The one where the enemies stop shooting if you let the two leftmost bees attack for awhile without killing them. It seems that would be an unlikely glitch to discover by accident.
After looking at some of the videos for Portal glitches I’m convinced that some people have way too much time on their hands. :eek:
Likely whoever found it had access to the code, and was able to notice that there was a loop not guarded against overflow, or whatever.
I saw a video on youtube the other day where someone beat LOZ:OOT in like 2 minutes. Apparently backflipping into the warp out of Queen Gohma’s lair in just the right way shunts Child Link all the way into the race to exit Ganon’s tower at the very end of the game.
Sometimes I wonder just what constitutes “beating a game”. Is it really just anything that causes the end credits to roll? What happens when someone makes a game where there’s a button to do just that on the main menu?
Bah!
Humans are incredibly good at noticing patterns. If enough people are using a “system” someone will eventually find a way to “game” it.
Another example was people playing “saucers” instead of Asteroids, where they would leave one little chunk of asteroid floating around, and then pick off the little flying saucer that would appear. It always appeared at the same location, so it was easy to pick off. This flaw was fixed by having the saucer shoot first - before it appeared on the screen.
http://computerarcheology.com/galaga/galaga.html
An explanation of why it happens but nothing on how it was discovered.
The saucer never shot first! That is a lie. 
“Hey buddy, could you dodge these last two for a few minutes for me? I gotta go take a leak.”
Nah. You have a bunch of people playing the same game, it’s only a matter of time before someone accidentally hits on a glitch. You have millions of trials, and only one has to notice the glitch and then try to repeat it. Then they tell everyone.
I mean, all it takes is one person trying to see how long they can go without those bees killing them all, and noticing that the bee stopped firing. People often want to add extra challenge to the gameplay, so this isn’t even that unlikely.
Yes, that seems more plausible to me. No decent consoles back then, no internet, no smartphones. What was a gamer to do except play the limited number of coin-op games to death?
Somebody probably had the goofball idea (paralleled to real-life) that the bees would run out of ammo. Ridiculous when applied to computer games, but it paid off because of the programming glitch.
Reading through it, the number of shots on screen is initially a maximum of 8, but the bug causes one of the eight slots to be filled. Over time, there will be a lower and lower maximum number of shots. Someone wouldn’t have to notice the bees suddenly not shooting after 15 minutes of screwing around, they’d just have to notice they are shooting less sometimes. Once they know somethings up, there’s plenty of motivation to investigate how to cause it.
Just to be slightly more specific: what causes the slot to be filled up is that it fires on line 0, which is where items are kept that are not in play. So the game doesn’t think a shot has actually been fired, and thus doesn’t know to clear the slots.
That’s probably more accurate. There’s a fascinating website by a man called Don Hodges, who analyses bugs in old arcade machines (in assembly language, no less) and patches them. He mentions another bug in Galaga here, whereby you can influence the game during the demo mode.
“It is amazing that this bug could go undetected by the people who created the game. I seem to remember discovering this bug when I played this game during my youth. The bug was never fixed, even though the game creators did release updates that fixed the no-fire bug.”
The game also has a Pac Man / Dig Dug style kill screen, where if you survive level 255 the game goes wonky. Lots of old arcade machines had bugs that showed up if the player managed to make some counter somewhere overflow - the designers seem to have underestimated the power of bored young people faced with a challenge.
Hodges’ archive is peculiar, a 50/50 split between opinion pieces about the war on terror and intricate fixes of old arcade machine bugs. Also links to The Pac-Man Dossier, which has a fascinating piece on the ghost AI in the game - the ghosts are smarter than most people and, left to their own devices, could probably solve the Israel / Palestine conflict. Instead they are trapped in a maze and forced to hunt Pac Man for our amusement.
Centipede had a similar bug: If you beat level 12, then level 13 would start, and 'pede segments would start crawling onto the screen, before the game realized it was trying to divide a 12-segment 'pede into 13 pieces, and crash. I’m guessing that this was ultimately an array subscript overflow, though I was only able to do it once, so I don’t have much data.