point without a workaround. The workaround is to disable the Sniper Scope while you are waiting for the fan to finish spinning
- Donkey Kong runs into these nasty glitches more than once. This video
- This is deliberately invoked in Dungeon, a game by cactus and podunkian. The game plays differently on every computer without telling the player. So, for some players, the game is unwinnable or unplayable as it's impossible to get past a certain room (or even to clear the first jump), or the game lags horribly.
- In the Genesis game Garfield: Caught in the Act, occasionally the third boss will walk off the right side of the screen and never return, forcing the player to restart the game and start all over.
- Glover on the N64 has one where you have to throw your ball into a holding tank and then jump into another holding tank and it will rocket you to the other platform. Only problem is, about 75% of the time, you or your ball will phase through the floor and die from it. There is also a point where if you fall off a platform in a certain level, you will glitch through the floor and get stuck there.
- In Gunstar Heroes, after defeating Orange, his helicopter blows up and player characters start falling as the screen scrolls rapidly. Normally it's Not the Fall That Kills You…, but when the bug that sometimes kills Speedruns of this game happens, the game fails to load the correct environment and scrolls through empty or garbage screens for several minutes before finally killing the player.
- Home Alone (Game Boy) has a game-breaking glitch where, if Kevin climbs up the ladder to the right side of the attic in the fourth level, the game crashes due to an error with a warp.
- Home Alone 2 for the NES has a fatal bug where, if you manage to get through the game with the Bell item intact without getting hit and spin jump into Marv or Harry in certain parts of the third level, the game freezes.
- The American Atari 7800 port of Impossible Mission has a bug that the final puzzle literally impossible to complete. You're supposed to collect "cards" hidden in random objects throughout the game and solve the final puzzle by combining all of them. Unfortunately, the 7800 American version (and only that one) will sometimes hide a card in a computer terminal. It can then never be found, because interacting with a terminal uses the computer instead of searching it as with every other object. This was fixed in the European version, and there is a chance if you are extraordinarily lucky that none of the 36 cards will be hidden in terminals.
- Jak and Daxter:
- In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a glitch sometimes makes it impossible to win a certain race (the game will expect you to complete a course in 1 second instead of 45), thus preventing you from getting every power cell in the game. The makers of the game apparently knew this, as the number of cells required to get the good ending is one less than the total number in the game.
- Jak II: Renegade has a showstopper late in the final act of the game. Playing the optional races in the stadium seems to create an event flag that supersedes a later story mission. The mission icon appears on your radar, but as soon as you approach the area, it disappears to be replaced by the icon for the optional races you triggered earlier, making it impossible to trigger the start of the story mission. You have to delete the save file and start from scratch.
- Jazz Jackrabbit:
- In the PC version, you can get stuck in walls and ceilings by jumping, teleporting (through a cheat code), or being bounced into them. You can escape using cheat codes, but if they don't work, your only other option is to restart the level.
- A worse one in some of the builds of the first game makes one of the levels in Orbitus nigh impossible to beat. The level features bouncy walls and a bouncy floor that also, unfortunately, acts as a ceiling that sucks you up to the level above if Jazz so much as scrapes a hair on it. Add in a few tiny holes the player has to navigate to without touching the floor or ceiling, and you get a recipe of pain. Players attempting this should turn on slow motion mode, as it's virtually unwinnable otherwise.
- Jet Set Willy:
- The famous Attic Bug on the ZX Spectrum version. An arrow that appears on this screen travels out of the screen memory area and into the game code, overwriting it and rendering the game Unwinnable. The first people to beat the game did so by hacking the code. Perhaps for that reason, it became famous as the most hacked game then in existence. A couple of hundred separate hacks were published in various magazines, including one that removed Maria, the housekeeper. (Since the entire purpose of the game is to get past Maria by collecting all the Plot Coupons, this hack makes the game pointless.) Even better, there's one that triggers the ending sequence when the player collects the first, very easy Plot Coupon.
- The programmer of the Commodore 64 version fixed the infamous Attic Bug, but didn't finish implementing the final cutscene, and so the game is still impossible to complete. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel: in 2010 a bunch of chaps from the forums of Lemon 64, a C64 fan site, transplanted some of the code from other versions of the game, thus making the game finally winnable. The 27-year-gap between initial release and final patch must be some kind of record.
- The original Dragon 32/64, BBC Micro and Atari 8-bit ports all have one or more (different) game breaking bugs — despite the latter two having been converted and published by a different company — making this into something approaching a tradition for the game!
- Kirby
- A rather nasty bug appears in Kirby's Adventure in relation to the Stone ability. Upon getting to the room with a mini boss in Orange Ocean 1, Kirby is standing right on a block that can be broken with the Stone ability. Using the ability to break the block will leave Kirby splashing in a single block of water, and attempting to use the ability again will result in the game glitching out. However, if B is pressed followed immediately by Start to pause, a variety of effects can happen, including the game crashing. In a best-case scenario the game can randomly warp to different areas including the Credits sequence, which counts as the game being beaten.
- The game can be softlocked in the fight with the Fire Lion boss in the level 6 arena. If Kirby has the Cutter ability, gets the boss down to two bars of health, and then uses the Cutter at the same time the lion grabs him, the game freezes.
- In Kirby Super Star it is possible to freeze the game during Milky Way Wishes. If Kirby inhales one of the Noddies at the start of Planet Hotbeat, then immediately pauses and exits the stage, going to NOVA next will cause the cutscene to play like normal but then the game will lock up when the level begins.
- The Japanese version of Super Star also has a particularly nasty glitch pertaining to the SA-1 chip included on the cartridge. Under certain circumstances (the exact nature of which is unknown, considering that the glitch seems to occur at complete random), the chip and its associated programming can end up corrupting the game's save files so that all three of them display six stars, 0% completion, and no icon. Aptly called the "0% 0% 0% Glitch", the sheer ease and randomness regarding its triggering has made it quite infamous among Japanese Kirby fans, to the point where it got parodied in the second episode of Pop Team Epic. Not helping matters is the fact that the glitch was never fixed; all re-releases of the Super Famicom version, be it Virtual Console, Kirby's Dream Collection, or the Super Famicom Mini, retain the glitch, with the DS remake being the only version to lack it (though developers have joked about including a hidden Classic Cheat Code to replicate the glitch, indicating that they're fully aware of its existence yet haven't done jack about it). Thankfully, Nintendo's international divisions managed to catch and remove the glitch ahead of time, meaning the Japanese version is the only one affected.
- In "Dyna Blade" the game can also freeze during the auto-scrolling part of the second level. If a Helper takes enough damage from a particular enemy to be defeated but Kirby manages to make it to the warp star just ahead by himself and jump on, the game will softlock as it waits for the Helper to also interact with it, even though it is technically dead. This will leave the screen to keep scrolling endlessly, even wrapping around itself at the end of the stage.
- Even the DS remake Kirby Super Star Ultra is not immune to game breaking bugs. If Kirby uses the Suplex ability on a Bomber enemy in a particular part of Stage 2 of Dyna Blade, right as the enemy is about to fall of an edge, he will grab the enemy with the Suplex ability like normal and land on the ground below, but the game will lock up if he jumps to throw the enemy.
- The 2022 rerelease of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards on Nintendo Switch Online Service initially had a game-breaking bug where certain damage sources in underwater stages (like those in Aqua Star) can permanently put Kirby into his "stunned" state which requires the player to quit and retry the current stage. It was eventually patched out with a later update.
- TT LEGO Games
- LEGO Jurassic World just loves to crash at inopportune times, often when an Event Flag is supposed to trigger but doesn't. It is also easy to crash the game by enabling too many Studs X cheats (which compound), which will make the game freeze during the end level tally. At best, this will cause oddities like having officially beaten the level but not earned the gold brick or any unlocked characters, minikits, or amber, and at worst (since it auto-saves during the tally), it can brick your game.
- LEGO Dimensions's Ghostbusters (2016) Story Pack has one on Wii U. Every time time you complete a level in that Story Pack, you are taken to the Ghostbusters 2016 adventure world. You are always required to solve a puzzle or a quest in that adventure world before progressing on to the next level. If you leave the adventure world during one of these quests and then return to the Ghostbusters 2016 portal in The Shard, you are offered to either continue the story or go straight to the adventure world. If you choose to continue the story, you immediately start the next level, skipping the quest you have to do. If you do that and then try replaying the level later after completing it for the story, the game will still think the level is locked, even though it will show you have clearly played it, collected minikits, got a Rule Breaker status and rescued the civilian in peril. This then makes it impossible to 100 percent and collect the Gold Bricks for the level if you didn't get everything.
- The Lion King has two such bugs in the MS-DOS version:
- The second level requires you to roar at some monkeys so that you can get them to turn around, allowing you to solve a puzzle. Unfortunately, 90% of the time you enter this level, a bug manifests where your "roar meter" never fills up, thus making it impossible to affect anything with your roar. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this bug: pausing the game several times for a short amount of time will make the roar meter work properly again.
- The third level has a section where Simba has to climb ledges while escaping two geysers at the same time. Thing is, in the MS-DOS version they are bugged and so they either will not move at all or will move so fast that it is impossible to outrun them. What's worse, whether the geysers will move or not is completely random, so hopefully you have enough lives to lose.
- LittleBigPlanet:
- Least severe was the terrible, horrible server lag that was apparent for the first few months of the first game, rendering it nearly unplayable online, despite the online connectivity being one of the main points of the game.
- The third game on Playstation 4 also had a broken online mode for the first few months of the game's release, where it was plain impossible to join another player's game, until it was fixed with various updates.
- Many players have encountered a bug that, when making a large grabbable material spin extremely fast in the level editor and grabbing on, they will no longer be able to respawn, stuck on some sort of infinite pseudo-death loop. Returning to the pod (main menu, basically) continues this, and this persists even upon resetting the game, rendering the game completely unplayable for those affected. The only way to undo this is to delete the entire save data.
- The "Info moon" on the left, which gauges your Play, Create, and Share points (among other things), was completely non-operational at one point (curiously, it was working fine before the official launch, I.E. before the servers were up).
- Still prancing around is the bug that makes your file completely unable to save new data (and gives no error indicating this. The game only autosaves), apparently brought on by having too many custom/community objects. It's supposedly fixable by deleting all of that and avoiding community objects like the plague. Obviously nobody wants to do this.
- "Spawn-Pop Cancer." Sometimes, when the player does the Lethal Sackboy Glitch that lethalizes Sackboy and allows him to touch objects of the same lethality without dying, they may become lethal to themselves. Meaning that they'll die every time they spawn, repeatedly. If this happens, you'll need to import an old save. Hope you made a backup!
- "Deep Freeze." When there are too many complicated objects in a small area, the game can freeze and you will have to turn off the console. This bug also happens in LittleBigPlanet 2.
- In the second level, Get A Grip, items can disappear, with the only known cure being to start a new file and hope your luck hasn't run out. The "Moody Cloud" sticker is one of the more common disappearances.
- A common glitch in LittleBigPlanet PSP can render user-created levels unplayable and impossible to edit. Attempting to play an affected community level will softlock the game.
- In LittleBigPlanet 3, a bug can occur in create mode where Sackboy will get stuck and start twitching wildly until you delete the glitched object. If you quit and restart the game, Sackboy will get stuck in the pipe of the Pod and make the game unplayable until you load a backup or delete the save data.
- Seemingly innocuous actions — it's not known exactly what causes this — have the possibility of corrupting your profile. Hope you backed up all your levels and put all your costumes, captured and community items inside another backed-up level, because if not, you're never going to see them again!
- In rare cases, loading the Ziggurat hub level can cause the player to repeatedly fall to their death.
- The English Commodore 64 version of Livingstone, I Presume? had a bug introduced in localization which, in addition to breaking the Cheat Code for infinite lives, causes the game to unavoidably crash at a certain point in level 3. 8-Bit Show And Tell discusses it in complete detail
. Notably, neither the original Spanish version nor any of the localizations for other systems have this problem.
- LostWinds is unfortunately affected with a bug where Toku occasionally gets stuck in the ground after a long fall. Effects can range from him being unable to jump (either over small ledges or with Gust) to being completely stuck. Sadly, the only way to get out is to reset. If you haven't saved recently, sucks to be you...fortunately, the game does autosave at various points in the game, and the game is short, so even if you don't use the save pillars, you'll probably never go that far back.
- Due to a poorly coded physics engine, some levels in Super Meat Boy are literally impossible when playing on a slow computer. This can be mitigated to some extent by switching to a lower graphics resolution, but if it still isn't fast enough on 640x480, you're out of luck. Hope you weren't planning on ever seeing 2-18x.
- Mega Man:
- In the first few screens of Ice Man's stage in the first Mega Man, if you move Mega Man back and forth at the very top of the screen at a specific point, a myriad of different effects can happen, from spawning random enemies or bosses, soft-resetting to the title screen, accelerating the ice physics, graphical glitches at varying levels of severity, counting the stage as finished, or freezing the game completely. In the best-case scenario, this can take you directly to the ending sequence.
- Another glitch exists in the first game where if you land on the ground during the second phase of the Wily Machine just as it dies and walk left, you will be stuck in the hallway before the boss with your controls locked, as the game normally does after the final hit. The only remedy is the reset button, since the ending won't play under these circumstances, and since the first Mega Man doesn't have passwords...
- Mega Man 3 has a rather nasty glitch in the Japanese version involving the fight with Hard Man. One of Hard Man's attacks involves him smashing into the ground, causing an earthquake that locks Mega Man into his current position on the screen until he gets back up or if Mega Man gets hit. If the player were to kill him while Mega Man is frozen by say, using his weakness, Magnet Missile, which can hit him from anywhere on the screen, they would be stuck. In the fight with him in his home stage, this isn't an issue at all, since the game will automatically take control when Hard Man dies (Mega Man 2 and 3 immediately lock your controls when you kill a boss for the "stage clear" sequence). However, if this is done during the rematch with him in the Boss Rush sequence in Dr. Wily Stage 4 near the end of the game, Mega Man will be permanently unable to move, since the game intends for the player to immediately regain control and exit via the nearby teleporter. The only way out is to reset the game and use a password to start all the Wily stages from scratch.
- In Mega Man 4, if you time a Rain Flush so that it goes off while Wily's escape pod is on the screen after defeating Wily Machine 4, it will destroy it, since it's not programmed to be immune to Rain Flush. However, the victory music and the lead-in to the final stage will not play if that takes place, meaning that you have no choice but to reset and continue from the last place you wrote down the password for, which is quite devastating at this point in the game since the final password is given seven stages prior.
- A similar glitch occurs if you use Flash Stopper to finish off the Cockroach Twins in Dr. Cossack Stage 3: the game will never proceed to the next stage. Thankfully, Flash Stopper is useless against this boss anyways, and there's a bed of One-Hit Kill spikes in the room.
- In the first Mega Man X, if the player kills the final phase of the Final Boss, Wolf Sigma, and dies at the exact same time, since the game once again locks all of your controls upon death, the player cannot advance the mandatory dialogue afterward. Looks like it's back to the beginning of the fortress stages! Thankfully, later cartridge revisions fixed this, among several other more minor glitches.
- In the first few screens of Ice Man's stage in the first Mega Man, if you move Mega Man back and forth at the very top of the screen at a specific point, a myriad of different effects can happen, from spawning random enemies or bosses, soft-resetting to the title screen, accelerating the ice physics, graphical glitches at varying levels of severity, counting the stage as finished, or freezing the game completely. In the best-case scenario, this can take you directly to the ending sequence.
- The current version (8.7.5) of Mega Man Revolution has a nasty bug where the game crashes if you try to save after getting a game over. Thus, the only way to save your game is to complete a level and then save.
- Mighty No. 9 has two involving the final boss. The only solution to either is to quit the level and start the whole grueling process over again.
- The first happens under some specific but easily exploited circumstances: When the arena forms stairs going up one side of the floor for the boss's wall attack, climbing the stairs before the boss emerges can cause them to drop down and switch sides. Doing so at the wrong time can get the boss stuck and never emerge.
- The second is more specific and rare, where beating either of its forms prevents the next scene (either the second phase transition or the ending cutscene) to not load at all.
- The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories has a few:
- Sometimes, the scale in the graveyard level will refuse to move all the way, and instead go about half of the way. This makes the level uncompletable.
- Also in the graveyard level, sometimes a needed item will land in the background and be impossible to pick up.
- In the diner level, if the player goes outside but does not fully complete the level, and quits the game, they will start just outside the diner when their next save is loaded. If they then re-enter the diner, the game crashes. The only way around this is to use Chapter Select.
- If J.J. tries to climb down a ledge while her phone is going off, the player will be unable to move. This is because when the phone goes off, all buttons lock except the pause button (which opens the phone), but when hanging onto a ledge, all buttons lock except the jump button (for letting go or climbing back up). If both these things happen at once, all buttons lock, making the player unable to do anything.
- In the end of the tunnel level, it's possible to jump over the spikes while gravity is reversed, resulting in J.J. infinitely falling into the sky. Since J.J. can only pause the game and use her phone when not in the air, this means the only way to quit and try again is to exit out of the game.
- Due to a bug in Round 7 of Monster Party, you earn the key to finish the level after fighting only two of the three bosses. If you face the third you'll lose the key, and your only choice is to reset the game. This is due to there not being a boss in that room in the unreleased Japanese version (there was planned to be, but it ended up being Dummied Out), and the game's programming was not changed to accommodate for this in the English version, as it only checks for exactly two keys in the player's inventory.
- Prince of Persia:
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
- One bug will stop the platforms in the observatory from correctly lifting (may have something to do with Farah triggering the switch instead of the player). A more infamous one occurrs in Warrior Within, where the game will randomly teleport ahead when loading to a part far later, when the Prince becomes the Sand Wraith. The only way to fix it is to load an earlier save. Don't have one? Sucks to be you!
- When you reach the Hall of Learning and use the save vortex near a spike pit immediately after the battle on the hall floor, there is a chance that if you reload the save, Farah would spawn in the spike pit and die, resulting in a death loop
that will effectively ruin your save file (since you need her to continue). If you must save here, first get to work on the mirror puzzle until you uncover a crack from the wall that will lead Farah away from the pit, before you can use the save vortex. This bug was fixed in the PC version.
- There's a horrible bug right at the end of the game where you try to run through the last sand portal to face the end boss and the portal will simply refuse to work. Play the entire game over from the beginning!
- An oversight allows you to reach an unreachable door and bypass a decent chunk of the game. Said occurrence forces you to run a massive disintegrating obstacle course, only to arrive at a wall which can only be broken with a sword you don't own yet. And unless you avoid the two saves along the nigh-impossible road to failure, you're forced into starting a new game. Worse still, you can stumble into this by complete accident with no indication.
- There's Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame on the Super NES. One specific standard enemy, when killed, crashes the game.
- In Prince of Persia 3D, there is a spot late in the game where a moving platform will not be moving. It causes excessive frustration the first time around, since the player has no idea it is supposed to move. To make matters worse, once the player reaches the area, the platform will not move unless the level is restarted and the player gets lucky.
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
- Rastan on the Commodore 64 has a fatally bugged rope swing in Level 4, as grabbing the rope at its end will cause Rastan to die from touching the water, while grabbing it at any higher point won't allow him to clear the gap. This renders the game Unintentionally Unwinnable without the use of cheat codes.
- Rayman:
- In the earliest copies of Rayman 2: The Great Escape for the PC, at the beginning of the level "The Top of the World", a message will pop up with a picture of a robot pirate, telling you the CD is missing and that you have to insert it to keep playing, even if it's not. As this video
shows, however, the level's still fully playable (should you not trigger OTHER glitches) when this glitch is active. The only issue is that you can hardly see shit when there's a gigantic robot pirate face blocking most of the screen.
- In the HD rereleases of Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, attempting to revisit any world before completing the game results in the last world becoming permanently locked, forcing the player to restart their save.
- In the earliest copies of Rayman 2: The Great Escape for the PC, at the beginning of the level "The Top of the World", a message will pop up with a picture of a robot pirate, telling you the CD is missing and that you have to insert it to keep playing, even if it's not. As this video
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves:
- Saving and quitting during the Canada Games section of of the game makes it impossible to complete the level, rendering the game Unwinnable. This has a fix built-in, though you do have to backstep a few missions. Just head to the house that contains the safe, and head to said safe. Once Jean Bison yells at his lackeys, you should be able to pull a switch and redo the laser mission.
- Although it takes some effort, it can happen in the "Leading Rajan" mission. If you set a bomb under Rajan right before getting the last blueprint, you will fail the mission but you will technically have gotten the blueprints. This results in the mission being unwinnable, forcing a reset.
- Getting hit while looking through the binocu-cam can cause the camera to become frozen in place.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- In the first game, you can die by going too fast for the screen to keep up (because it just kills Sonic when he touches the bottom of the screen), and there are other situations where you can get stuck in the scenery and be unable to get out.
- At the end of Labyrinth Zone Acts 1 and 2, if Sonic rolls after passing the end of level signpost, he falls off screen
and the game crashes.
- At the end of the final boss fight, it is possible to hit him as his defeat animation is playing. This sets his health counter from 0 to 255, making the fight unwinnable. It's also possible to jump into the bottomless pit after you defeat the boss. Later games would put an invisible block in places like that.
- At the end of Labyrinth Zone Acts 1 and 2, if Sonic rolls after passing the end of level signpost, he falls off screen
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has a couple major glitches, which are design oversights as a result of the game being rushed out for release:
- Whatever you do, do not try to turn back into Super Sonic again at the end of a level (where touching a Goal Plate or Capsule cancels out Super Sonic automatically); most of the time, doing so will trap Sonic in mid-air, preventing the game from moving on to the next level, and thus forcing the player to reset the game. It should be noted that is only applies to the first versions of the game. A later revision released on the Sonic Classics cartridge fixed this glitch.
- Turning into Super Sonic while you complete the Wing Fortress level will leave you unable to finish the level. Super Sonic jumps too high and this causes him to miss the scripted event of Tails's plane flying below to catch him, which in turn causes you to plummet to your death and replay the battle or level again.
- Hitting Robo Sonic for the final time at the wrong frame will soft-lock the game, as seen here
.
- Sonic 3 & Knuckles:
- The American manual for Sonic 3 actually acknowledges that it's possible to get stuck in scenery during Mercy Invincibility (and be forced to either wait for a Time Over or reset the game), but Hand Waves this as a "diabolical trap" left by Dr. Robotnik that takes advantage of Sonic's speed.
- In Marble Garden Zone, while playing as Sonic with Tails, you can actually scroll Tails off the screen permanently. While this would be good (since Tails is an Annoying Video Game Helper in this mode), it also prevents him from showing up during the end-Zone boss, a boss that requires you to have Tails fly you up to beat. This means you're permanently stuck off-screen and unable to complete the game.
- By Marble Garden Zone, you can be playing as Super Sonic. During the Robotnik animation where he is demolishing the scenery just moments before the boss battle, it is actually possible to damage him. If you hit him 8 times? GAME CRASH! In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, this bug is fixed, and any hits you land on him past the seventh just won't register until the actual fight begins.
- This Youtuber
has analyzed an incredible number of bugs in Sonic 3 & Knuckles in all stages. The worst cases cause the game to crash; the silliest cases cause the game to restart.
- The S-monitor restart glitch. If you place too many S boxes in debug mode (10-20 at once) and then break them, the game will likely glitch out (or Sonic will stop in some cases until you pause) and reset...back into plain old Sonic and Knuckles mode, meaning you won't be able to play the Sonic 3 stages or as/with Tails.
- Towards the beginning of Sonic's version of Lava Reef Zone Act 1, there is a passageway blocking progression, and the only way to open it is to simply destroy the wall-mounted cannon right below it. If for some reason the player destroys the cannon, then backtracks to a checkpoint and enters a bonus stage, then the passageway is closed off again, but the cannon won't reappear, meaning the player has to waste one of their Video-Game Lives in order to properly reset the level.
- The Quiz Lady bug in Sonic Unleashed. Essentially, this bug will cause Sandra—a woman who travels around the world, giving you quizzes about the place you meet her in—to not appear in Shamar. Therefore, you are unable to finish this quest, unable to get the Art Book she hands you for finishing, and therefore unable to get 100% completion. You get this bug? Too bad! Looks like you'll have to start a whole new save file. This has since been fixed...at the cost of $3.13 USD (plus tax) to get the Chun-Nan DLC.
- The first Sonic Adventure has game-breaking bugs that double as Good Bad Bugs, and vice versa. These bugs allow characters to access levels or parts of levels that they normally can't, and can also access stages out of order. However, doing this can cause glitches that, at best, make the level unbeatable, and at worst, make the game unbeatable. One of these is the bug that allows Knuckles to enter Casinopolis early. While you can play through the level without incident, the problem occurs when you beat it; Tikal whisks Knuckles away to the past...and he's stuck there. The game doesn't necessarily freeze, as Knuckles is still able to move around and explore. However, Tikal and her father are glitched in a way that has them standing in midair. This prevents the cutscene that ends this sequence from playing, making it literally impossible for Knuckles to ever leave the past.
- Another particularly bad one occurs during Super Sonic's story. The Crystal Ring is an optional upgrade that depletes the time it takes for Sonic's Light Speed Dash to charge. Most players grab it during their first playthrough, but if you choose to collect it during Super Sonic's game, it will essentially ruin your save file. There is usually no auto-save feature, as Super Sonic's stage is just one long level, but acquiring the upgrade forces the game to save. That wouldn't be a problem, unless you have to switch off the console. Trying to reload the game will then lead to you seeing a Dummied Out recap screen, before either being dumped in an inescapable Hedgehog Hammer room, a bottomless pit, or simply freezing the game altogether. The only way to bypass this is to start a new file, which is incredibly frustrating, because Super Sonic is only unlocked after completing the other six characters' stories.
- A rather infamous one happens in Emerald Coast, the first level in the game. During the first part, Sonic has to run across a downward incline that leads into one of the series' signature loop-de-loops, before landing on the pier where he's chased by an orca. The incline deliberately pulls Sonic into the loop, and one of the guardrails has a small gap in its collission, meaning there's a chance of making Sonic fall into the blue watery void below. The Game Grumps famously showed this glitch, and hilarity ensued.
Even though it's more noticeable in the DX version, which the Grumps were playing, it's still possible to get this to happen in the original Dreamcast release,
albeit harder to pull off.
- In the original Dreamcast release of Sonic Adventure 2, taking your Chao to the doctor after reincarnating will sometimes cause the game to freeze or delete your Chao entirely.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is broken in general, but the infamous Silver Boss Battle is definitely one of the buggier parts. Silver's telekinetic attack ("It's no use!") can endlessly pin Sonic against a wall or fling him out into space. At one specific spot, it can knock Sonic outside the invisible wall of the arena, and he can't get back in, trapping him in an empty, but solid and rendered version of Soleanna. The Purple Gem item also lets Sonic double jump infinitely.
- Shadow the Hedgehog has two bugs in The Doom. Playing the dark mission requires you to kill all GUN Troops. However, at one specific area, the final mech that you are required to kill in order to complete the mission will not spawn without you backtracking to a previous checkpoint. This added to an already ridiculously expansive and maze-like level. The Hero mission has a different one; sometimes the item you need to throw at the researchers to heal them can get stuck in mid-air, forcing you to die and come back to try it again. However, this one isn't an issue if you have the Heal Cannon.
- Sonic Generations:
- Classic Seaside Hill has the entire level not load at all
if you go past a checkpoint in a certain way. Models for enemies, items, and other objects are still rendered, but the level itself isn't loaded. However, the level is still beatable because the terrain is still physically there. The difficult part is trying to remember how the level is laid out without falling into a death trap. Even if you lose a life when this bug happens, the game still bugs out and won't load the level objects unless you restart the stage. The same thing can happen
in Modern Planet Wisp. In the PC version, it can happen in almost any level, though normally this happens only if both your video drivers and the game aren't updated.
- The PC version has an irritating bug when using a non-Xbox controller where Sonic will step to the left randomly in 3D sections until you restart the game.
- Classic Seaside Hill has the entire level not load at all
- Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric gives '06 a run for its money in the glitches department, with the ability to fall through the hub world by grabbing an invisible ledge and clipping through a mountain
, dying inside an impenetrable force field then respawning
outside, switching to 3D controls while still in a 2D plane, getting stuck in chests
... you can even outright skip the Final Boss.
- In the first game, you can die by going too fast for the screen to keep up (because it just kills Sonic when he touches the bottom of the screen), and there are other situations where you can get stuck in the scenery and be unable to get out.
- In the N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley, one of the game's bonus trophies is uncollectable, which makes it impossible to get the 100% Completion necessary to access the game's bonus level without cheating. The game can still be won and you can still gain EVO's bonus gold costume from collecting all the bits, but the bonus level will forever be lost to non-cheaters and you'll never fill in that last percent.
- Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos manages to crash less accurate SNES emulators when a vital switch in the first level of the sixth world is pressed. Why an actual SNES can break out of the (probably unintentional) infinite loop baffled emulator writers until 2010
.
- Spyro the Dragon:
- Spyro: Year of the Dragon:
- A horrible, horrible glitch in the first editions of the game prevents you from gaining the second egg of the Speedway levels if you exit the level without getting it, even if you didn't even select the objective needed to get it in the first place. Even if you do win the race needed for the egg after this glitch is triggered, it won't register, preventing 100% Completion. This can even happen in reverse: if you beat the race but not the time trial, then exit, the time trial egg will never register even if you do beat the objective.
- The game's own difficulty system leads to a borderline example. On Fireworks Factory, a pair of ninja opponents are present on all difficulty levels, but on Easy they don't jump down to fight Spyro. It's necessary to fight them for two gems. It is fixable by using a cheat code to change the difficulty level or by playing well enough for the game to change the difficulty itself, but unless you know how, it can be a game ender.
- It's possible to flame a cat-fairy named Fluffy in Cloud Spires, which will result in the cutscene being skipped; speaking with the fairy again will act like the cutscene did play, but he won't give out the egg, and will just disappear into an invisible portal. While you can use the nearby portal to respawn Fluffy, he cannot be spoken to, forcing the player to exit and restart the level. The person who discovered the bug, which she dubbed the "Fluffy Glitch", even posted a video on how to trigger it
.
- It's also possible to trip the game's Copy Protection feature if your disk is scratched or the lens of your PlayStation is dirty. Your only warning is that Zoe the fairy will warn you that you may have have purchased an illegal copy. However, if you disregard the warning (which odds are you will if you're an innocent gamer who bought the game fair and square) and face the end boss, BAM! All your data on that file is lost. Every single thing from gems to eggs goes back down to zero, and you go all the way back to the beginning of the game as if you deleted the file and started a new one.
- Enter the Dragonfly will occasionally freeze while loading levels. Because the load times are very long to begin with, you might not even notice until several minutes have passed.
- A rather irritating glitch can sometimes occur in Dawn Of The Dragon, where even if you've completed the game and collected everything / defeated all the Elite Enemies / upgraded all your elements to their maximum, the file will only read 99%, meaning you can't open the final gallery.
- Spyro: Year of the Dragon:
- Stinkoman 20X6 has two. First, if you die to either of the first two bosses, losing results in the game respawning you in the boss room as expected... except there won't be any ground, and you will immediately fall to your death. The other is that it is impossible to complete level 4.1. The last button you need to press will not move the platform, so 1-Up will fall to his death.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Super Mario Bros.:
- If you do the Infinite 1-Ups trick, DO NOT get more than 127 lives. Otherwise the counter will overflow and your next death will be a Game Over, unless you collect 129 more livesnote .
- If you Jump over the flag at the end of the level and scroll the flag off the screen, you end up in an infinite loop until the time runs out and you die.
- In the Deluxe version for Game Boy Color, if you earn the Yoshi Medal at the same time as the Red Coins or High Score medals in Challenge mode, you'll only get the Yoshi medal, and the others will be lost.
- Super Mario Bros. 3:
- In the NES version, if you die on the World 5 airship, there is a rare chance that the ship will fly off the map completely, making it impossible to advance, unless you have a warp whistle. This means the Anchor is actually useful for this world.
- If a Hammer Brother and a card matching game end up on the same spot on the map screen, it's possible for them to get stuck together and continuously move around the map, locking the game up. This can happen in the NES and SNES versions.
- Super Mario 64: Due to being an early 3D game and having numerous glitches and design oversights, there are many ways to mess up the game:
- It's actually possible to crash the game just by messing around with the file select screen.
- In Vanish Cap Under the Moat, if you try to perform the backwards long jump glitch on one of the rotating platforms
, the game will crash. It's been said that locking the camera in place will work around this and let Mario just fly out of the level's bounds instead.
- In Bob-Omb Battlefield, if you ground pound on the floating island's item box while exploiting the Dead Flying Mario glitch
, both Mario's death animation and the cutscene of the Star appearing will trigger at the same time, softlocking the game and forcing the player to reset.
- Also in Bob-Omb Battlefield, if you sandwich Mario underneath the level's first bridge and a cork block
, the game will crash.
- For some reason, Big Boo's Haunt has a glitch
in the room that lets you fall down to the basement that causes the game to crash if you're up against a wall and fall in a certain way.
- Using the Hat Factory glitch
in Shifting Sand Land can crash the game if you grab one too many hats.
- In Tall, Tall Mountain, if you let the Monty Moles throw too many pebbles with Mario standing nearby
, the game will run out of memory and crash. This is due to a design oversight—pebbles deactivate when they are more than 4000 units away from Mario. Hence, a deactivated pebble won't hit the ground and unload, but instead just remain invisible and unmoving in midair. So by having Monty Moles continually throw pebbles off the edge, the pebbles will keep loading into object slots but never unload. Since the game only has 240 object slots, eventually all the slots become occupied and the game crashes.
- In the DS version, it's possible to crash the game
before you even reach the file select. However, you have to be doing it on purpose to pull it off, as it's virtually impossible to do it normally.
- In the Nintendo DS version, a game breaking bug is found in Snowman's Land. If the snowman blows off Mario's hat and Mario throws a crate at the snowman wearing his hat to retrieve it, he will get his hat like normal, but repeating the action will add another hat to the total on screen. After too many hats appear, the game first slows down, and then freezes completely.
- Also in the Nintendo DS version there is a game-breaking glitch in Bob-Omb Battlefield. If the Koopa walking near the cannon is jumped on, he will be pushed inside the cannon, and if Yoshi eats him from within the cannon he will begin to ride the Koopa's shell with his tongue sticking out. Making contact with any object in this state will crash the game.
- In early versions of the DS remake, being attacked by Klepto while holding an object and wearing a transformation hat causes the game to freeze.
- The infamous romhack Super Mario 64 Chaos Edition, which is purposefully designed to be impossible to beat, is loaded with even more glitches than the original game due to its unstable code. While most of the glitches are purposefully done to make the game go screwy on you, the game will often just crash on you, with the basement entrance being a particular hotspot for it.
- It's actually possible to crash the game just by messing around with the file select screen.
- Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
- The "Pipe glitch" which can be accessed with early versions of the game. After finishing any level with a pipe and then re-entering the level, exiting the level while going down a pipe will cause an effect where Mario immediately falls through the floor of the next stage he enters. This can not only access the game's Minus World but also the ability to beat the game and see the credits early.
- The disc version of New Super Mario Bros. Wii has Copy Protection in the form of crashing the game after 3-10 minutes of gameplay and telling you that an error has occurred and that you must eject the game from your Wii, turn your Wii off, and determine the cause by reading your Wii Operations Manual. Like the SNES Donkey Kong Country example above, there's a slight chance of this happening on a perfectly legitimate and completely unscratched disc.note If this happens, you have to turn your Wii off (as the message tells you to do), turn it back on, and hope you saved during those 3-10 minutes!
- Super Mario Odyssey: If Mario captures a stack of Goombas while touching a Life-Up Heart, the level freezes and Mario is unable to do anything besides run around, meaning he can't progress. The menu can't be brought up, and falling off the level just makes Mario fall forever, so the only way to fix this is to restart the game.
- In Super Mario Maker 2 there is a game-breaking bug on any stage based on Super Mario 3D World. If Mario is wearing a cat suit and enters a warp block that is right next to a standard block and then immediately goes down a pipe, Mario is despawned from the game and the game softlocks.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!, there's a sequence at one point late in the train level where Buster dashes off the train right as he is about to be scrolled off screen. Normally, this isn't a problem, but if you reassigned the R button to something other than the default Dash, then congratulations — you've screwed yourself over! Fortunately, this is not a problem in the Spanish localization.
- A PS2 demo version of Viewtiful Joe 2 has a severe bug that causes all other data on the memory card to be erased by just playing the demo.
- In the Capital Cashino level of Yooka-Laylee, for most of the Pagies, you have to find enough casino tokens and cash them in at the cashier near the entrance. In the initial release of the game, if you cashed in the tokens and quit the game before triggering another auto-save anywhere else, you might wind up with a file that saved after removing the tokens from your inventory but before awarding you the Pagie(s), leaving you that many Pagies short of 100% Completion. Fortunately, a patch fixes this, and also detects if this happened before to correct your Pagie count.
- In the original version of Yoshi's Island: Kamek's Revenge, a hack of Super Mario World 2, in 4-3 (Green Green Bay), entering one particular room (required for 100 points) would make Baby Mario fall below the screen instantly without even getting hit, and it would be impossible to die. This meant that you had to restart the game. Thankfully, this bug was fixed in Kamek's Revenge 2.0.
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