From Fallout 4 to Pokémon: The weird and wonderful world of game glitches

Thomas McMullan Read more November 23, 2015

Game glitches can be scary, hilarious, memorable and unpredictable. They are fleeting interruptions, momentary mistakes. In increasingly lifelike game-worlds, they are sledgehammers against the fourth wall between the environment and the player, where artful imitation comes crashing down with a well-placed code-burp.

In the Glitch Studies Manifesto, critic and artist Rosa Menkman describes a glitch as “a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form.” These experiences can be unsettling or funny – sometimes both – and as Zak McClendon recently argued in Wired, they can go a long way to lending open world games a sense of messy charm.

Crucially, they put a stick in a spoke of a game’s illusion. For a developer who’s spent months carefully crafting an imitation of reality this might sound like a very bad thing, but for a player sitting through a po-faced narrative, glitches can be immensely empowering. They take control away from the creator and open up the possibility for subversive play. See a glitch and you know you’ve gone off track, off-grid, and that feels both liberating and terrifying.

With the release of Fallout 4, players got a new glitch-friendly playground from Bethesda to explore. With that in mind, here are some of the best game glitches out there. Want to be pampered and funnelled through a story? Patch all the bugs. Don’t want to play by the rules? Then stop worrying and learn to love the glitch.