CRASH COURSE Some of the best ‘glitch games’ can be found on itch.io
F J O R D S
By Kyle Reimergartin
Purely and simply a game
about delivering pizza.D E I O S
By BARCHboi
A ‘glitchventure’ inspired
by lost bulletin boards.GLITCH DUNGEON
By jakeonaut
Pixel dungeon crawler in which
magic breaks the game.PROBLEM ATTIC
By Liz Ryerson
“A game about prisons,
both real and imaginary.”LABYRINTHOS
By dataerase
Highly WIP glitch RPG
comparable to Phantasy Star.n early 2015, Daniel Mullins was working on
a PC version of Grandia 2 at Skybox Labs
in British Columbia. Mullins was a pretty
seasoned programmer at the time, but porting
a Dreamcast title from 2002 felt like starting
from scratch. “I was looking at this ancient code
written by a Japanese team,” he says. “It was so
hard to parse – it was like nothing I’d ever done.
Just getting basic things to appear on the screen
was a huge accomplishment.” When the porting
team did manage to output graphics they were
awash with bugs, including improperly rigged
meshes leading to “knees moving as if they
were elbows, creating grotesque walking
Frankensteins”. Mullins only spent a few
months on the project, but the ordeal stayed
with him. It would prove foundational to his
2016 gamejam creation Pony Island, which traps
you inside a glitchy arcade machine that is
actually the work of the devil.Loosely modelled on the pixel fonts, boot-up
noises, and curving low-res monitors of older PCs,
Pony Island is a wicked celebration of videogame
bugs. The graphics fluctuate wildly between a
sugar-pink pastoral backdrop and a glaring
bone-white wasteland. Menu options corrupt
under your cursor. Swirling artefacts unlock a
desktop behind the main menu, where you’ll trade
messages with other imprisoned souls. To restore
certain broken features, you must guide a key
around a maze of command line text dotted with
English words – a representation of
how it felt to wade through
Grandia 2’s innards, deciphering the
odd line here and there.CRASH COURSE
Pony Island is part of a curious tradition of games
that build stories, levels, and features around
simulated technical problems. These games come
in all shapes and sizes. As you’d expect, many are
indie experiments – take Metroid homage Axiom
Verge, where you can ‘glitch through’ corruptedBreaking Ground
FE ATURE