9 Coolest Ways to Break a Game

No one is a perfect programmer. Sometimes you can manage to rewrite memory locations using nothing but the game itself. This causes the game to read your position as an item, or read your item as your hp, or your hp as a piece of programming code. Skilled speedrunners have used tricks like this to bypass entire games, and program completely new endings into the game at the same time!

Old school games, like NES games, could only handle a certain amount of commands at a time for a certain amount of objects on screen. If you move fast enough or fill the screen with enough objects in certain games, you could actually stop enemies from doing anything. Other games would actually cause the entire A.I. to freeze, allowing you to waltz through each level untouched.

Altering your attack rhythm in action games is another way to exploit imperfect enemy A.I. Most attack strings in games like this end with a powerful move that leaves you open. This is the perfect time for a crowd of enemies to get their pot shots in. However, if you stop your combo before the last move, or even just spam the first attack over and over again, you will rarely become that vulnerable, allowing you to dispatch your opponents quickly, safely, and effectively.

Walls are the most obvious boundary in any video game. They mark areas where your character simply cannot go. But all walls really are polygons with a few sets of special rules attached to them. If you can find a way to circumvent those rules by, say, finding a spot in a corner where the polygons touch, you can walk through walls and discover entirely different areas of the game that the programmers never wanted you to see.

When designers program a basic method of movement into a game, they assume players will use it. However, ADD laden gamers will always find more efficient ways to move. For example, Link moves faster when he rolls than when he runs in Ocarina of Time. Many shooters allow you to move much faster when jumping, which created the “bunny hop” strategy. Some games, like Super Mario Bros., allowed you to jump on walls and kill enemies with your head simply because of artifacts of their movement system.

Game A.I. is not perfect, not by a long shot. Even the most powerful boss has areas of a stage it’s simply not allowed to go into. When you realize this, you can exploit the imperfect A.I. to take on challenges that are far above your level. For example, you can take on any level 50 bar brawl challenge in Borderlands 2 by simply never entering the bar. Just stand outside the bar doors and fire into the bar, and no enemy will ever come close enough to kill you.

When any game with an item or experience system is designed, most designers assume you are simply going to continue progressing through the game at a constant rate. However, this is almost always not the case. Many gamers enjoy finding a place where enemies will infinitely respawn to leech off their experience and items for hours. The best examples of farming can completely automate the process by taping down a button, allowing you to run your game overnight, letting you wake up to characters that have essentially become gods.

Gameplay in the fighting game genre is emergent. That means that it’s defined by the people who play it after the game comes out. So no matter how much developers try to prevent infinites from happening, gamers will still find them. Third Strike had a juggle point system that would immediately break your combo if you hit the opponent too much with a single move, and it was broken using stun. Skullgirls has a system that specifically records the moves you do to detect loops and it was broken using two moves that chain into each other. Making an infinite combo is all about getting inside a designer’s head and figuring out what sequence of moves they couldn’t predict.

Games like Metroid are designed to progress in a somewhat linear fashion even though the world is entirely open. The “next area” of the game tends to be cut off by say, a jump you can’t reach because you need the power-up that gives you a double jump. However, some gamers have figured out how to jump at the exact right time in just the right way to totally bypass hours of open games like this. That’s what’s known as sequence breaking, and it has been the subject of many awesome speedrun videos throughout the years.