Glitch Hunters: The Speedrunners Who Only Want to Play Broken Games

Conventional wisdom says a good game should work properly. The character should move when you tell it to. The walls should be solid. The laws of physics, while negotiable in a fantasy setting, should probably apply in some consistent way. Conventional wisdom has never met a glitch hunter.

There exists a passionate, slightly unhinged corner of the gaming world where the broken isn't a bug — it's the whole point. Where a game that lets you clip through the floor, launch yourself into orbit, or skip 90% of the content through a menu exploit isn't a failure of design. It's a playground.

Welcome to the world of broken-game speedrunning, where imperfection is the only perfection that matters.

What Even Is a Glitch Run?

For the uninitiated: speedrunning is the practice of completing a game as fast as humanly (and sometimes inhumanly) possible. Most people are familiar with this applied to polished classics — watching someone sprint through a beloved Nintendo title in seventeen minutes is its own kind of art.

But a growing subset of the speedrunning community has developed a very different appetite. Instead of chasing optimized routes through well-designed games, these runners seek out titles that are technically compromised — games where the seams are showing, the collision detection gave up, or the developer accidentally left a door open to an alternate dimension.

The more broken, the better. The weirder the exploit, the more legendary the run.

The Hall of Glitched Fame

Goat Simulator (2014) Coffee Stain Studios released Goat Simulator with a wink and a nudge, openly admitting the game was buggy and that they'd chosen fun over fixing. The result was a physics sandbox so delightfully unstable that speedrunners immediately moved in like squatters who found an unlocked mansion. Runners discovered ways to use ragdoll physics and geometry collisions to fling the goat across maps at speeds that would make an actual goat very upset. The any% category became a masterclass in controlled chaos — if "controlled" means "pointed in a vague direction and hoped for the best."

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (2003) If broken-game speedrunning has a patron saint, it's Big Rigs. Released in a state so unfinished it makes a half-baked cake look like a five-course meal, Big Rigs features opponents that don't move, collision physics that are optional at best, and — most famously — the ability to drive in reverse at speeds approaching infinity. Runners don't just beat this game fast. They break the concept of the game entirely, using its own fundamental wrongness as a vehicle (pun absolutely intended) for records that feel more like performance art than competition.

Sonic '06 (2006) Few games have inspired as much affection-through-suffering as the infamously rushed Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). The game shipped with loading screens between loading screens, collision detection that treated the ground as a suggestion, and a camera that seemed personally offended by the player. Speedrunners adopted it immediately, discovering that the same bugs making it unplayable for casual players created extraordinary skip opportunities. Watching a Sonic '06 any% run is like watching someone navigate a burning building by using the fire creatively.

Action 52 (1991) This NES cartridge sold fifty-two games for fifty-two dollars, which sounds like a deal until you realize most of those games were barely functional. Speedrunners who tackle Action 52 categories are essentially archaeologists, digging through layers of broken code to find the fastest path through something that was never really meant to be played in the first place. It's chaotic. It's absurd. It's genuinely impressive.

Bubsy 3D (1996) Bubsy 3D is widely considered one of the worst games ever made, which is exactly why speedrunners love it. The controls fight you. The camera is hostile. The level design appears to have been generated by someone describing 3D gaming to a person who had only heard about it secondhand. Runners have still found ways to clip through walls and skip chunks of content, turning a game that was bad on purpose (debatable) into a game that's entertaining on purpose (undeniable).

Why Broken Is Better (For This)

Here's the thing about glitch hunting that non-runners often miss: it requires extraordinary skill. Finding an exploit is one thing. Executing it consistently, under timer pressure, while managing a game that is actively trying to malfunction in new and creative ways — that's a different level of mastery entirely.

There's also a deeply human appeal to the absurdity of it. Watching a polished speedrun is impressive. Watching someone beat a completely broken game in three minutes through a sequence of events that should not be physically possible is hilarious, and hilarious has its own value.

The community around broken-game running tends to be looser, more irreverent, more welcoming than some competitive gaming spaces. When your entire category is built on a foundation of joyful wrongness, it's hard to take yourself too seriously. The shared language is one of appreciation for chaos, and that creates a genuinely fun environment.

The FlyZap Verdict: Long Live the Broken

There's a beautiful counterculture energy to glitch hunting. In an era where AAA games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and ship with day-one patches to sand off every rough edge, these runners are out here celebrating the rough edges. They're finding the fun that wasn't planned, the entertainment that exists despite — or because of — failure.

If a game is broken enough, it becomes its own weird genre. Not a bad platformer. Not a failed racer. Something stranger and more interesting: a puzzle with no intended solution, waiting for someone weird enough to find one anyway.

And if there's one thing the internet has proven beyond any reasonable doubt, it's that we will always find those people.

Now go watch a Sonic '06 any% run. Clear your schedule first.