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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
1
While bottled Blue Fire is meant to be used to melt Red Ice in the Ice Cavern, it can also be used to destroy brown stone Weak Walls that normally need to be destroyed with Bombs. However, it can only be used to break this specific kind of bombable wall and this function is never actually mentioned in the game, suggesting that it may be a glitch.
NBA Courtside 2002
subdirectory_arrow_right Nintendo GameCube (Platform)
1
The Brazilian release of the Nintendo GameCube has special code that patches a crash glitch that can only be found in NBA Courtside 2002. This patch does not exist in any other version of the hardware.
Pumkin: Digital English Education
1
Attachment It is possible to feed the Hungry Pumkin indefinitely past the maximum score. If one right clicks after feeding him and presses "Play", the Pumkin will repeat the eating animation, which can be done repeatedly far beyond the game's end at 25 items. The Pumkin's weight, which increases very slightly every time he eats, does not have a cap, so he can eventually become so large that he covers the entire screen (note that in the attached image, the score listed is missing its last digit, so he has eaten over 470 items, not 47).
Sonic & Knuckles
subdirectory_arrow_right Sonic The Hedgehog (Franchise)
3
Attachment Thrash the Tasmanian Devil, a character introduced in Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, is based on a purple sprite that is created for several milliseconds on the game's title screen if the player quickly switches between Sonic and Knuckles' sprites. Notably, Ian Flynn stated in the graphic novel "Sonic Universe 3: Knuckles Returns" that Thrash was meant to be another rogue of Knuckles who could "throw down with Knuckles and have it mean something", which did not line up with his role in his debut during "Sonic Universe" Issue #11. However, this would later be conveyed during the "Endangered Species" story arc of the main comic, where it's revealed that he has a strong hatred towards the Echidna species due to their actions against his ancestors. When asked about the possibility of bringing Thrash back in the comic's reboot, Ian Flynn said he would love to bring him back, but "it comes with all that baggage... We can't really bring him back without people going 'Oh boy! And here we go!'"
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month December 17, 2023
Action 52
1
Attachment Action 52 came with a leaflet explaining that the games Alfred and the Fetucini's[sic] and Jigsaw could only be unlocked by completing Ooze. In reality, the prior two games are not playable on NES hardware and the latter game is unwinnable.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2
2
As of the current updated version of the game, a walkway overlooking a pier found in the southwest portion of the Financial District region contains a spot that does not have collision detection. This spot makes players fall under the world's map where they can unofficially travel under New York City. By carefully traveling northward towards Greenwich, players will come across leftover assets for an underground structure with pipes that can be web swing towards. Entering this structure and climbing up will reveal a Spoiler: leftover unused Kraven trophy room featuring a throne and the mounted heads of Rhino, Vulture, Electro, & Shocker. This Spoiler:trophy room probably would have coincided with the game's story that Spoiler: Kraven The Hunter kills Scorpion on screen, while Vulture, Electro, & Shocker are killed off screen.
person Yoshispacedragon calendar_month October 31, 2023
Minecraft
1
Attachment Before version 18w07a (1.13), the height of large oak trees would be shared for each instance of the large tree generator created. Before Beta 1.8, this was not an issue since every time a large tree needed to be generated it used a new instance of the generator. However, from Beta 1.8 onward, each biome had its own large tree generator instance, resulting in naturally generated large trees sharing the same height per biome. These height values would remain the same until the game is restarted.
person BlueStaggo calendar_month October 28, 2023
The source code below is generated using RetroMCP for version 1.2.5 unless otherwise stated.

Around line 340 of WorldGenBigTree.java, this can be found:
[code]
if(this.heightLimit == 0) {
this.heightLimit = 5 + this.rand.nextInt(this.heightLimitLimit);
}
[/code]
This code randomises the height of generated large oak trees. However, this height limit is set once due to the [code]this.heightLimit == 0[/code] check.

Line 51 of BiomeGenBase.java shows the generator instance being created: [code]protected WorldGenBigTree worldGenBigTree = new WorldGenBigTree(false);[/code] The instance is unique for every biome created and is used whenever a biome has large trees in it. Therefore, large tree heights are unique per biome. This is not too noticable however, since these trees only generate in forests, extreme hills, ice plains, jungles and plains.

Between Alpha v1.2.0 and Beta 1.7.3, BiomeGenBase still controlled what trees were generated, but it used a new large tree generator instance every time, as seen on line 64: [code]return (WorldGenerator)(var1.nextInt(10) == 0 ? new WorldGenBigTree() : new WorldGenTrees());[/code] In earlier versions, new generator instances were still being created with the exception that the height was shared per chunk: in Alpha v1.1.2_01, the following code was used around line 380 in ChunkProviderGenerate.populate().

[code]
Object var18 = new WorldGenTrees();
if(this.rand.nextInt(10) == 0) {
var18 = new WorldGenBigTree();
}
[/code]

In the image attached to this submission, it shows a world generated in Minecraft Java Edition 1.9.4. The red sand border shows the border between chunks generated before and after game reset. Trees with sea lanterns are large trees generated before the reset and trees with glowstone are large trees generated after the reset.

This bug has its own report on the official bug tracker:
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-11208
Postal III
1
Postal III was delisted from Steam on November 22, 2022 due to issues with the Steam version's DRM going offline. On October 12, 2023, Running With Scissors announced on the "I Regret Nothing Podcast" that the game had received some DEPOS updates to fix the issues keeping the game from being playable, and would be added back on Steam at a later date with some additional fixes from the ZOOM Platform version of the game.
person Wingzzzzy calendar_month October 12, 2023
Metroid Prime
2
According to one of the game's tech leads Jack Mathews, shortly after Metroid Prime shipped, Nintendo told Retro Studios that a "bad batch" of GameCube CPUs shipped, and apparently this game was the only game that misbehaved on them. Upon seeing videos of the issue, it became clear to them what was going on:

"All animated objects were freaking out... we needed to actually slow down some of our code, because it was running too fast for these CPUs to handle! We needed to be able to test this, but Nintendo only had one dev kit with this CPU. We couldn't detect the CPU, and if we slowed it down too much, the game's framerate would tank. If we didn't slow it down enough, it would glitch. Even worse, we had to burn disks for this kit. So each test was hours. Even weirder was to see the problem, the kit had to be cold. Like, freezer cold. So we literally had to put the kit in the freezer, test the game for 15 minutes tops, then start all over. It was crazy. We literally were running the kit from the break room freezer to the TV, and loading save games as fast as possible to as many places as possible in 15 minutes, then trying new code, re-freezing, and back. I'll never forget it."

In retrospect, he wondered if it was possible to instead rig up the GameCube so it stayed in the freezer and let the wires run out to connect to the TV to save time running back and forth.

On the more technical side, Mathews explained:

"Our skinning used the locked cache DMA to read in data and the write gather pipeline to write it out. Most of the Nintendo samples used the locked cache for both read and write, so my method was a bit faster. But it also hit memory bandwidth limits. As I recall, the issue was that the write gather pipe on these broken CPU's wouldn't stall when it was full or properly report its status, so we had to keep inserting NOPs in the code to slow it down just enough to stop stalls from happening, but not so much to slow down the game."

When a player called Nintendo of America's support hotline about this animation problem, they would send them a new copy of the game disc with this updated code.

When this story was posted to Twitter in 2022, one user posted an older video of a graphics glitch positing that the issue is "caused by the ANCS file using the wrong CSKR for the suit model", and that it might be possible to simulate the issue outside of the hardware and software conditions it originally happened in. Mathews replied:

"I don't know if it was writing out less than we were putting in the write-gather, or throwing away and reusing from the buffer, but sort of along these lines, with more jittering and triangles all over the place. This example has coherent skinning, just a bad mapping... I think the WG pipe was a 96 byte circular buffer. So when it wouldn't stall, it would write bytes over earlier entries in the buffer before they could flush to main memory. These would still be four-byte aligned writes, so I think the way to emulate it would be to take blocks of anywhere from 4-32 bytes (a multiple of four) and move them back by 96 bytes in the skinning buffer."

Mathews also talked about how it would have been a bigger hassle to rewrite the skinning pipeline to use the locked cache, because it would have been a rewrite by taking the risk of adding new code and may have net slowed things down. Adding the NOPs wouldn't break anything and just moved the stalls from the memory controller to the PPC chip.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month September 16, 2023
Metroid Prime
1
Attachment To help development reach its finish, Retro Studios licensed out a PHP-based bug tracker called Mantis, working with Nintendo of America's product testing division to find bugs and the team's producers would enter bug reports.

Eventually, Metroid Prime went gold on October 29, 2002 at 2:21 AM, less than a month before the release date to give time to manufacture game discs. Programmer Zoid Kirsch described it as one of the most memorable days of his life, commemorating it by getting the development team's signatures on a magazine poster. Notably, none of the developers signed on Samus because they had a large amount of respect for the character.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month September 16, 2023
Super Mario Bros.
2
Attachment The Minus World glitch is believed to be first acknowledged by Nintendo in the third issue of Nintendo Power (November/December, 1988, page 55).
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Super Metroid
2
After figuring out how to destroy the Glass Tunnel in Maridia, the glass itself will not shatter until Samus jumps, shoots, or changes her item selection. If you fire a shot to break the glass on the exact same frame you enter the door transition to move to the next room, the game will freeze.
sell
Halo: Combat Evolved
1
Attachment In the campaign levels "Assault on the Control Room" and "343 Guilty Spark", a glitch can be performed where if you hold down the button to throw a grenade right as a cutscene showing you arriving on the Pelican starts, you will stay inside the Pelican despite map scripting normally forcing you to jump out. The ship will then fly off out-of-bounds. If this glitch is done in the former mission, you can exit at any time and explore, but if you do not jump out in time, the Pelican will fly through a kill barrier and kill you. If done in the latter mission, you can safely get out at any time and explore with no risk of death. If you travel northeast from where the Pelican landed, you may eventually encounter a lone Marine, Private Mendoza from later in the mission, standing around in the empty area doing nothing. In Anniversary Edition, this Marine is slightly hidden behind a tree (several were added to this area in this edition), but he can still be seen as the trees do not have collision-detection, allowing you to walk through them. While it may seem that him standing around doing nothing is just an Easter egg, his presence here is actually a pre-determined location for his model to spawn in at before he is needed later in the level so there are no memory allocation spikes that would occur if his model was just loaded in and destroyed from the level. This is part of a common game programming pattern called "object pooling" where multiple objects are pre-initialized to be in use, and once their usage is finished are set to no longer be in use. The position of Mendoza's model is changed to be used in a pair of cutscenes during the mission.

It's notable that Mendoza's model has very minimal AI unlike other NPCs in the stage. Normally, if you use mods to possess any other character in the level and play as them, the game will recognize that the functions assigned to that character are being overridden by the player character and the level will crash. If you use mods to possess Mendoza's model however, the game will not recognize his functions have changed and you can play through the entire mission as him. He has less functionality than Master Chief, he freezes when he is hit due to him playing an animation central to his original AI, and will die in a few hits, but with the God Mode invincibility cheat on he can complete the level. Although designer Jaime Griesemer mentioned that there was a playable Marine unit named "future soldier" in an earlier RTS prototype of Halo titled "Monkey Nuts"/"Blam!", it's unknown if Mendoza specifically was ever planned to be playable.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month March 21, 2023
Video about the hidden Marine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA1S6d0d-bE

Glitch to stay in the ship during Assault on the Control Room:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAVgeC5cpdA

Vice article on Halo development:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwqjg3/the-complete-untold-history-of-halo-an-oral-history
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
1
If the player performs a set of Bros. Attacks correctly Mario will get an idea to do an Advanced Bros. Attack, illustrated with a small thinking animation. If this occurs during the battle against the Hoohooros boss while said boss is also using the thinking animation, the game will soft lock.
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Metroid Fusion
1
Attachment Due to a glitch, Samus' left wall jump sprites in-game do not have her left arm. This is due to a rendering error, as internally these sprites do have her left arm. This does not happen with her right wall jump sprites.
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Super Mario Kart
1
Attachment The game has a secret CPU ghost mode which can be accessed under the Time Trial menu by pressing Start on a controller in port 2 while selecting a driver. This triggers a CPU cursor to appear, allowing the player to select a ghost driver to compete against. However, the CPU ghosts are capable of interacting with elements of a track's mechanics, like the ice blocks found in Vanilla Dome.

If the player allows the CPU to destroy these blocks, then drives over where the blocks were, then saves and race against their own ghost, a glitch will occur where the ghost will vanish when it touches the block that was supposed to have been destroyed and trigger a visual error where the player's tires will cycle between two frames of animation even while in an idle position. This glitch only occurs when the player and the ghost use the same driver.
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened
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1
Pokémon Emerald Version
1
Attachment In the Japanese release, the player is able to use Dive on the deep water tiles in Team Aqua's hideout due to a programming oversight. Because these tiles were never intended to lead anywhere, diving in them simply teleports the player back to Petalburg City, the lowest-indexed map location in the game. In the international release, this error is fixed by disallowing the player from using Dive in the hideout.

This glitch is not present in Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, because in those games, the entrance to the hideout is no longer accessible after obtaining the Mind Badge, which is required to use Dive in the overworld.
Brave Fencer Musashi
1
At the Fluffy Puffy Breadshop in Grillin' Village, there is a glitch that can be performed outside the bakery right before it closes. It requires Musashi to fall asleep on a very specific part of the wooden floorboards leading inside, and if performed correctly, the shop's door as it closes for the night will push him inside. When inside, talking to Jam at the counter will reveal that the bakery is currently having a sale. However, this can be done on any day of the week, making this glitch a possible exploit to buy cheaper goods from the Breadshop.
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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
1
The Japanese FM Towns release of Monkey Island 2 is completely missing the so-called "cliffside puzzle" (which involves stealing a fish from a chef, trading the fish to a fisherman for a rod, and casting your line over a cliff, so a seagull appears and snatches the piece of the treasure map away).

At first, it was speculated this was either a bug (with one person going so far as to officially submit it as a bug for the ScummVM emulator in 2006) or censorship. But looking at the game's source code, the change was seemingly intentional, with additional lines of code being added to tell the program to skip the correct sequence of events.

When asked about this, even former developers and play testers couldn't explain or remember why. Recent consensus is that this was most probably because of a technical issue involving vertical scrolling (where if the screen moved up and down you couldn't have objects or animations on the screen at the same time or the game's script would break - and the cliffside "room" is the only room in the game to feature vertical scrolling).
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