If These Bugs Are Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right
10 classic glitches that improved games
2/16/2009 6:38 PM | 28 Comments | Page 4 of 5
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation): Climb the Chapel
The bug: Stand near a wall in the Royal Chapel. Activate your level 90-plus sword familiar, and turn into a bat. You'll be able to pass through the wall and explore the area outside the chapel, increasing your completion-rate stats to superhuman levels.
It's a feature because: It inspires players to push the boundaries. If you color inside the lines on
SOTN, the maximum completion percentage is a bit over 200 percent -- 100 percent for each of the game's two castles, and a little bonus for the extra-diligent. Yet a greedy community of Castlevania diehards wasn't sated by Konami's generous offer of 200.6 percent, so they set out to abuse the game and pilfer more delicious percentage points from the map.
And they were rewarded handsomely for their effort. As it turns out, one of the best PlayStation games is also one of the buggiest. The chapel exploit was among the first
SOTN glitches discovered, but many more have surfaced since. The ongoing exploration of Dracula's back doors has uncovered so much new ground that the max completion rate now stands at a staggering 425.5 percent. In other words, the developers only had half the story.
Asteroids (arcade): Hide Behind the Score
The bug: Move your ship to the upper-left corner of the screen, where the score is displayed. Congratulations; you're now invincible.
There's no video of this bug, but if it helps you visualize the action, here's a transcript: "FADE IN: The arrow-looking thing goes behind the numbers. THE END."
It's a feature because: We like to imagine that moral dilemmas are a relatively modern construct in videogames, innovated by titles like
Fallout and
Fable. In fact, the internal battle between good and evil has been part of gaming since the beginning, even in the primordial classic
Asteroids. This trick could earn you a spot on your local machine's high-score list, but living with your furtive misdeeds was another matter. As the screen's cathode-ray tube burned your initials into the phosphors, was it not also burning them into your soul? (Answer: Yes, it was. Jerk.)
Atari moved quickly to patch the
Asteroids software because fewer deaths meant fewer quarters.
