4 Spooky Glitches That Turn Games Into Horror Shows
Video games are fun, happy diversions to play while emptying your mind, eating candy, and spending all of the money you and or your parents have. Some of them are designed to be spooky but it's always a measured, controlled spookiness. But some games … break. And when they do, they unleash a portal straight to your weirdest and wildest nightmares.
Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Plague
In September of 2005, World of Warcraft was proceeding as it normally does (boringly?) when Blizzard accidentally unleashed a pandemic. The result would later be dubbed The Corrupted Blood Incident and would be studied by actual scientists to see how a real plague could spread throughout the globe.
What happened was a location-specific enemy would cast a debuff (a bad thingie) on you during a fight, like normal. The debuff wasn't supposed to last past the fight or be able to be taken outside of the area. Except, as you can probably now guess, it managed to do just that.
The corrupted blood plague spread throughout the game, and Warcraft changed. People quarantined or tried to help and got infected due to curiosity. Shopkeepers became super spreaders, and some who were well off would go about their day as if nothing happened, spreading it to those who fell to it. The economy was disrupted, people refused to self-identify, and quarantine was broken. Eventually, the game was reset to stop it from spreading any further.
We haven’t yet had any real-world applications for the lessons we learned from Warcraft's plague. But we might someday, as some say it's possible we'll have to deal with a real pandemic, even within our own lifetimes.
Bethesda’s Bodies Never Hit The Floor
Bethesda is perhaps best known for making games too long for any sane person to reasonably play. But there's one thing that Bethesda brings to nearly all of their games that sometimes gets overlooked. And that's the meatchunks.
Bethesda games have a bit of a reputation for being slightly glitchy—which makes sense, as each game is the size of a planet. A lot slips past the testers. Which is why, after you explode enemies to smithereens, sometimes, you can still see their disembodied bits moving around and dancing.
Granted, that is if you haven't destroyed their bodies so hard they clip through the entire game.
Bethesda
Zelda's Unstoppable Ghosts
We suppose you might find The Legend of Zelda scary, if you're weirdest out by such little things as seeing the moon has a face and is coming to kill you personally. But one of the more interesting things about Zelda is the fact that some of the creepypastas you'd read out there about it … are real.
Take the Ghosts of Misery Mire in A Link to the Past. For a while, it seemed like a tale told when the sky got dark. There are ghosts in Zelda, invisible to all, but still able to hurt you, with you powerless to stop them.
Nintendo
However, it turns out the ghosts are real. This invisible demon is found in the Swamp of Evil, invisible to all, and is able to kill you without you even fully realizing it's there. This glitch happens because a Ku, one of the shitty fish creatures, was placed in a spot it never should appear. The game didn't know what to do with It, so it rendered it invisible and nigh unkillable.
Okay, slightly killable Luckily, a workaround has been found. It's apparently killable by using bombs or an ice rod or just by finding it, which is slightly more difficult than it sounds.
The Sims is a bestselling series about what it would feel like if God was stuck in the suburbs and none of his shitty children listened to him. You grow families, abandon them in pools, watch as they pee themselves, or sometimes help them. Mostly, you only redesign buildings and make sure you have just enough chairs.
But sometimes, when two Sims fall in love, or you install a smut mod and they bang real nasty, one of them will get pregnant. With Satan's son.
EA
These nightmare children were one of the first glitches to be found in The Sims 4 after its release, which is interesting, because at a certain point, you have to have made the conscious decision to go into The Sims, ignore all the other bugs, and just get to boning to find one of these.
These nightmare babies seem to spawn randomly, just like Eraserhead’s child. Luckily none of these hollow-eyed mistakes of God ever manage to break the game, or kill their parents and feast on the brains.
If we pray, God may one day make a Sims flood to wipe these living abortions off the face of the planet. Until then … well, we’re not going to be mean to the babies. Look at em. Just look at em.
EA
Tara Marie’s favorite glitch is that one where even though you’re good at the game, you keep failing. Hilarious. Tell her your favorite glitch @TaraMarieWords or just buy her Trailer Park Boys comic. It’s on it’s like second printing, that means you’ll probably like it.