Pokémon Red. My first Pokémon game. I discovered you don’t have to use multiple Pokémon. Fuck type advantage. Fuck building a whole team. Charizard is my full team. I was like 9 years old.

Using only my starting Charizard for battles I beat the entire game. Slash is a guaranteed crit if you have higher speed than the opponent in gen 1. So you basically just hella over level charizard and slash everything to death in one hit.

The other moves barely matter but I did flamethrower as well for things that had high defense and low special.

The other Pokémon in the party are just HM slaves for cut/flash/surf/etc. They literally don’t matter for anything else because the charizard almost never died and if it did you just heal it up while some of the shitty pokemon get one shot. Whatever lol

Well most games I play I end up finding at least one exploitable bug/glitch. Mainly item duping kind of stuff.

Mechwarrior 2 you could jump jet forward and then shutdown your mech but you’ll keep moving forward (no longer using jump jet fuel nor generating heat). This also allowed you to clip through terrain and enemies would ignore you mostly.

Fallout. I would pickpocket the gamblers at Gizmo’s casino, reloading when I got caught. This reset everybody’s inventory, so you could (gradually) get unlimited caps

I did not discover it but its the exploit I abused way too much. Collectors map from GitHub for RDR2 back when you knew the location of every trinket every rotation. I spent 2-3h every day for a week if not more collecting every single flower,tarot card etc… in the end I purchased pretty much everything there was to buy in game and still have some money to spare

In Guild Wars 2, you can convert in-game gold to premium gems and vice versa. I discovered you could convert a really specific amount of gold, something like a couple hundred, to a massively inflated amount of gems, like 10x the conversion rate. You could then convert some of those gems back to gold and cycle this for infinite gold and gems.

I didn’t wanna get banned, so I did enough to confirm it worked and submitted a ticket - never heard anything from them, but a couple weeks later it was fixed.

When bf4 was popular, me and friend found a glitch that can make you spawn under the map. EVERY MAP

I discovered on my own the hidden merchant chest in Skyrim, the Dawnstar one as I was looking around for either flowers or ore. I also figured out the merchants restock if you save, hit them and then reload save. Both I imagine lots of people found out but these are the only two off of the top of my head

Silver platter

In an MMO called Tera, I found if you deleted a certain Terrain file in your games folder and entered a certain endgame dungeon that was easily solo-farmable for expensive leveling materials at the end but really quite long, you could spawn in and immediately fall right into the boss room skipping a 30m loot run.

Not that i did that of course.

When I was a kid I’ve got my hands on the pirated copy of GTA Vice City and after playing for some time I’ve learned that you can mod it with custom cars from some websites. Part of mod installation included changing some lines in ‘handling.cfg’ config file. I’ve figured out how the entire file works and started modifying the existing cars for different effects. The best one was Hotring Racer with infinite mass and acceleration that instantly exploded any other cars that it touched.

Elder scrolls oblivion: crafting your own spells. Applying fire, electric, or ice damage to the spell. If you apply over 25 of one damage type, you’d need to have an advanced Destruction skill level to use that spell. But if you apply 24 of all 3 damage types to one spell, you could still cast it at lower Destruction level. So you as a low level destruction mage could be casting a 72 damage spell that uses all 3 damage types, but you can’t cast a 25 damage spell that uses one of those damage types.

Edit: the downside was the 72 damage spell would probably use up all your mana in one attack, but hey it was still a useful damage exploit

GoldenEye on N64. Pistols were laser accurate and you didn’t even need to stop and aim - as long as it hit, you could continue shooting them until they died.

Another pretty cool story is the one of GunZ, an old TPS online where what was originally an exploit became so popularized that eventually replaced the actual core gameplay.

It was born as an arena shooter with guns, shotguns, rifles, knives, katanas and some Matrix style movements such as wall runs, doublejumps etc, very cool concept.

However the whole game physics was tied to your FPS and that allowed for some janky stuff, said janky stuff eventually evolved into an entire different style of gameplay called KStyle (named after koreans who discovered and popularized it.

Stuff like swapping weapons between katana and shotgun at precise frames allowed you to move faster, jump multiple times, do infinite double jumps up walls and stuff like that, so you’d see people flying around waving their swords like butterflies and shotgunning your face, it was honestly very fun and hilarious and eventually it was just so weird, original and better than playing the intended way that it just replaced the gameplay altoghether.

I remember practicing a lot and being able to pull off a couple of the moves but due to my crap PC and connection at the time I was never able to pull off the more advanced stuff

I didn’t discover it, but the biggest exploit I can think of in gaming would be back in the original Everquest days.

There was a goblin banker in the bottom of a dungeon.

He was friendly to most players, so he was convenient to drop gear off if you were farming the dungeon.

In Everquest, you could exchange between all the different values of currency at a bank. They were valued at 10 to one for each level larger. So trade 10 silver netted you one gold.

Well, they patched one da, and somehow they messed up this ratio on this one goblins banker. You could transfer 1 Platnum to 10 gold and then back to Platinum at 1 to 1 ratio. 10 times your money, basically as fast as you could click.

This one bug destabilized the entire EQ economy on multiple servers. It was used by so many and so much money was dumped on the market all over the place that the devs couldn’t get the money back out of the economy.

They banned a bunch of accounts that directly exploited it, but if you got the money second hand, there was no good way for them to “fix” it.

They probably should have just reset the servers, but they didn’t. The economy never did recover back to pre bug levels.