20 Worst Game Breaking Bugs & Glitches

As video gaming has become more immersive across the past forty years, it has become less obvious that we’re playing something developed and coded using software and hardware, and more like we’re stepping into fully formed worlds supplied by benevolent techno-gods. But the occasionally painful truth is that there are massive teams of people behind each game we play, hard at work and as prone to error as anyone else.

Glitches and bugs are the common result of good, old fashioned human error, and there isn’t a game out there that doesn’t have a sharp edge somewhere, even if it’s just a tiny gap in the game environment, a stutter in a cutscene, or an invisible snag your character gets stuck on. Unfortunately, there are also a whole lot of bigger issues that make it through development and out into our world, many with the potential to bring the whole gaming experience to its knees.

Great games, terrible games and everything in between - for some the game breaking bug is a sweet release, for others it is the miserable ruination of something spectacular. These ten games feature glitches that stop you dead in your tracks, render the game unplayable, make your save file worthless, or in the worst cases wipe your hard drive altogether...

Despite the absence of modern consoles like the PlayStation or Xbox, the eighties is seen as the foundational decade for modern video gaming, giving us Super Mario, Donkey Kong and other all-time classics that have lived on far beyond their 8-bit origins. But progress continues in spite of those it leaves behind, and the decade saw many casualties in both game IPs and the consoles they were played on.

One such relic of the mid-eighties is Impossible Mission, a roguelike game that definitely, no way, wasn’t at all based on the hit TV show Mission: Impossible - and shame on you for suggesting as much. Originally released on the Commodore 64, the game lets players step into the shoes of a secret agent tasked with preventing evil genius Dr Elvin Atombender from blowing up the world, with just six hours on the clock.

Impossible Mission was well received by gamers and critics alike, so much so that the game was ported to other systems in the years following release, including the Atari 7800. Unfortunately for players in the NTSC region (the Americas), the game is genuinely impossible. It features a bug that places some of the cards required to complete its puzzles behind computer terminals, which can’t be searched (you are forced to access the terminal instead). And as it’s a stage-based game, if you can’t get past any mission or puzzle, you can’t continue playing.