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Yep, it’s time for another edition of Staff Stories where the folks here at Nintendojo go around telling goofy gaming stories or ask silly questions. In this edition of Staff Stories, we’re talking about the most amusing of all gaming fails– glitches.
Ah yes, the glitch. They do a variety of things, from making the most sophisticated game look like it was suddenly taken over by QWOP, to cheating the system and getting things that you really shouldn’t have had at all, like say…a Pokémon. And then there are the strange ways you can die where the gaming physics or level just randomly kill you for no reason. The glitches are varied and the stories are always entertaining, so we asked what were the most amusing or fun glitches that we here at Nintendojo have come across. Here are the answers:
Mel Turnquist
Was there ever a game more glitch ridden than Pokémon Red and Blue? Of course, I don’t mean this in a bad way at all. In fact, it’s thanks to a certain glitch that I can boast the ultimate of video game hipster claims: I had Mew way back in 2000 (or was it 1999? I honestly can’t recall which year) before the rumors of the glitch were officially confirmed in 2003. Chalk it up to the lack of internet back then, but I swear it’s true. I even have the game to prove it! Either way, the best glitch I came across was that amazing Mew glitch.
Granted, I wasn’t the one who originally caught the Mew. It was a friend of my cousin’s who was a really big Pokémon nerd. He was online a lot and always tried to do whatever possible cheats he could find. As a result of my cousin’s friend doing the Mew glitch, he had one and there was a very twisted way you could give someone else that Mew which involved trading cables. Basically you hooked them up and you traded two different Pokémon. I don’t think it mattered which ones but just as the trade is officially going through, both parties immediately turn off their Game Boys. When they the turn them back on, it reveals that BOTH parties have Mew. This was something that made the 15 year old me so damn giddy– especially since my crush played Pokémon too and I could use it as an excuse to talk to him!
I got Mew that Thanksgiving weekend and things were coming up Milhouse for me. When I got back I basically called around all my Pokémon friends and showed them off the epicness of epic known as Mew. There had been rumors around for a while and it was pretty much what people thought of as an urban legend. But here I was, not even one of the best Pokémon players in the school (I was middling) and I somehow managed to get Mew. And because I was such a nice kid, I gave it to my closest friends. Whenever I’d see them in the hallway, I’d get my cables out and we’d do up the trade and it’d end up with Mew. And it was awesome.
That glitch made me the coolest Pokémon fan in my school…until I realized I was in high school and most high schoolers thought that Pokémon was for babies. However, I still got hipster claims that I can throw out there and it’s definitely worth it to shut up all the haters and snooty hipsters.
Andrew Hsieh
Okay, so it’s not a glitch, buuuuut I think it comes close enough. Ish. Sort of.
See, for the longest time, I couldn’t pass through that pesky fence in Kakariko Village. You know the one– it’s right in front of a grotto, on the side of the town with the Potion Shop and two annoying Cuccos. The “correct” way to get over the fence is to fly over while holding a Cucco. Well, my noggin just didn’t have enough brainpower to come up with such an idea, so instead of doing that, I decided to climb to the highest point of Kakariko Village to take a look-see. Which I did. It told me two things:
1. There was, in fact, no way to get to the other side of that fence without jumping it. The fence didn’t even open.
2. Therefore Kakariko Village’s architects were the most idiotic eggheads in Hyrule. And this is a place that holds a hero so dumb, he needs a fairy to tell him how to read signs.
Pfft… Using cuccos to do this jump is for squares!
Well, after I noted this, I decided, well, maybe I could jump off the tower, and fly far enough so that I landed on the other side of the fence. Fantastic idea. Great idea! Now to see if it’ll work! So I did. I climbed up that tower a good dozen times that day, trying to jump off and reach the other side of the fence. Well, needless to say, none of that really worked. Until finally, with only one heart remaining, I decided to backflip over the tower, at the closest corner possible. And lo and behold, Link– uh– Link– flew through the air? Weirdly? And then all of a sudden BAM, Link landed on the very top of the fence, damaged, but alive. From there it was a hop to the other side of the fence– while hoping it didn’t kill me– and just a few steps away to the nearby Cuccos, which I promptly threw over the fence. And while it was a little difficult to figure out how to get out, seeing as there was no way up the tower from the other side– well, all I really had to do was grow a few more brain cells. And then I called the me from before my Cucco-flying revelation a total nincompoop.
Kevin Knezevic
You really can’t talk about glitches without mentioning Pokémon Red and Blue. The pair were rife with them, as Mel already pointed out with her tale of Mew exploits. But rather than detracting from the experience, they actually added to the games’ mystique. Whether it was because of childhood naivety or their general frequency, the glitches in Red and Blue felt like they were intentional design choices by the developers, which made stumbling upon them all the more memorable.
Nowhere was this truer than in the case of Missingno., that infamous glitch “Pokémon” that stalked the shores of Cinnabar Island. Long before the Internet became a ubiquitous source of gaming knowledge, I learned all of my gaming secrets through whispers on the schoolyard. It was here that I first learned of that strange, distorted Pokémon, which we now all know was simply a programming error left in the games’ code.
Of course, we couldn’t have imaged that back then, and hearing of its virus-like appearance– not to mention actually seeing it one night when I was all alone in my room– gave the titles a creepy, X-Files-ish vibe that made them feel much darker than they actually were. (It didn’t help that I got the same feeling when I first stepped into Lavender Town’s Pokémon Tower and was promptly told to leave by the angry spirits haunting it. I had assumed this was a similar situation.)
Of course, the mystique surrounding Missingno. soon faded once I learned it could be exploited to multiply my items (hello, infinite Rare Candies), but I’ll always remember the first time I came face to pixelated face with the creature, which forever colored the game (or at least my perception of it) with a spooky, supernatural tint. There are more things in Heaven and Pokémon than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
So there you have it, some of the most amusing and fun glitch stories that we have to offer here. We turn the question now over to you — what are YOUR most amusing glitch stories? Feel free to let us know in the comments! Until next time, happy gaming!
