The worst glitch in Nintendo history 

Thanks so much to Kit Ellis of @kitandkrysta for talking to me via email for this video! Check out Kit & Krysta's channel: www.youtube.com/@kitandkrysta And if you like my videos and want to help keep this channel afloat, then considering supporting Thomas Game Docs on Patreon! www.patreon.com/ThomasGameDocs As a Patron, you get access to bonus videos, polls and behind the scenes updates! Alrighty, I'll see you in the next video!! - Thomas :)

Oh so THIS is the timeline that BOTW and TOTK are in. Link softlocks, Faron never floods, the Eldon volcano never erupts, a whole new Hyrulian history is written

It's interesting how they decided to fix that issue, if this happened today it'd probably just be a patch that would come out in a few days or less and no one would think much about it

If Miyamoto knew back then that nowadays releasing video games with game breaking bugs is a normal thing he would have a heart attack instead of just a nightmare lmao smh

Dang. Miyamoto had a vision!

I actually fell victim to Skyward Sword's bug despite doing the dragon quests in the "intended" order. That goron was an absolute menace, and would halt your progress no matter when you spoke to him after completing the thunder dragon quest. XD

Fun fact: Pokemon once had an issue like Twilight Princess, too, in X and Y, where saving in a specific location would leave you unable to progress! Fortunately patches were a thing by then, but I remember it took quite a while for patches to be sent out and since it was on the 3DS they weren't downloaded automatically back then so players would keep running into it for quite some time.

The worst glitch they had was that one glitch in twilight princess where your younger sibling deletes your save file as you’re on the second last dungeon…

I thought the worst glitch was Super Smash Bros Brawl completely crashing old Wiis

Considering Nintendo had given the freedom to choose where to go in the first place, I'm surprised they hadn't found out about this bug while testing this game

If I recall correctly, there WAS a way to actually softlock Link's Awakening in one of the dungeons, by carefully using the pegasus boots to dash jump over water in JUST the right way you could gain access to a locked door you're not supposed to get to until you get the flippers, using up a key that you'd need for elsewhere. It's just really hard to do and most players aren't gonna stumble across it in casual gameplay.

what a coincidence, pokemon legends arceus had an issue just like this. you could catch cresselia before hitting the right flag, and you were softlocked on that quest until the next patch update

Another infamous bug in Twilight Princess is the fact that they didn't implement input sanitation when naming Epona, which was used to hack the Wii and allow piracy on the console 😮

bro had a premonition 😭

The Metroid Other M door bug made me cry. It's the only Metroid game I never finished. Never went back to it, either.

As a kid when this happened to me that made me so mad I threw my Wii remote

This bug HAD to be at the best region in the game lmao

I never fully understood the purpose of the Save Data Update channel years ago, but it’s now easy to know that it patches a small, yet massive game-breaking bug in the process.

I mean, at least this one was only triggered by specific means that not so many people ran into. The save corruption on the launch of Pokemon X&Y was way worse imo

Nintendo didn't find this game breaking bug before launch despite the game giving players the freedom to do it in any order they wanted. But when they found it, they figured a way to patch the game. But when it came to Other M, the exact same type of game breaking glitch happened for the opposite reason - the game is extremely linear and doesn't let the player explore anything until the post game, so nobody bothered to go back one room and save before moving forward, and as a result that glitch exists to this day. They never patched it online, you had to send your disc to Nintendo so they would burn the patch on the disc, limiting the number of people that could get their games fixed to only those who live somewhere where Nintendo offered that service.

This happened to my sister. Fortunately she played slowly and ran into the glitch after there was already a patch released but boy was it scary!

I find it hilariously ironic that my browser crashed at the 3:00 mark where you were describing how the game becomes unbeatable.

The QA ream really cannot be blamed for neither of the glitches talked about here. It's such a specific way to trigger them, the chances are so low, ofc only the masses of players will find it first. I would like to know what game breaking glitches are being found and removed before release. In the end, only a fraction of crazy bug and glitches shit makes it into the final game. What do we know 😂

I remember that I wanted to say hi to that Goron before progressing with the story but my little brother was so excited to see what would happen next in the quest that he forcefully made us avoid any distractions, Goron included. He basically saved our game from that glitch without knowing it. We still laughs about it today.

I love how the thumbnail has a Windows 3.1 window with the Windows 7 warning icon over it

When playing through Skyward Sword, I did the Song of the Hero quest in the Faron, Eldin, and Lanayru order, therefore avoiding the bug without even knowing of its existence. When I first played through Twilight Princess, the walkthrough I used alerted me of its bridge bug and cannon bug. My Twilight Princess is on Gamecube, but I still took precautions to avoid any chances of triggering the bugs.

timestamp 13:50 That’s a short term fix, not a long term fix. Eventually, the ability to download updates for games will be ceased permanently. And if someone were to buy a physical copy of the game for the first after that happened (or someone who owned the game had their Switch break and and to buy a new one), he or she would be out of luck. (In fact, I can name two Switch games that can’t be updated.)

0:10 For a sec I thought he said that he found a bag.

Ok, talk about irony.. I was watching the video till around 12:40, and there was the line about players being able to send the Twilight Princess disk back to Nintendo of America. the video stopped playing. I was like, "Ok, that was a funny joke." With no sign of buffering I wondered what went wrong. For some reason, and never doing it before.. My computer just froze fully at that time.. So a video about a the worst glitch in Nintendo history caused my computer to glitch and hard lock..

I'd argue the Lumiose City Save Glitch from Pokemon X and Y is the most unfortunate and game-breaking glitch from a Nintendo game. WIth the Lumiose City glitch, if you saved in the wrong parts of the city and reloaded your save file, no matter your progress in the game, there was a chance you'd be hard locked, unable to do anything. Your only option would be to delete the entire save file and start anew. The difference here is that this glitch could be triggered even after you'd completed the game, so players could fall victim to this bug even if they'd spent hundreds of hours in the postgame.

As someone who saved their game in the Cannon Room in Twilight Princess on the Wii, I’ll tell ya… This wasn’t the first time :0

It was a good thing I was informed of this big glitch before I made it to that part of Skyward Sword, so I made sure to do it in the proper order to progress. I also thankfully never encountered those two glitches in Twilight Princess.

This also happened in Metroid Prime 2. There's a certain room with multiple (Three, IIRC) shootable echo buttons. If you enter the room, shoot some, but NOT all, then leave and save, that room becomes softlocked. The room is coded to trigger an event once three echo buttons have been shot since last entering, but each echo button permanently saves its shot/not-shot status. It happened to me, back in the day. (Technically, this doesn't render the whole game uncompletable. Like any Metroid, there's plenty of advanced speedrun tech that can bypass the room completely, but casual players are not going to know about this.)

There was another game breaking glitch on Twilight Princess: When you go to the Hylian Lake for the first time, you can go to the minigames in wolf link without activating the portal in the middle of the lake islands, the ones connected by bridges. If you do that, when you try to transport the cannon to the lake to go to the Sky Temple, you encounter that you are unable to do so, because there is no portal there. This happened to me in one of my playthroughs, and it is awfull, because it is near the end of the game and you have to start it over.

Fun fact you can still get that channel. I just got the channel the other day and patched my data.

Anyone else notice that the Suika Game music sounds similar to the "Going Up" theme from Super Mario Bros Wonder?

havent gotten many of your videos in my recommended fr like 2 years so i thought you mightve stopped uploading! glad to see youre still making vids

French viewer here, loves your work as always. Just was caught off guard when you read your patreons' names because Cyprien Iov is actually the 3rd biggest RU-vidr in France lol

There are actualy two softlocks in links awakaning one where you diagonaly jump over water in the water dungeon and one in the tower dungeon where you can get an iron ball stuck in a corner

To be clear, at that time game updates were completely standard and normal. The Wii was the only console that couldn't do it.

Sometimes foreshadowing is relatively obvious.

Hearing you talk about kit and Krysta was a unexpected rush of nostalgia I wasn’t expecting

I was unfortunate enough to run into that cannon room glitch in one of my Twilight Princess playthroughs. I'd preordered the game, so I had one of the buggy launch disks (I still have it, as a matter of fact!) I remember being bummed at the time, but I've played through the game so many times by now that one lost playthrough feels like nothing, haha.

The funny thing is, consoles did support game updates and patches at that point. The Xbox 360 and PS3 (The other two big conesoles from that generation) had ways to update games, but for some reason Nintendo did not implement this feature when designing the Wii.

It should be noted the Skyward Sword patching channel has remained available on the Wii eshop, even after its shutdown. The only other thing available there is the Wii manual.

There was a similar bug in Spyro 3 that prevented getting 100%. I had to send my memory card into Sony and when I got it back it had another save slot with everything I had plus the bugged items. I still don't know if they were able to just load the data in, or if someone had to play through Spyro 3 for every memory card that got sent in.

I'd be so interested in seeing someone try to undo that softlock, I know speedrunner do mess with bit flags using various glitches, so maybe it's possible

Even in the remaster of the game I was TERRIFIED of talking to that Goron 😂

bdsp had a lot of bugs, unfortunately, including getting permanently stuck, like using diagonal movement in the snowpoint gym can get you stuck, then save in the center.

I remember, in 2012, I was following a french Twitch player, and the chat warned about the Goron glitch, so a whole small group was safe! (At that time, people read the chat lol)

They had a crazier time trying to fix the berry glitch in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire.

Wow! That’s crazy! Love ur content keep up the good work :)

Love the videos. Amazing job as always!

*Laughs in Castle Crush glitch*

Meanwhile Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were... not even ready when released.

“This soft lock is the worst Nintendo bug EVER!” Meanwhile, Pokemon X and Y having a data corruption/save deletion bug if you saved in the biggest city of the game that you visit multiple times.

I still have PTSD from those STUPID TADTONES.

Why do you repeat stuff in your scripts like that? I get padding the video for time, but I think that you said you can't progress in the other two areas if you talk to the Goron at least 3 or 4 times, and then repeated the thing about save files. I understood the first time.

Nintendo had actually done something like the UK's solution of mailing the console to Nintendo before. In Japan, you could mail your Nintendo 64 save card and your GameCube save card to them to transfer your town from Animal Crossing for N64 to Animal Crossing for GC

There was a similar bug in I believe the Wii version of Twilight Princess. If you save and quit your game in the room where you launch yourself to the City in the Sky, you hard lock yourself into that room as an NPC prevents you from leaving and another NPC prevents you from progressing. The only way to fix it is load up another save or star over. 12 year old me learned this the hard way…..

GIRLIE YOURE SO PRETTY :))

I’d argue that “ENGAGE RIDLEY” is worse due to the damage it does to consoles.

Reminds me of the bug in DK64 where, if you save right before proceeding to the final boss, the door won't open

Just saw this come out! So glad for a new video!

There's one in Metroid Prime 2 as well. In the room, "Main Research," in Sanctuary Fortress, you're supposed to shoot three sonic locks to open the door blocking your way. If you shoot one or two but not all three, and then leave and de-load the room, then the state of the locks won't be recorded correctly and the door can never be opened. This is casually a softlock, although you can do a developer-unintended movement technique called a "Kip Dash" to bypass the problem. IIRC Nintendo invited affected players to mail in their memory card, and they would edit the save file to remove the effects of the glitch and then mail it back.

Oh, the Skyward Sword glitch. I thought you were going to go into the softlock in Angler's Tunnel, and how it was fixed in all future versions of the game, including the DX and Switch remakes.

14:19 Tears of the Kingdom sorta did at point. If you went into the depths after completing the great sky island before talking to Impa and getting the paraglider you could get soft locked in the depths since the autosaves could be filled up after a while and for some reason you were not able to fast travel to the shrines in the great sky island.

I never approached this glitch when I played Skyward Sword but I do remember my friends talking about it they never told me how to do it properly for the best but it was interesting.

I love how BOTW and TOTK both have a generous auto save feature that allows you to revert back to any of those saves at any point. It's like the developers said "but just in case theres another game-breaking glitch, nobody has the 'one save file' excuse anymore."

I remember these! The general advice I remember at the time was "just do Lanayru last" for Skyward Sword, and to avoid save/quitting in niche spots in Twilight Princess (i.e. save wherever, but don't quit until you're out at Hyrule Field or one of the main towns or whatever)

I remember running into this glitch. Having to wait a couple of weeks before the release of the Save Data Update Channel really sucked. It didn’t help the the Song of the Hero quest felt like so much extra padding using recycled environments.

I love how literally no one ever mentions the Wii U release of BOTW, like it basically doesn’t exist anymore

I always wondered why there was an update on the wii shop channel

Okay, but Donkey Kong Country 2 had a glitch that could "destroy" the cartridge. It corrupted save data, then the game would crash at the title screen trying to read it, so you couldn't do anything. The only fix was to remove the battery, which required soldering, or use an external device to erase it. But few even knew it could be fixed at all.

I thought this was gonna be about the cannon glitch in Twilight Princess.

There was one in Twilight Princess that stopped game progress. Of course I found it on my first playthrough

How I imagine it happened Link: - starts assembling the song of the hero - Ghirahim: Golo, I have a proposition for you. If you speak to the hero and keep him from making any progress, I will reward you handsomely. Do we have a deal? Golo: Sure. And thus the softlock was born

That was nice. glad to have heard and seen you in your true voice and way. So interesting!

I was sure the bug would be the Twilight Princess horse name overflow exploit that let you softmod your Wii. That one was epic.

i had a similar issue where upon finishing the first version of the fire world dungeon, i went exploring and managed to reach the fire dragon song part but before unlocking the rest and it locked the Thundercloud event flag from triggering…

The Skyward Sword game breaking bug was in the back of my mind the whole time I was playing A Link Between Worlds a couple years afterward. I got stuck in the Temple of Darkness, and I was terrified that I found a gamebreaking bug, but it turned out I had just missed a bombable spot near the top of the dungeon. I felt really silly after figuring that out.

Hearing about this when I was 8 made sure I backed up my savefile before every session

Myamoto: "I had a nightmare that there was a huge bug that stopped you from progressing in the game!" 🥺 The bug: "Well now I'm becoming real!" 😡🐧

The canon room softlock happened to kid me. At least it takes less time the second file since you know where things are and you dont have to read.

There was another Zelda with a game breaking glitch. The legend of Zelda: link's awakening on game boy. In eagle tower if you throw a sphere in a specific place you can't grab it again and if you save and quit, it will remain there. These sphere is needed to destroy some pillars and progress through the dungeon.

Wii U WindWaker has a game breaking bug as well. In the earth dungeon you can get the bird girl permanently stuck in a room and as far as I know it was never fixed.

I remember the insanity on forums when this was discovered. I never saw something like that with a newly launched game before that point

Anybody remember how unstable final fantasy seven remake was when it first came out? People would fall through the floor during the ghost boss fight, or games would freeze during the air duct scene. Knowing about those glitches made me terrified to progress even though my copy was fine. I never knew Skyward sword had similar problems.

I had forgotten about the glitch in Skyward Sword. Not long after I bought it I came across comments on the internet about the softlock and I was so scared to play because I didn't really understand what caused it (I didn't have that much knowledge about technology at the time). In the end, my copy was already patched from factory, so I was scared for nothing. Good times, lol.

And I thought it was weird when I had some unexplained glitch in A Link to the Past when I did a normal thing by using the running boots and running into a tree and as soon as I bounced off the tree, the screen went pitch black and the only sounds I could hear were the thunderstorm from the beginning of the game and the flute playing at the same time. So weird, but fortunately if I remember correctly, I didn't lose my save data.

The nostalgia of the Windows 3.1 era box in the thumbnail

I'd argue that the cannon room glitch in Twilight Princess is worse than the Skyward Sword glitch. The TP one happens at a checkpoint in the main story, so it's not unusual for people to end their game session and save at exactly that disastrous point. In SS though, I don't think most people even trek back that way when they're done with Lanayru, they just use a bird statue to go directly to the sky.

Thomas, I have a story in a similar vein that may interest you! Once, in September of 2002, Sega was releasing a remake of the popular Phantasy Star Online, originally for the Sega Dreamcast, this time ported to the Nintendo GameCube. It released in Japan months before a proper western release. I had a region-modded GameCube, and the JP version of the game already has a functional English setting, so like many western PSO fans, I imported the game. Unfortunately, there was a problem. Like many an online game, players discovered (almost immediately) a duplication glitch that allowed them to replicate their rare items. Sega rushed to fix the bug for future releases, but the GameCube had even worse download functionality than the Wii, and patching the bug was impossible. Sega put a plan in place to quarantine the bugged version of the game - deemed version 1.0 - on its own server, allowing players the choice to either continue playing in an online environment flooded with duped items, or request a copy of the fixed version 1.1 disc. Despite the game's online element, however, Sega was not terribly concerned with customers who had purchased the game from overseas. They did not allow anyone to enter a delivery address into the website's exchange form if they were not located within Japan. I was one of those people, unable to exchange. The quarantined “duping” server was gradually being abandoned, and a rift was forming. Many saw it as the “cheater” server that no one wanted to be on. Since the ver 1.1 server was going to be used for the North American release, in order to play with all my friends I'd have to either buy a replacement copy or find a way to apply for the replacement disc. I was very lucky. Unlike most American importers, I had coincidentally already applied to study overseas in Japan a couple of months later. So I took my copy of the game with me and hoped for the best. With a guide written by a more fluent player, I filled out the very specific form and directed them to deliver to my dorm. Service to people living in Japan was fantastic, as it turns out. A private Sega courier service brought the replacement disc directly to the international dorm's front door. I got the impression that Sega was unreasonably resentful towards importers for sticking their nose in before the domestic release was finished. But Sega never did finish translating all the Japanese quest content into other languages, so many quests were only accessible by changing the language setting to Japanese and stumbling through it that way (though, I think they eventually blocked that as well, even though it didn't harm anybody). Under Sega, all versions of Phantasy Star Online had effectively zero moderation, until Microsoft paid for the right to manage and service the Xbox 360 release themselves. If you are interested in any other details, feel free to contact me! Take my username, RobynBetween, and address it to the house of Goog. You know the one. ~Robyn

John Carmack has said on the record that modern game development is harder than rocket science, because you're working with millions of lines of code, any combination of which could interact in a way you don't expect and produce strange behavior. You've gotta figure that _something's_ going to slip through the cracks in QA testing sometimes. And, as someone who has worked with code, you'd be amazed how easily seemingly obvious oversights can slip into a code base like this.

9:15 I've actually mailed my Nintendo hardware to them on two different occasions, last time it was to fix my joycon drift, another time it was to fix a problem with the Wii's laser that prevents it from playing smash bros brawl...also I experienced the twilight princess bug firsthand

I’ve never experienced these glitches but I have experienced a rare one in Twilight Princess. I was outside of Iza’s house in Upper Zora’s River and it triggered the shadow beast fight. I always like to fight them as a wolf so I transformed, which is strange because I’ve never been able to recreate this. I defeated them and the cutscene took place inside of Iza’s house only with wolf Link. In my inventory I had one water bomb bag, two bomb bags, and in place of my bow was the image of a Rupoor. Nothing happened when I tried to equip it. Unfortunately for me this was right before I went to the Temple of Time, so I had to restart the entire game. I’ve tried to recreate the glitch again but have never been able to.

Yes there was a game breaking bug in Link's awakening, you could actually erase one of the instruments if you used the select warp glitch.

i had a game breaking bug in alan wake 2 when a roller coaster blocked my path preventing me to continue on with the game but thankfully patches exist now and it was fixed

0:05 "And I named that bug Gohma."

There's another softlock in Twilight Princess that I ran into as a kid. If you get too excited to use the Spinner to open up the path to the boss room in Arbiter's Grounds before you get the boss key, you lock yourself out of being able to get the boss key and can't progress