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From trying to get onto Cycling Road without a bike in Pokémon to taking out bosses in Deus Ex before their fights even begin, sometimes players break video games without even trying. Here are 10 ways gamers accidentally discovered game-shattering glitches.
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00:00As fun as it is sometimes to watch speedruns strategically use game-breaking tricks to make a 50-odd hour
00:06game as short as a few hours long,
00:09it's not something that most people like to try and do the first time that they play through a title.
00:15But that doesn't mean that you can't still break the game outright, even when you're not trying to.
00:21So with that in mind, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are 10 ways players accidentally broke video games.
00:26Number 10, pretending to have a bike, Pokemon Red slash Blue.
00:30While Pokemon isn't a game just for kids, it is a game with a huge young player base.
00:36And while it's unfair to say that kids are more likely to do dumb things,
00:40it is fair to say that they find perhaps a great sense of amusement in doing slightly impractical things,
00:47largely because they haven't got as used to the tropes of gaming as many older players have.
00:51This in mind then, it's easy to imagine a kid repeatedly trying to get into cycling road,
00:56which takes up routes 16, 17 and 18 without a bicycle in Pokemon Red and Blue.
01:02Now this would be fine if it weren't for the fact that at a certain point,
01:06the game just gives up and lets you on the road anyways, because God loves a trier I guess.
01:11So while you can happily trot around Cycling Road this one time,
01:14you're likely a level way too low if you don't actually have a bike for it.
01:19Similarly, the fact that you've messed with the game script by walking into an area that you shouldn't be in,
01:24can cause all sorts of other issues along the way,
01:27which is maybe what you get for tempting fate and going against Arceus' intentions.
01:32Number 9, killing enemies before their time, Deus Ex.
01:35One of the most interesting parts of Deus Ex is that, for the most part,
01:39you can take out the bosses without even properly fighting them.
01:42How? Well, as ever, by doing something silly thinking it won't work,
01:46only for it to work all too well.
01:48This is because the boss battles are proximity triggered,
01:51meaning that it only properly starts when you get close to the enemy.
01:55So if you manage to hurt or kill them from a distance,
01:57you'll find that they carry this damage or death through,
02:00meaning a casual pot shot at a boss can accidentally skip your skirmish with them.
02:04Now this isn't always possible of course, as certain bosses,
02:07like Anna Navari, have been designed seemingly to avoid this pitfall.
02:11But there's still a bunch of ways around them too,
02:13so if you've committed to the lovable rogue style of play,
02:17you'll likely still find a vaguely cop-out way to beat them.
02:21Now, it's interesting to think that with just one moment of wonder,
02:24you can discover something that makes huge sections of the game basically a cakewalk.
02:29Mercifully, this is a game that's easy to play more than once,
02:32so you can have a legit playthrough and a silly one as well.
02:36Number 8, playing around, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.
02:39Goofing about is a crucial part of any gaming experience.
02:42I mean, everyone has at least thought about putting a bucket over an NPC's head
02:47to steal something right in front of their now-covered eyeballs,
02:50or some of the similarly stupid but entertaining shenanigans.
02:54Sometimes this isn't even really a matter of getting anything out of it,
02:57but the pure reward of getting to mess around.
03:00As such, it's easy to imagine a player innocently messing around in Breath of the Wild,
03:04learning the shield surf mechanics,
03:06only to then accidentally clip themselves straight through a wall.
03:09Now, while speedrun players often use this to skip huge areas of the game,
03:13they do so with clear intentions of which walls to go through and exactly where to go.
03:18Should you manage to pull this off accidentally then,
03:20things can go very wrong very fast.
03:22Plenty of walls simply aren't meant to be walked through, that's why they're walls,
03:27leaving you either stuck outside the area you need to be in,
03:30or otherwise just stuck chilling out in the void.
03:33And yeah, yeah, it's easy to watch this and think,
03:35well, that would never happen to me,
03:36but that involves purposefully ignoring every silly thing you've ever done in a video game,
03:41and generally, there's always at least once that this happens.
03:45Number 7, Escaping Prison, Phantasy Star 3.
03:48While you're tasked with escaping from prison in Phantasy Star 3,
03:52many players likely had the same thought as to how to leave the area through less legit means.
03:57That's because before you get trapped, you're able to buy an item called the Escape Pipe,
04:01which allows you to escape from a dungeon upon use.
04:03For anyone struggling with figuring out how to escape the prison then,
04:07or just looking for an easier way to do so,
04:09I mean, after all, work smarter, not harder, am I right?
04:11This seemed like a surefire way to leave the prison early,
04:15and then continue the story a little quicker than otherwise.
04:18While the Escape Pipe does let you leave the prison early though,
04:21it's not so helpful with the second part.
04:24Though you've escaped, the game can't quite figure out how,
04:27and thus the dialogue you need to have to continue the story isn't accessible after this method of escape.
04:32Instead, you can only mourn that this creative route is effectively useless,
04:37and go back to your previous save.
04:39This one is at least at the beginning of the game though,
04:41so if things go wrong, you haven't ruined hundreds of hours of your life.
04:44Number 6.
04:45Moving in a Cutscene, Half-Life
04:47Being given the ability to move in a cutscene is a strange little gift.
04:52You're stuck in the cutscene, obviously, so you can't just leave,
04:55but it's also surprisingly nice to just be able to jitter yourself around a little bit
05:00while someone talks to you instead of being trapped in a total freeze frame.
05:04Well, it's nice until it accidentally breaks your game at least.
05:07In the original versions of Half-Life however,
05:10moving in some scenes could actually risk you breaking the game entirely.
05:14In particular, when you get caught by marines,
05:16moving can actually totally sabotage the game's script,
05:19leaving it unable to free you from your tiny dark prison.
05:22Which is especially awkward if you don't realise and instead just wait around hopelessly
05:27for whatever comes next.
05:28After all, when stuff goes wrong, it doesn't give you a heads up about it
05:31and you wouldn't presume that the whole thing had just broken for you
05:35so you could be there a long time.
05:37Later editions of the game fix this issue,
05:39but likely only because so many poor souls sat in a dark room
05:42for way, way longer than they deserved.
05:45Number 5.
05:46Killing Strangers, The Elder Scrolls III, Morrowind
05:49Now, let it be known that this particular way of breaking Morrowind
05:53was more the game teaching you an important moral lesson.
05:56It's not a good idea to go out and kill people all willy-nilly.
06:00Because unlike later editions to the series,
06:03in Morrowind you can, theoretically, kill whoever you want.
06:06This sounds great in theory,
06:09as we've all had that one NPC we desperately wanted to see the back of,
06:12but in practice it had some pretty serious drawbacks.
06:15Should you be unfortunate enough to slay someone you needed for a quest,
06:18you'd be unable to finish it,
06:20since the person that you needed a chat with to continue or end it
06:23was now sort of a little bit busy being dead.
06:26If you weren't lucky enough to have killed a person vital for the main quest,
06:29then this became infinitely, infinitely more worse.
06:32So if you made a habit of killing NPCs,
06:34or just happened to kill one by accident,
06:36this could mean that many, many hours later,
06:39you'd suddenly realise that they were secretly an important character,
06:42and you'd have to either go back to the point you killed them,
06:45or just deal with never properly finishing the game.
06:47Safe to say, nobody enjoys making that choice.
06:50Number four, selling your stuff at Champions of Norrith.
06:54RPGs have always been largely about organisation.
06:57Sorting all your characters to have abilities that fit with the rest of the team,
07:01making sure your equipment is tip top,
07:03and just generally optimising everything you can,
07:06is basically RPG 101.
07:08As much as most players desperately hate it though,
07:11inventory management is also a big part of this.
07:14Making sure you have room for more drops,
07:16and remembering to sell what you don't want to keep,
07:18is vital for a whole lot of these games,
07:20not to mention the lion's share of most MMOs.
07:23And so it's especially cruel that Champions of Norrith punishes you for this,
07:27even if it does appear to be by total accident.
07:30See, after killing the suitably unnerving Spider Queen Sheloth,
07:33players who've remembered their teleport,
07:35can quickly pop back to sell all the gross spider goodies that she just dropped,
07:39likely feeling pretty good about themselves for being so prepared.
07:43Only when they try to return to the boss area,
07:45they'll soon realise the key issue with this.
07:48The boss room is locked.
07:50Since an NPC opens this area for you,
07:52you're unable to unlock the door yourself,
07:54meaning it's time to do another RPG classic manoeuvre
07:57of desperately looking through older save files
08:00to figure out which one you can use to restart.
08:02Number three, believing in the Green Lantern.
08:05LEGO Batman 2 DC Superheroes.
08:07When it comes to superheroes,
08:09Green Lantern is perhaps the most easily overlooked.
08:12This title, of course, used to belong to Aquaman,
08:15but since the DC film made the smart move of casting Jason Momoa as him,
08:19the fish puns have gently died down.
08:21As such, it is instead the unfortunate emerald protectors of the realm,
08:25who now appear to many light dorks.
08:28But in LEGO Batman 2, Green Lantern can fly,
08:31which still serves to make him one of the more useful characters in the game.
08:34However, it turns out that relying on flying characters can have some major downsides,
08:39especially with Green Lantern,
08:41who the game seems to presume that you just won't want to play as at all.
08:45As such, in one particularly unwieldy section of the game,
08:48flying to the area's exit,
08:50which should allow you to go to the next area,
08:51will just instead get you stuck there.
08:54Now at this point, you might be thinking,
08:56is the game just freaking out that you chose to optionally play as a character
09:00who historically was weak to wood and the colour yellow?
09:04Or is it so delighted it just couldn't go on?
09:07We'll simply never know.
09:09Number two, losing your duster, Psychonauts.
09:12If you were one of the unlucky players to be graced with a bug
09:14that meant you lost your cobweb duster in Psychonauts,
09:17you likely didn't consider it a big deal at the time.
09:20You won't be able to get all the collectibles,
09:22but not everyone wants to go around finding every pesky hidden item anyway,
09:26so it's easy to realise that it's gone and just kind of shrug it off.
09:29You'll get it next time.
09:30Only, as it turns out, this is the worst thing you can do,
09:34because the final level requires you to get rid of some cobwebs
09:36to get through the fun of the nightmarish meat circus,
09:39meaning that if you don't have the duster,
09:41you can't clear the level and finish the game.
09:44But the duster is sold in the shop of the hub world,
09:47so it's no biggie, right?
09:48You can just go on and buy another and carry on with your life,
09:51happy as a person who just narrowly avoided a game-based despair.
09:56Well, unfortunately for you,
09:57at this point you've gone beyond the time in the game
09:59where you can go to the shop,
10:01so unless you have a save file from before,
10:03then you're plum out of luck.
10:05Number one, finishing the game, Batman Arkham Asylum.
10:08The first installment of the Arkham series
10:10is just about the perfect length to 100% complete.
10:13You won't find everything on your first roam around,
10:15but it also won't take worlds of time to scout around afterwards
10:19and find all the extra Riddler trophies after you've completed the game,
10:22and you can always just Google the riddles
10:24when and if you get sick of trying to figure them out.
10:27But with all silver linings come clouds,
10:30and this is no exception.
10:31That's because Arkham Asylum can have a uniquely heartbreaking bug,
10:35where all the save data containing your adventures
10:37with the Spandex Crusader can become corrupted,
10:40forcing you to either restart the whole game from scratch
10:43or to quit in a fit of rage.
10:45Worse yet, the painful issue can be triggered
10:47by finishing the main story,
10:49meaning that you could finally experience the joy
10:51of finishing the game and its weird-as-hell final boss,
10:54only to find out that you've been blocked
10:56from getting that sweet 100% completion.
10:59And even if you bravely go back through all of it,
11:02you do so aware of an awful possibility
11:05that there's nothing to stop it happening again.
11:07Have a good day.
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