Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would occasionally spawn aircraft that had a flight plan going straight into the ground, assuming the player was at certain parts of the game world (the tops of a rural mountain). The dev team discovered this bug when the game was being tested and decided not to fix it.
This bug has been seen in the middle of a crowded intersection, which destroyed several cars and killed many people. Assuredly, worth the price of admission as the bug was not known of at that time.
There is another bug in this game where, in some 2-player situations, player 2 can decapitate player 1 (with the sword) and player 1 will respawn headless with blood spurting out of their neck.
A cool visual glitch can be triggered while riding the Mountain Bike. Mash the X button while holding the Square button and watch as CJ's limbs stretch, twist, and bend in all sorts of uncanny ways. Do it enough and he'll even start to melt into the ground.
While riding a bicycle, it's possible to climb up inclines at angles just shy of straight vertical by repeatedly mashing the accelerate button.
If you play the PS2 version of the game with a tool like HDLoader, the delay between spawning vehicles drops to almost nothing. This is mostly harmless, as the same amount of vehicles spawn, just sooner; however, it interacts badly with the buggy highway driver AI, which results in VERY BIG pileups if you approach certain intersections in Las Venturas on foot, or occasionally spontaneously on some highways with no provocation whatsoever. A well-placed grenade in this situation can set off a neverending chain of explosions that is continually fed by the rapidly-spawning vehicles adding to the pileup as cars are destroyed.
Several "ghost" vehicles are in the game. These tend to be due to odd spawn conditions within the game itself, the most famous being the Ghost Cars in the hills of the Back-O-Beyond. They spawn at the top of a hill and roll slowly down, heavily damaged and completely driverless. Others include a "ghost hovercraft" at Bayside and another "ghost" car at Mt. Chiliad, even though that one has a driver. They don't do anything particularly useful, other than give you some transportation, but they are definitely creepy.
And on occasion, dangerous if you don't see it coming. Nothing like an empty car slamming into yours just inches from your face...
Using the jetpack and some careful maneuvering, you can get into some rooms and other areas that are normally contained only within cutscenes, as detailed here.
Before the famous swingset glitch in IV existed, there is a glitch that if you put your Monster Truck's wheels underneath pedestrian's vehicle, touching the vehicle and/or entering the vehicle it will send it fly away.
In Grand Theft Auto IV, there is a swingset in the game's version of Brooklyn that is unintentionally buried inside the concrete under it. The physics engine realizes this is a problem, and constantly attempts to dislodge the swingset with brief moments of infinite force. If you drive a car onto the swingset (or climb on it yourself), said infinite force will destroy the vehicle, kill the person, and launch both of them into low Earth orbit. It's a popular spot for YouTube videos.
If you position your character on a ledge just right as the police are moving in to arrest him, a long line of police will jump onto the ledge and fall off like lemmings. Works when you hide next to billboards too. (See example here.)
After completing a friend event or date, if you take your partner back to their place but park so that the passenger door is blocked, they will cold-cock Niko and climb over him to get out. What's interesting is there is actually dialogue for this scenario, even though someone like Roman would never normally have to steal a car. Developer's Foresight?
Call up a friend to go drinking. Walk to the bar, or park just before getting there. Pull out a gun and go to the bar. Now you are stumbling around drunk with a loaded weapon that you can fire. Especially funny with a shotgun or automatic weapon. High probability of shooting yourself in the leg or accidentally blowing away your drinking buddy.
Hell, even DLC isn't immune to this sort of thing. In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony one of the weapons you can get is an Assault SMG. However, you can't fire it while in a car... unless you exploit a glitch in the PC version that lets you select it, although it will only shoot at 1/5th of its normal speed.
it also has a glitch where entering either of Tony's clubs and punching anyone will... Get no reaction from the NPCs. You can even do this with the explosive punches cheat on. Keep in mind, however, punching the guards makes all of them attack you.
Grand Theft Auto V has a glitch that allows you obtain three vehicles normally only obtainable in the Collector's Edition of the game. This can also be used to bypass Rank requirements in Grand Theft Auto Online.
Another Online glitch involves getting to snowy North Yankton. One does this by starting a new game in the Campaign, then during the mission set there, enter Online mode. Hop in a plane and fly up, and you will eventually get to North Yankton. Explore to your heart's content, but be wary of certain areas, such as an open grave in the graveyard, that might drop you right back into the Pacific Ocean.
Running into the door of Blazing Tattoos can have odd consequences. If you're ever in Online and see people swarming around a door, this is probably why.
There was a glitch in Online in which sometimes player characters when entering water would nots swim, treating the sea floor as if it was exactly the same as the rest of the world. Cue running around the bottom of the sea floor.
The 'Gate Launch Glitch' was the successor of the Swingset of Doom, and was a popular YouTube pastime.... Until it was patched. Several other glitches for launching and aesthetic glitches have been removed, either intentionally or not, considering Rockstar initially said that they'd keep 'fun' glitches.
The "NAT test glitch" allowed Xbox One players to glitch themselves into a solo public lobbynote Simplified explanation: going into the XBox menu and choosing the "Test NAT type" option would create a lag spike big enough to kick you out of your session and into your own, but not big enough to kick you offline completely, meaning you could make money without interference from other players. Unfortunately this was patched in 2021 (with a similar glitch for the PlayStation 4 patched around the same time), though this became a moot point a few months later when Rockstar lifted all restrictions on private lobbies, making the glitch unnecessary. Rumors quickly spread that Rockstar did this because they noticed a steep drop-off in players, as a lot of GTAO players (especially the car collectors) would rather not play than deal with other GTA players.
In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, sometimes if there is a body or object next to the open driver's side car door, and you try to get in, Tommy will instead run in a U from the hood to the back tire trying to find the door. Sometimes he will even bump into pedestrians who will then start fighting each other! A riot because the poor guy can't find his car door...
True Crime was loved for the massive amounts of bugs that took place with its random crime missions. Notable examples are when the designated mugger tries to mug the player, a villain trying his best to run through the wall and a villain car being destroyed before the mission begins.
If you drive at full speed while heading directly at wall, the chances are you will drive through it as if it weren't there.
A pillar of the David Avenue bridge near Washington Boulevard in the game's rendition of Culver City is located next to a grassy slope. If you drive directly into this pillar, your car will be thrown a few blocks, and if you exit your car at the precise right moment as it hits the pillar, you could be launched into Low Earth Orbit and sent across town or even out of bounds into Dummied Out areas of the city.
The space trading game Frontier: Elite II featured a 16-bit math overflow bug whereby the player could transit distances of exactly 655.36 light years instantly, using minimal fuel. The "wormhole bug", as it became known, was almost essential for exploring the outer reaches of the in-game galaxy, although sadly it was removed with later patches.
A more useful bug in let you obtain as much money as you want. All you had to do was accept a mission to carry someone to a different system and then try to sell your ship. You'd get the money for the sale of your ship, but the game wouldn't sell the ship because there was someone still on board.
The early versions of Frontier had another useful bug, there was a system in which gemstones had a negative value - they paid you to take them away - and in another nearby system they were illegal, which doubled their black market value. You could make ludicrous amounts of money exploiting this bug.
Elite II also had a bug which allowed laser turrets to be aimed while game time was paused. You could wait until the enemy was close enough, pause the time, take all the time you need to aim, fire your laser and unfreeze time to watch the enemy take a certain hit.
Frontier First Encounters, the third game in the franchise introduced Thargoid Warship which you could obtain by doing certain scripted missions. The creators of the ship also fill your cargo hold to the brim with Alien Artifacts - the most expensive trading good in the game. Well, the bug caused the cargo to be filled well beyond the brim, capping at 65000+ tons of Artifacts in your hold. This was fixed once you saved the game - it would return to 140 something tons. BUT! If you went back to core systems without saving you could sell all 65k tons of Artifacts for ludicrous amount of money, effectively making cash a no-factor in subsequent play. Better yet. After you emptied your hold of Artifacts you could load up anything (water being the obvious choice being the cheapest and most common good available) onto your ship and THEN save your game, which would not revert the cargo space to the original amount, as was the case earlier! Congratulations. You now have a ship that not only sports four best lasers in the game, has the most insane range, but which has a cargo space equivalent of 30+ biggest freighters in the game! Put 1000 Shield Generators on it and you're indestructible. You can now safely ram planets.
Crackdown has an interesting physics glitch made possible by the "Keys to the City" mode. Turn off pedestrian traffic, set your driving skill to four stars, and spawn an Agency SUV. Drive as fast as you can on one of the larger highways with the Keys menu open, then spawn a ramp truck when you reach an upwards slope. If done correctly, the SUV will be launched at an absurdly high speed sideways, usually either slamming into a building or flying a couple miles out into the ocean depending on where you were and how fast you were going. Seeing a tricked-out SUV doing barrel rolls as it flies sideways over a Ferris wheel at Mach 2 can be quite entertaining.
Using Keys to the City, one could create a kind of staircase by constantly spawning ramp trucks if they were quick enough to pull it off. This allowed players to scale tall buildings without having to go through an army of mooks on the way up, or just see how high they could climb into the sky.
With Keys to the city. Turn off the pedestrian traffic, set driving to four stars, and spawn in an Agency Supercar. Go on the highway (for better effects), then drive up to between 160-190 MPH. When you are there change the driving skill to zero stars, and when it changes back to it's normal form, it will speed up and be able to reach up to speeds of around 400 MPH (as long as the road is straight and no collisions happen).
Red Dead Redemption has quite a lot of these - including, most notably, the Demonic Horse (which seems to have epileptic fits that toss it a couple of metres in the air), The Gunslinger Dog (an NPC's model is replaced with that of a dog), Charles Kinnear The Talking Horse (Charles Kinnear's model is replaced with that of a horse), The Bird People (humans flying around as birds), The Cougar Man and The Donkey-Lady (both of them animal-men similar to the above. The latter of which you can ridenote No, not like that.).
One of the few actually useful ones allows you to use Dead Eye - a brief moment of painting targets and shooting them with 100% gunshot accuracy - with Molotov cocktails and dynamite. It functions exactly the same way, just with an invisible crosshair. Can you say homing explosive projectiles?
Horses have a stamina meter that's supposed to drain if a horse sprints at its maximum speed, but if you press the sprint button at a certain speed, the stamina will recover more quickly than it's spent without your horse losing speed, effectively giving it unlimited stamina.
Stagecoach rafting. Stagecoaches have a floating quality which allows you to sail along water. There aren't many places where you can successfully raft, but most of them can take you a long way before you stop. You can even get across to places you haven't unlocked yet. Sometimes, you can even see posses going for a sail in Multiplayer.
High-speed collisions with space debris pose a negligible threat thanks to Hitbox Dissonance — the debris simply phases through the would-be victim too fast for the game engine to register a collision. So you don't need to worry about accidentally re-creating the events of Gravity.
In Mercenaries 2, a glitch exists where if you lose enough times, particularly in the Bird Delivery Mission, for some reason the bad guys will stop shooting at the player. This glitch lasts until one quits the game. During this time, one can beat the side missions that are normally impossible to complete because of the attacks.
The first Mercenaries game also had a rather amusing glitch known to the community as "Spinning Artillery". If you shot a soldier driving the open-topped ZSU-57-2 and killed him, the vehicle would begin to spin in a slow circle until boarded or destroyed.
In the game Bone Town, one is able to have normal sex with the special characters in the Fantasy Mansion. Just need to stand far away from said woman, and slowly move in while hitting the Enter Key until the scene occurs.
Saints Row: The Third has a glitch with special weapons like the minigun or shock hammer in Mayhem activities. Basically, you're restricted to certain specific weapons for the activity, and cannot pick up or select alternate ones. However, gang specialists and brutes, who have unique weapons, still arrive to attack you if you end up getting a ton of gang notoriety while causing mayhem. You can still hold the reload button to pick up their weapons once you kill them, at which point your character just holds them in their hand and acts as though the weapon doesn't exist, leading to such sights as holding a minigun one-handed or mashing it together with an RPG.
In Batman: Arkham City, if you stand at the edge of building and start throwing Ice Grenades, Batman will start to rise vertically with every throw. Sounds interesting on its own, but if you get high enough you can escape the normally impossible walls of Arkham City and explore the rest of Gotham, which despite only being seen in the distance, is breathtakingly detailed. The buildings don't have collision so you cannot grapple or stand on any of the buildings; you only get one glide to view the city of Gotham, but most view it as worth it to do it at least once. Here is a link.
The final mission of Saints Row 2, which can easily be That One Level if you're not good with the game's helicopter controls, can be somewhat eased if, immediately after getting into the helicopter provided, you get back out again and run around for a little bit, resolutely refusing to engage with the attack helicopter that is sent to shoot you down. After a couple of minutes, the enemy helicopter will seemingly get bored and fly away, and oftentimes it will not be replaced with subsequent iterations as it would be if you shot it down. This makes that part of the mission much easier.
The zombie survival gameThe Dead Linger is still in its Alpha stage, so of course it has several bugs, some of which work in favor for the player. Besides the possibility to run endlessly without your stamina depleting by just holding Tab after you started running, there's also the famous "flying" glitch. By taking any movable object that's big enough to stand on it (mattresses are the preferred choice), standing on it, looking down and grabbing it with the middle mouse button, it starts to ascend, with you on it. You can even steer it and fly wherever you want. This way, you can not only evade the zombies on the ground, but it also helps you with your building projects.
Goat Simulator is basically Good Bad Bugs: The Game. The game outright advertises "millions of bugs!" as a feature, and the devs fix none of them except the ones that outright crash the game, due to Rule of Funny.
Starbound had the "Moonbase exploit", wherein you built a house on a moon (preferably deep underground to avoid meteors) and invited tenants. The amount of money (or rarity of non-money payments) a tenant gives you is dependent on the planet's danger tier (with harmless garden planets at tier one and fiery volcano planets at tier six), with better pay the deadlier the planet. (Why anyone would pay more to live on a scorched Death World than a pastoral forest planet is anyone's guess.) However, moons had a danger tier at a whopping ten despite being arguably the second safest place you could be, in order to ramp up the deadliness of the Erchius Ghost, the only relevant threat other than the meteors - and which doesn't show up at all as long as you don't pick up any fuel. So you could easily get filthy rich, as well as get some seriously overpowered weapons that made the rest of the game a breeze, practically as soon as you got your ship working. It was since corrected in the 1.1 update. However, any moons visited before the patch retains their tier ten rating even after...
In-universe, the whole Glitch race could be seen as the result of one of these. The Glitch are Ridiculously Human Robots, (usually) not selfaware of that they are attempts at simulating the development of societies. However, a group of them had a bug that prevented them from surpassing the medieval ages. The bug is Good Bad because it's the only reason they are still around — societies without this bug usually ended up destroying themselves for various reasons.
The Martinus Transformation liquid duplication glitch exploits a quirk in how the engine renders liquids. Dripping small amounts of a liquid into a second liquid will result in the first liquid being slowly but surely converted into the second type. This has been exploited for infinite fuel. As of Version 1.3.4, it has not been patched out.
There's also core mining - the practice of digging down to a planet's molten core and placing soft blocks you can remove easily inside the lava. This both removes the lava and causes precious ores to appear, which can then be mined out far more quickly than finding and mining them from cobblestone or obsidian. Apparently, these ores would be generated there if there was solid rock instead of lava. It's been patched out as of version 1.0.
In some missions where you're forced to use a specific vehicle in The Simpsons Hit & Run, you can start the mission, drive to a phone booth, and switch to a different vehicle. You'll be penalized with a mission failed, but when you restart you'll still be in the new vehicle.
Dynasty Warriors 9 has since been converted into an open world game, complete with crafting and gathering elements not previously seen in the series. This includes 'resource clusters,' where large numbers of a particular collectible crafting resource spawn near each other. This usually happens in any random, viable open space in the map, but sometimes the game's idea of 'viable space' glitches out and causes these clusters to spawn in cities. Not only is this mighty convenient (reducing the time needed to trek across China looking for materials) but also damned funny when you suddenly have random plants growing on people's houses, leading to questions such as "How did twenty square feet's worth of ginseng root grow on clay roof shingles?"
Exiting a flooded base with an active Seaglide applies the Seaglide's speed boost to itself ("super Seaglide").
Mobile Vehicle Bays can be used to clip through cave walls.
A Mobile Vehicle Bay in a cave will load before the cave does, and consequently travel to the surface unaided for retrieval ("a wild Mobile Vehicle Bay appeared!").
Partly deconstructing and rebuilding a Moon Pool builds a second Moon Pool in the same location, doubling the materials.
Clipping a building into a large wreck will cause it to despawn, revealing the goods inside.
While the Orwellian police patrols have become a source of frustration among players of Mafia: Definitive Edition, a bug in the game's facial effects system causes Tommy to somehow lipsync to police reports made by civilians which leads to some rather unintentionally hilarious moments.
Valheim: The game updates the world less frequently than it does player inventory. This means that after a game crash, the player will respawn at their latest spawn point with their inventory but the world won't change. This allows for things like instantly transporting non-portal items like metals to a home base, or getting a free portal (since dismantling one puts the materials in your inventory but the portal will still be there).
The way the world map generates biomes can rarely result in oddities like Swamp crypts appearing in the Plains or Meadow biomes, or fuling camps appearing in Mountain biomes. It can also on rare occasions spawn Forsaken altars in the middle of oceans, though fortunately they will also always be on (tiny) patches of dry land.
The explosion caused by Bile Bombs can actually cause damage through walls. Not the most useful thing normally since it damages enemies very slowly... until you get to the Infested Mines in the endgame, which consist of small tight hallways filled with swarms of Seekers and Seeker Soldiers. Chuck bombs at the walls near them and they will slowly die on their own.
A similar trick also works with the shockwave caused by great hammers like Frostner, as the shockwave also can travel through obstacles (big help for dungeon areas)
The Abyssal Harpoon is a spear with rope attached to it, and it's main purpose is to pull enemies closer to you and prevent them from running away. But as SoundSmithfigured out, speared creatures build up force if they get stuck on something, which when they get unstuck will send them flying a short distance. And because players can be speared as well, and sitting in a chair counts as being "stuck", this exploit could be used to send players to the other side of the map in seconds.
When the Mistlands update originally released, a glitch would occasionally make the Mistlands biome boss The Queenspawn outside of the instanced boss arena. This also had the unintentional effect of making the boss significantly easer, as it would prevent the boss from burrowing and summoning mobs.
By getting guards to attack you before entering a Tower to fight the boss, they will spawn during the tower boss fight. As long as the Guards are the only ones to deal damage to the boss, it becomes possible to capture that Tower's boss along with the human, allowing you to use those bosses as Pals. And boy howdy can they be absolute Game Breakers, given that not only are their boss mechanics and overinflated stats perfectly intact when caught, but they'll only get stronger as they level up. This was removed in version 0.1.5.0 (unintentionally, according to the game's official Twitter/X account which apologized for fixing the bug as a consequence of the other stuff they fixed).
While it was quickly patched out, it was possible for Pals attempting to transport large quantities of materials to get stuck in a loop of picking up and dropping the same objects repeatedly. This would simply be annoying if it weren't for the animation making it look like the Pal is uncontrollably defecating wood/rocks.
The Nature Preserve islands are filled to the brim with rare, powerful Pals that you can't find anywhere else save for a few available as bosses along with treasure chests full of powerful items, but just setting foot on them is a crime that'll get the PIDF on your trail. However, the emphasis is on "setting foot": the game never checks if you're actually ON the island until your feet make contact with it, which means staying mounted on a flying Pal like Beakon will let you flaunt your poaching in front of the PIDF Elites patrolling the island who only turn hostile if you're committing a crime, which you technically aren't, because the game says you aren't. This was patched out in 0.1.5.0; now riding in the nature preserves will be considered trespassing and the PIDF patrols there will turn hostile.
Freezing an enemy and then shooting them with a rocket launcher will hurl them into the sky where they will promptly die to fall damage. This will no longer work in 0.2.0.6.
There used to be a glitch where you could butcher a ridable Pal, and then then mount it immediately after it's been butchered. The Pal will remain alive and in your party. You could then drop the Pal on the ground and it would be perfectly unharmed. You can then repeat this cycle to gain infinite drops. 0.2.0.6 patched this out.
Still present:
When you attempt to capture a Pal, your Pal Sphere will float in the air until it either fails or succeeds in doing so. In that time, it's possible to jump on top of the ball. After a successful capture, you'll be rocketed straight up into the sky. Combine this with the glider and it's a pretty useful way to get your bearings in unexplored areas during the early to mid game. Just don't try this if you haven't unlocked it yet for obvious reasons.
Thanks to glitchy furniture hitboxes, people have used them to make unusual buildings such as staircases, lampposts, and stacked farms.
Using a powerful but long-cooldown attack when mounted on a Pal, then dismounting it will somehow allow the Pal to recharge this attack and likely use it immediately. This allows you to execute attacks like Faleris's Phoenix Flare twice in succession, which can put a good dent in the health of Alpha Pals.
Due to their rotund model and its habitat being full of trees, Mozzarina has a notable tendency to spawn on top of said trees very often. It looks utterly hilarious seeing a plump cow balancing on top of a tree.
The "Crumbling Wall Exp" glitch consisted of building three platforms, three walls attached to the platforms, attaching a two segment long roof facing outwards, attaching a staircase to the roof and then placing a wall at the junction of the staircase and second segment. This is recognized as a valid building spot, but actually attempting to build the wall causes the new wall to instantly break, dropping lumber and granting experience points from building the wall.
If you climb onto a dungeon wall and then feed your pet, then mount it, you're almost guaranteed to end up through/above what surface you were climbing. You can walk, ride, and fly around plenty of out-of-bounds areas with such, and even use this trick to skip a dungeon path and get straight to the boss (and/or the rewards behind it, which normally require the boss's defeat).
If a mountable Pal clips inside terrain and you attempt to ride it, you'll get pulled inside the terrain. This is easily remedied by releasing your Pal outside the terrain and attempting to ride it, pulling you out.
