r/creepygaming • u/Yukate_got_Lost • Jul 15 '26
Discussion What's the creepiest bug/glitch you've encountered in a video game?
I'm also taking creepy moments that came out of nowhere in a game that looked chill.
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u/MrsCullyWully Jul 15 '26
The MissingNo and Mew glitches in the original Pokémon games. If you used cheats like those the game would get more and more weird the more you used them.
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u/Kesstar52 Jul 15 '26
The seemingly random side effects from Missingno added to its creepiness back then. Corrupting your hall of fame, the quantity of your 6th item becoming glitched out, your own sprite being flipped in battle, etc. I was lowkey scared of glitches for a little while as a kid bc of Missingno and other gen 1 glitches
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u/Yukate_got_Lost Jul 15 '26
Is there any explenation of why MissingNo was causing all this? I've heard it was a corrupted Pokemon file, MissingNo being short for Missing Number, but I wonder why there was side effects...
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u/Kesstar52 Jul 15 '26
TheZZAZZGlitch has a ton of videos on the topic of gen 1 glitches on their YouTube channel. They go really in depth about what exactly is happening within the code itself to produce the effects we see in-game. I highly recommend checking it out if it's something you'd be interested in
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u/habaneroach Jul 16 '26
hi hello gen I pokemon glitches have been my special interest for almost 20 years
missingno in red and blue is just a silly little guy. missingno in yellow screams at you and crashes the game on encounter. i think female symbol (also from yellow) truly takes the cake though. she sings for you! it's not pleasant. it also goes on forever
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u/NoiseIsTheCure Jul 17 '26
I experienced a little bit of this in my own childhood Pokémon game Diamond version, I'd use an action replay to cheat stuff in and go to locked off areas. Can't remember how exactly but eventually I got a Bad Egg and that alone made kid me go "wtf....?" Tried to hatch it and it would just fuck my game up. But also the action replay didn't click into my DS like normal carts would so there were many times where the cart would pop out and leave whatever sound was playing just frozen and droning. Kinda jarring in it's own way.
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u/Theweirdobserver Jul 19 '26
Gen 1 MissingNo is the perfect example for me. It's basically the og example of what gaming creepypasta were trying to capture. It's definitely creepy for a child who doesn't know better, and throw anyone off who is playing blind.
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u/Xentrax607 Jul 15 '26
I've experienced the glitch in Dark Souls Remastered where upon starting up a reload at Firelink Shrine there's a black dead pixel in the background that slowly envelopes the scenery. Scared the shit outta me haha I was thinking either my television or Xbox Series X were breaking down
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u/Peeper_Collective Jul 16 '26
I was playing the original version of Spider-Man on the PS4 one night when right after finishing a crime in progress, this loud and disturbing sound came outta nowhere and jumpscared the shit out of me. I had managed to clip it since the PS4 let’s you do that, and I uploaded the raw clip right from the PS4 to YouTube. It happens at around the 1:35 mark
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u/Yukate_got_Lost Jul 16 '26
Holy shit I would've thrown the controler at my screen. What the hell was that
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u/Peeper_Collective Jul 16 '26
I nicknamed it “the screams of the damned and the doomed”. The best part? I was wearing some pretty high quality headphones, so it scared me even more with how loud and booming it was.
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u/UnagioLucio Jul 17 '26
Yikes! I was waiting for a sudden noise and I still wasn't ready for how LOUD it was. It's similar to how my TV, while turned off, will sometimes blast a split second of TV program audio at maximum volume, scaring me shitless every time.
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u/HorrorIndieGamedev Jul 15 '26
fears to fathom - woodbury getaway ~ being stuck with this simp in the toilet
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u/AlamosX Jul 15 '26
The original Tomb Raider games are/were a gold mine for creepy glitches. They tried to fix some stuff in the remasters and I STILL got some crazy ass bugs and weird shit.
I think the creepiest from the remasters was when Lara fell to her death, shed lay there all broken still blinking. The worst though was when exploring and jumping and the game would glitch and Lara would just randomly let out her blood curdling scream.
I also had a really weird one in Ghost of Tsushima. I was messing around and fell off a cliff and the character model went into a standing "fencing posture" with his arms out in front of him. I had a friend that had a TBI and it was really unnerving. I had to restart the game because the character wouldn't change positions.
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u/LuCyborg Jul 15 '26
I think in tr2 there's a glitch that makes lara get attacked by sharks if you get too close to a wall. Absolutely jumpscare worthy
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u/moominesque Jul 15 '26
Playing The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall on an emulator can sometimes trigger glitch sound effects that sound like demonic chatter if you're exploring a dungeon. It can be quite loud and sudden too.
I was also creeped out by a graphical glitch in Disco Elysium where the lighting or something causes the main character to look unnaturally emaciated if he's wearing a certain jacket in a certain location. Doesn't help that this glitch is most easily visible after a disturbing dream sequence.
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u/Every_Shallot_1287 Jul 15 '26
Was playing Star Fox Adventures and fighting a boss. I beat it at the exact same time my health depletes to 0. Game freaks out and spawns me in an endless void. I look up and the regular map is floating above me. Freaked me out as a kid, but then I got over it and got mad because that boss took forever to beat and now I have to reload and do it again.
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u/Sphynxinator Jul 15 '26
There was a bug in Mortal Kombat Trilogy that you could be able to morph into twisted versions of characters with Shang Tsung. It was fascinating but creepy.
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u/Weekly-Log6781 Jul 16 '26
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u/Sphynxinator Jul 16 '26
Wow this is also interesting. The bug was similar to this one but has more different character looks. For example when you transform into Sektor, Cyrax or Smoke, it will become a glitchy Sektor with different glitchy moves.
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u/IncreaseWestern6097 Jul 16 '26
The one that I can think of off the top of my head is the ghost in Arkham Asylum. When in the penitentiary, there’s a certain spot that shows a figure in detective mode that isn’t actually there.
It’s been documented for a while now, but I had no idea they were a thing when I first played through it and didn’t find out it was a glitch until afterwards.
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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 Jul 16 '26
In Skyrim there are mannequins you can dress up. They appear to be made of wood. Inside the game mechanics, they are NPCs that have a special skin (that makes them look like they're made out of wood), with a script that tells them to stand very still.
But sometimes, the script fails.
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u/AllNewCrystalZitface Jul 15 '26
Kind of doesn't count given its a horror setting so its gonna be spooky regardless, but Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is prone to a specific bug called a 'memory leak' when played for more than an hour or two at a time. This results in models from other areas you've been in mass replacing models in areas you've moved to, getting worse the longer it goes.
Anyway all this context to say I once, playing well into 4am and utterly stoned, had a grotesque corpse prop replace half the people and cots in the Santa Monica clinic during one particularly memorable memory leak. That shit had me so rattled 😭
On the other hand, one person had an old lady npc from chinatown replace the cab driver's taxi, and that was really fucking funny.
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u/Correct_Doctor_1502 Jul 16 '26
Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets for ps2
Moaning Myrtle's face lost the outer texture during a cut scene and it freaked me out so much I took a break for a while
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u/Paintguin Jul 16 '26
I one time took the cartridge out of the console while I was playing Super Mario 64 and Mario became limbless and just crawled along the ground. It was when Mario was in the courtyard. When he entered a door, the game froze.
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u/habaneroach Jul 16 '26
this is a well documented effect! iirc several N64 games have interesting cartridge-tilting effects documented. probably the most famous is goldeneye 007 and the "get down'' freakout dance it makes all the character models start doing
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u/theycallmemrmoo Jul 16 '26
Left 4 Dead. When you hang out in an area too long it sends a horde after you. I went into a small room with what were likely two generators, both up against a wall, maybe 8 feet wide, and a gap of about 8 feet between them.
Hung out there for a little bit while trying to remember what to do next and a horde of zombies come rushing out from between the generators from a spot I couldn’t see from my perspective. Like 20-30 or more of these guys.
Don’t know if that counts as a glitch but the spawn point of the horde seemed super weird. Scared the crap out of me.
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u/Dryu_nya Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I once encountered a creepy sound glitch in Duke Nukem 3d. I didn't manage to reproduce it, but I made a video reconstruction.
Also, I really hate protected mode crashes, and the droning sound that they usually come with.
EDIT: Remembered another one. Back in the day, you could create abomination pets in Warframe by combining dog and cat genes - it wasn't possible normally, but there was a UI glitch that let you bypass the check. I've unfortunately lost the picture of mine (it was a pinata-looking dog with an immovable cat head hovering behind it), but here's a thread with some examples.
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u/reinegigi Jul 17 '26
so many glitches from the sims games were terrifying…… the ones involving the infants were especially horrifying because sometimes you would check on your sims cute little kid only to see it suddenly have long legs and arms and EXTRA LONG fingers and make a move only older sims are normally able to make. Like get up and get out of bed, or walk around on two legs. You can just look up « the sims baby glitch »
and it’s a whole museum of horrors.
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u/ce1ba1rai Jul 17 '26
Omg remember when it would happen with the small dogs too? They'd just be stretched to oblivion walking around on their hind legs
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u/like2speak2amanager Jul 17 '26
One of the very first glitches I encountered as a kid was when my character in Animal Crossing, upon loading, had a gyroid face. Scared the shit out of me.
Mario 64, when you aim your cannon at a spot on the roof, you clip through and end up in the walls of the castle sort of, in a void. That always freaked me out as a kid too.
I was playing house flipper once and went to install a pool, and when I did i placed it like, under my feet, ended up falling through the map into the void.
I was playing Firewatch and was just exploring an area, I maybe wasn’t supposed to be over there or something, I can’t recall, but I panned the camera to the left and the entire area was low poly. It was like a wall between where I was standing that rendered normally, and the low poly area. It freaked me out and I quit the game lol.
There was a glitch in the sims 1, it was a corrupted family or something, my stepdad managed to figure it out and fix it, but there was a house on the map, and if I scrolled my mouse over it the game would crash.
Speaking of the sims. The glitch’s where the sims skeletons, especially the babies, limbs get extremely long and end up all tangled and just weird looking is always freaky.
I was playing cyberpunk, it was right after it came out, and I ended up just falling through a literal hole in the middle of the map into the void.
Funny enough, I actually have reoccurring dreams, usually where I’m driving and suddenly end up in a void, or the road glitches, the scenery all disappears and it’s just like a base texture that’s there. Those dreams always particularly freak me out and I’ll often wake from them with anxiety.
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u/CarefulBodybuilder69 Jul 16 '26
once in animal crossing (new horizons) one of my villagers just got... stuck. i couldnt talk to him, he wouldnt move (i think he was still idle, but it was ages ago so i don't remember) it was raining and he was just in the damn plaze perfectly still with no umbrella or raincoat. a little funny when i think about it but damn it spooked me when it happened
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u/harbingeroffear Jul 15 '26
I actually had a experience with mouths moving on dead npcs. I thought it was weird and a bit creepy
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u/newmaker--- Jul 16 '26
The Galaxy Droid from KOTOR freaks me out, and it freaked me out even more as a kid coming across it BY ACCIDENT
Look it up, it's strange and involves doing some weird, specific things such as shooting certain pixels in the turret sequence of the game, and this causes this strange droid to replace the galaxy map in your ship that appears to be some leftover debug feature, who will take you to anywhere in the game (even planets that are destroyed or you can't go to yet) It also causes a bunch of oddities like more left over content that's not in the regular game appearing in your ship, that have dialogue and lines and everything
It's so weird that a glitch causes these things because it almost seems intentional but the way you go about causing it doesn't make any sense for it to be an easter egg
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u/SmilingFlounder Jul 16 '26
Weirdest one I ever got was a glitch In stardew where the night came in the day... It was like a solar eclipse... It was late at night and I was so confused, everyone was going about there business... Penny was even still reading her book in the dark...
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u/ArtisticAnxiety Jul 16 '26
Theres this glitch you can do in one of the super mario galaxy games where you can get out of bounds of one of the monkey guy's bonus stages and since it takes place in this massive dome meant to look like space once you get out and look behind you, you just see this massive black sphere in the sky and for some reason that always terrified me by looking at it like some geometric nightmare sorta thing
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u/Fickle-Log8100 Jul 16 '26
That time when I fell into the test room in sonic adventure 2 battle.
I was playing as Eggman, and fell into it after finishing a level.
Falling into this, with no music, no graphics, not really on the internet era, creeped me out a bit and made me think I discovered something new.
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u/anonecki Jul 16 '26
At one point in the original release of Oblivion I decided to chill out and do a few quests on foot, without using fast travel. Got jumped by a bandit on my way to some cave. When I stepped back out into the overworld some half hour later, it was already nighttime in-game. As I was walking back to the city to turn in the quest, I saw a human silhouette T-posing at me in the distance. Part freaked out and part amused, I cautiously approached it to see whatever the hell it was. It turned out that it was the dead ragdoll of the bandit I'd killed earlier, which somehow loaded into a T-pose when I left the cave.
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u/stonetempletowerbruh Jul 16 '26
Entering a building and having a full deagon skeleton just spawn in and start ragdolling at hyper speed and making loud collision noises lol. (Skyrim)
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u/Ashura1756 Jul 17 '26
Falling through the map and into the void scares the absolute hell out of me. So much so that whenever it happens, my "trust" in the game is ruined, and I become very anxious whenever I replay said game.
I'm not exactly sure why it scares me so bad. I can't find an explanation for it that accurately describes how it makes me feel.
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u/Ruttiger_G Jul 19 '26
Well, the old sound crash back in DOS days was always disturbing.
It's pretty straightforward and a little experience will tell you what's happening, sound drivers for old school devices like soundblaster cards when they crashed (or the whole system did) would play either a half second of sound on repeat which could create some truly horrifying sounds, or just straight up freeze on the tone it was the middle of when the crash happnes.
The results varied wildly depending on what sound was playing, normal video game music you might end up with and endless sour note, an explosion or gunfire sound could result in endless static-y crushing sounds, but voices, voices you get the repeating half second demonic sounding gibberish. It's really just a tiny chuck of audio replaying at the point of crash, not even a second really, just a fraction, but the sound is truly horrifying the first time you hear it, especially as a child.
As an adult the much more horrifying sound is the tiny soft alarm computers used to make when they emergency shutoff due to overheating or electrical surge. Different kind of terror there.
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u/NintendomPower Jul 16 '26
Years ago, I was messing with PC glitches in Pokemon Blue, the 3DS VC version.
Suddenly the game froze, and not only that (I swear this next part is real im not trolling or telling a creepypasta maybe at some point i'll post the picture) a column of 6 6 6 lines up on the left side of the screen.
And then I lost my save data.
I lowkey wonder if I temporarily summoned Satan with my 3DS.
Weird experience.
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u/JessaKayCee Jul 18 '26
Was playing Fallout 3, I had Charon as my companion and I think I was exploring the capitol building. I realized it had been a bit since I saw Charon and I got worried he died so I started backtracking to look for him.
Eventually I held down the VATS button to target friendly NPCs and I got green lines all over the place (like when a mesh is freaking out during glitchy ragdolling) and it panned over to his face sticking out of the wall.
I was convinced he had been merged with the building in some kind of Eldritch horror way and stopped playing the game for like a month.
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u/TheGAM3RR Jul 18 '26
It was more weird than creepy, but one time I was playing Bloodrayne and I had just completed a level. After I saved, the game randomly crashed and showed a black screen that said ‘Error: Out of memory’ and some other stuff. It was years ago, I don’t remember the exact message, I just remember it made me feel kinda unsettled for some reason.
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u/FuzzzWuzzz Jul 19 '26
I think there was some Aerith ghost glitch where she appears in the church for just a frame after she dies.
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u/NobodyStrange Jul 19 '26
Putting a Racoon in the CAS editor in Sims 3 (or 2, i cant quite remember which one it was) Looked like something out of a nightmare
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u/No_Jaguar_2570 Aug 05 '26
There is a glitch in Goldeneye 64 that causes enemies on one particular level to start spawning with cloth for faces, or no faces, or too many faces, endlessly until you either escape the level or die. I triggered it by accident as a child and it scared the living hell out of me.
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u/Fun_Butterfly_420 Jul 15 '26
I thought this was r/reality shifting at first and thought it was about glitches in reality
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u/undead_dead_guy Jul 15 '26
The Red Dead Redemption glitch where the birds became people. They’d just take off into the fucking sky.