Better Games Through Bugs: Part 1-Amusing Oddities

We’ve all experienced bugs during games.  And usually they end up frustrating or annoying.  But sometimes they add to the experience.  For a while now I’ve wanted to do a little series on some of my favorite bugs from games, and I’ve collected a nice list, filtered them into three broad themes and will drop an installment once a week. First up are bugs that were amusing, or even added to the game in small ways.  These glitches were gems in and of themselves.  So without further ado:

5. Wing Commander: “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”

What do you do when a complex, obvious but otherwise harmless bug pops up at the end of the development cycle?  Wing Commander needed to ship, but it also had a memory error on close.  And back in the olden days you couldn’t just rely on a day 0 patch to correct the issue.  Down to the wire, what did the programmer opt to do?  He edited the memory manager to change the error text to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”, allowing the game to ship and with the player none the wiser.

4.  Starcraft 2: The Archon Toilet:

While more of an ‘unintended use of game mechanics’, given that steps were taken to limit this. It's one of my personal favorites and caused me quite the chuckle back when I watched the competitive Starcraft scene back in the day.

1. There was a spell called “Vortex” which put a large swath of enemies and allies into a temporary swirling ‘black hole’ spitting them out at the end of it.  In addition, things that went in last came out first.

2. Enemies could stack on top of each other, albeit temporarily, slowly spreading outward until they were in a clump.

3. Archons were units that did a decent chunk of damage in a smallish AoE.

Throw these three ingredients into a bowl, stir vigorously and when the vortex ends the Archons electrocute everything that’s all clumped together and the opponent quickly finds that their army hasn’t simply been flushed down the drain: it’s been shredded.

3. Eve Online: Space Shaping

Eve Online is a highly competitive space MMO, and like any space game it has well, a lot of space.  And you don’t want to simulate all of that space at once, so the developers smartly put in a way to reduce the amount of space they had to care about.  And as its highly competitive the precise mechanics were deeply investigated resulting in a 60 plus page white paper on how to manipulate space to your faction’s advantage.

This varies from using things to hold space ‘open’ in odd shapes (like the number 7) to cause your enemies to travel from one extremity to the other, falling ‘off the grid’ and triggering a loading screen to using two split spaces to push up against each other and allow your ships to cross back and forth across the ‘hard boundary’ between spaces causing them to effectively unload from that section of space and be protected.

2. Quake: Bunny Hopping

This was a movement quirk in the original Quake.  By strafing and moving forward players were able to go faster than they would by just going forward alone.  Then by jumping and manipulating their movement keys they could maintain this speed and even increase it by carefully adjusting their facing.  This ended up becoming a mainstay of the competitive scene and was purposefully kept in, in later editions of the game, even finding itself added to other games.

1. World of Warcraft: The Plague

Obviously this has to be at the top slot given how famous it is.  But in case you hadn’t heard.  There was once a boss fight almost 25 years ago, and in that fight players could be infected with a plague that would spread to other players if they got too close.  Of course this debuff got removed if the player somehow left the area of the boss fight.

But that wasn’t true of pets:  They could be despawned while they had the plague and then summoned in a densely populated capital city.  This turned into quite the spectacle, with some players purposefully infecting themselves to spread it to others.  It got so famous that it was studied by epidemiologists to see how a real plague might spread, though at the time it was considered ‘unrealistic’ that people would let themselves become vectors of infection.

Next week I’ll be posting about 5 bugs that later became game features.