The good, the bad and the glitch

If you’re a games developer, you probably live in fear of the glitch – a slight or sudden malfunction that, although normally temporary, can impact a game’s playability to an insurmountable degree. However, although bugs can be a nuisance, they’re not always game-breakers. No, on the contrary, some glitches were so well-received by players, they became a big part of a game’s brand – here are a few of the most famous.

Civilization was a 1991 PC strategy game in which you established attempted to expand and develop an empire that would last through the ages. The game prided itself on being incredibly historically accurate but, despite the game’s fantastic reception, there was one little glitch that lived on in infamy. Gandhi is the leader of the Indian civilisation in the game and, although he is programmed to be a highly peaceful character, he is notorious for becoming a nuclear warmonger about halfway into the game.

This was linked to a bug in the game’s code – his ‘aggression value’ is set at one out of a maximum 255, which makes him try to avoid armed conflict. Once a civilisation achieves Democracy, the leader’s aggression value falls by 2 – because the value is an 8-bit unsigned integer (limiting its possible values), it can’t hit -1 (as you’d expect) and so wraps back around to 255, turning Gandhi into a dangerously aggressive leader. The glitch has been referenced in subsequent Civilization games, and the historical outlier that is nuclear Gandhi has become a defining reference of the series.

The development team had clearly never reckoned with gamers

Have you ever played a fighting game and finished off your opponent with a massive combo (a series of hits that give the enemy no chance to respond)? Well, it may interest you to know that the combo originated from a glitch, which also dates back to 1991. The game this time is Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and the combo glitch was a happy accident found in the bonus stage (in which you rack up points by beating a car to bits). You were only theoretically able to deliver one hit at a time, but the game’s producer learned that extra attacks were possible if you were able to nail some extremely precise timings.

Why was this glitch not fixed? Well, the assumption was that it would be so hard to pull off, nobody would be able to take advantage of it – the development team had clearly never reckoned with gamers. Landing a hit temporarily immobilised the enemy, giving the player the chance to land a series of subsequent hits that almost definitely guaranteed the victory. The impact of this glitch cannot be understated – after all, you’d be hard-stretched to find a fighting game nowadays lacking the combo mechanic.

You could potentially be witnessing the future of game development

Let’s wrap up this list with something even more fundamental to video games, which was once again generated entirely by accident. There can be few people who are unfamiliar with Space Invaders (initially released in arcades in 1978), in which you control a ship attempting to destroy an ever-approaching alien army. The more of the aliens you kill, the faster they move towards you, making eliminating them more difficult.

This may seem somewhat obvious to you and me, but the difficulty curve in this game was the result of a glitch – one of the game’s developers Tommy Hiro learned that the processors used to create the game rendered the graphics for aliens faster when there were fewer of them onscreen – this, rather than any intentional difficulty hike, is why they start to speed up. The option to fix this was available, but it was decided that it would be more of a challenge if the feature was left in the game.

Although glitches can be a byword for broken games, they have also been fundamental in shaping the medium as we know it. So, next time you’re playing and your game bugs out, try not to get upset – you could potentially be witnessing the future of game development.