7 Worst Bugs in History of Video Games

Crashing operating systems, deleted saves of all your games, broken code – some games' bugs make the disappearing facial textures in AC Unity a holiday.

Michael Grygorcewicz

Bugs. Errors. Glitches. They've always been around. Sometimes they're amusing, sometimes they make things easier, sometimes they annoy, and other times they completely ruin the game. They used to be less common, but the more complicated computer and console games become, and the easier it is to patch them, the more common they become. These days, it's actually surprising if there's none on the game's release.

They are the subject of today's article. But not just any bugs. Oh no. No silly stuff here. Here, we focused on the most spectacular bugs in the history of games. Ones that didn't just ruin our fun – their destructive impact was much greater and, for example, they could lead to the destruction of the operating system.

Demo Destruction Disk – Viewtiful Joe 2

INFORMATION

  1. Game: Viewtiful Joe 2 demo
  2. Release date: November 2004
  3. Bug: wiping all save data from the memory stick
  4. Was it fixed? No

In the heyday of the PlayStation 2, American fans of this console could subscribe to PlayStation Underground, a sort of fan club that had evolved from an unusual magazine distributed on CD-ROMs. One of the benefits of being a member of this community was access to special discs containing demo versions of selected new releases.

Such discs was distributed to members of the PlayStation Underground in November 2004. The PlayStation Underground Holiday 2004 Demo included playable snippets of games like Ace Combat 5, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Star Wars Battlefront, Crash Twinsanity, and Viewtiful Joe 2. The demo of this last game contained a fatal bug.

Anyone who decided to play one of the most interesting walking fighters ever, and managed to complete the first level of the demo, activated a bug that mercilessly formatted memory cards plugged into the console. Big deal? Yeah, since saves were not stored in clouds back there, but rather on memory sticks. Needless to say, having it formatted was not desirable. Viewtiful Joe 2 demo sent all our saves into oblivion. .

As soon as Sony became aware of the issue, they sent all members of PlayStation Underground an email in which they sincerely apologized and advised to disconnect all memory cards from the console prior to the launch of the Holiday 2004 Demo. It was a tad too late for that, and players lost hours of progress of then-hits: GTA San Andreas, Gran Turismo 3, or Tekken Tag Tournament.

  1. More about Viewtiful Joe 2

Minecraft

November 18, 2011

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Author: Michael Grygorcewicz

He first worked as a co-worker at GRYOnline.pl. In 2023 he became the head of the Paid Products department. He has been creating articles about games for over twenty years. He started with amateur websites, which he coded himself in HTML, then he moved on to increasingly larger portals. A computer engineer, but he was always more drawn to writing than programming, and he decided to tie his future with the former. In games, he primarily looks for stories, emotions, and immersion that no other medium can provide - hence, among his favorite titles, are games focusing on narration. Believes that NieR: Automata is the best game ever made.