I occasionally move older writing that still feels interesting to my new site, and today I republished the 2015 story about a strange bug that brought back an old pixel font from beyond the grave:

Some of the technical details inside are obsolete, but the story might still be fun. (Plus, it seems like at every job I have, I eventually stumble upon a bug that brings back something from the annals of history. Here’s one from 2019.)

RuneScape is a popular MMORPG that reached its peak popularity in the late 2000s.

In the game, combat – colloquially known as PvP, or player vs. player – is limited to a specific map area (called the Wilderness) and otherwise people’s houses.

On 6/6/6 (sic!) a bug in RuneScape made it possible for a few players to start killing others outside of designated areas, without them being able to defend themselves. One of these players, Durial321, gained a lot of notoriety:

A player called Cursed You had invited some friends to his in-game house once he had maxed his construction skill, but decided to eject them all from the premises. Things turned sour, however, as a group of players marked as PvP in the house didn’t lose this PvP flag when ejected, allowing them to storm through Falador and massacre whoever they pleased. The most notorious of these players was named Durial321.

This event went down in internet infamy and meant that many players lost their items when killed as well as the banning of those involved.

I don’t have any context of RuneScape and I found it really funny to learn about this event from different retellings of the story.

This wiki entry reads almost as journalism:

Several others were able to use this glitch, but Durial321 abused it the most. His rampage lasted for about an hour, starting at Rimmington, where the house party was, then proceeding to Falador and subsequently Edgeville. At Edgeville, he gave Voodoolegion the green partyhat, who never gave it back to him. Soon after, he finally encountered a Jagex Moderator, Mod Murdoch, who disconnected him and locked his account. Durial321 was later permanently banned from RuneScape. In a 2006 interview, he said that player killing outside of the Wilderness was exciting, although he felt bad for the players who lost their belongings.

The 2006 incident later became known as the Falador Massacre.

(The tone is even more funny if you actually read the interview.)

There is also this more modern retelling that feels like scary story time by the campfire:

Reactions from players were initially kind of incredulous. Plenty of people were shocked and found the whole incident quite funny. Durial had essentially broken the game, after all. Some players wanted to be like him, whipping strangers to death and taking their items. But soon, as more players started hearing about what had happened and seeing the video, the mood shifted. Players wanted Durial321 hung, drawn and quartered, with his head displayed on a pike outside Lumbridge Castle.

You can witness the event PC Gamer called “one of the best all-time MMO bugs” by yourself since there is video capture of the Falador Massacre taken by one of the witnesses. At least to me, it’s rather incomprehensible.

Fear not, however, because there are many (!) documentaries. This recent one is reportedly the best one and also goes into the technical details:

Without spoiling too much, the bug was a classic Swiss cheese situation involving a new untested item, a race condition, peculiar timing, and a player with an unusually high uptime and a whole lotta luck.

As a former ISP employee I occasionally like dipping my toes into some networking stuff, and this 25-minute video from The Serial Port is a good retelling of the day in 2014 when one of internet’s important routing tables crossed a threshold of 512K, which caused all sorts of trouble:

What I appreciate about The Serial Port is that they always seem to actually test the vintage hardware or rebuild the old software they’re commenting on, and this time was no exception: they grabbed a classic unsung hero of ISPs, a Cisco Catalyst 6500-series router, and then recreated “The 512K Day” in their studio.

This was a nice comment under the video:

Have absolutely no knowledge about networking, but watched this video as if a thriller movie. Thanks for opening my world of tech to networking.

Yeah, the video is kind of nerdy and intense, but maybe you’ll enjoy it; even a classic aging piece of hardware with an arbitrary ticking-bomb limit deserves some respect.

Also, the funniest comment:

I had a 2.4k day a couple days ago when I realized Farm Sim 22 only allows a max of 2400 bales. Couldn’t load into my saved game. Had to go into items.xml and temp remove a hundred bales.

An interesting 14-minute video about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:

San Andreas was released in 2004, but the game started breaking only after Windows got updated… in 2024. Turns out the bug was sort of a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right set of conditions. We covered one similar bug before, in Half-Life 2 – but this investigation goes deeper, and shines a light on the difficulty of making Windows, whose backwards compatibility comes at a price.

I’d guess a lot of people know that the original 1980 Pac-Man ends accidentally with an iconic, glitchy, and impassable “kill screen.” Many people will also nod with recognition at hearing the kill screen is level 256, a number that immediately gives some ideas on what might have happened.

But this fun 11-minute video from 2017 by Retro Game Mechanics Explained doesn’t stop there. It shows, step by step, exactly what is going on when you reach level 256, and how each one of the glitchy things appear on the screen.

It’s a little mesmerizing, like watching a building demolition in slow motion.

A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012.

Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality” story:

Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist, since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 metre (3 feet) over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land.

A fascinating deep dive look at one of the most well-known bugs in computing history, the 1993 Pentium FDIV bug. Ken Shiriff actually grabbed a microscope to analyze the processor and mapped out exactly what happened on the hardware level, and the details of Intel’s (surprising) fix.

Also, an interesting detail of what ended up being Intel’s self-own:

The problem might have quietly ended here, except that Intel decided to restrict which customers could get a replacement. If a customer couldn’t convince an Intel engineer that they needed the accuracy, they couldn’t get a fixed Pentium. Users were irate to be stuck with faulty chips so they took their complaints to online groups.

When home computers were new, there was this enduring myth of “killer poke.” POKE was a pretty low-level BASIC command that allowed you to write any number to any place in the memory, as there was no memory protection. From that developed a set of myths of the right magical pairs of numbers that could be input and cause permanent damage to the hardware of the computer, shared in nerd circles almost like campfire stories.

Wikipedia has a pretty dry set of those. The most exciting one there is annotated with [citation needed], and the message seems to be: by the 1980s, this was no longer possible. Even in the earlier version of this idea, Halt and Catch Fire, the “catch fire” was an exaggeration. Before then? Sure, I bet some user actions could damage the computer, but computers themselves, with their high-voltage vector CRTs, electromechanical parts, and even liquid mercury tanks early on, were not that hard to damage.

Unsurprisingly, there are more modern versions of “killer poke,” too. At this point, the best they can do is crash or hang your operating system, but they are still chased, and coveted, and mysterious.

This 10-minute 2021 video from Mrwhosetheboss is a fun story of a wallpaper that could crash your Android OS. I’m not going to spoil the surprise, but it’s not what I expected – although the moment you see the wallpaper in question, you might figure it out.

It’s a fun video, and of that good kind that actually teaches you something.

A really fun 2021 story by Fabien Sanglard at the perfect-for-me intersection of bugs and typography.

In 1991, just days before the final deadlines, Akira Nishitani, one of the graphic designers of the absolutely seminal arcade game Street Fighter II realized they misspelled the world “Warrior” as “Warrier.”

The typo was there for months and no one noticed. But the moment it was noticed, the graphic ROMs were already burned and impossible to change, and the code was due in three days.

What would you do? I’ll let you click through to read, but I really enjoyed this short story.

Tom Forsyth wrote about a fun bug in a Half-Life 2 reissue, of a particular flavour I have never heard before.

So I started it up, selected new game, played the intro section. It’s a fairly well-known section - you arrive at the train station with a message from Breen, a guard makes you pick up a can, and then you have to go into a room and... uh... I got stuck. I wasn’t dead, I just couldn’t go anywhere. I was stuck in a corridor with a guard, and nowhere to go. Bizarre.