Gaming Levels Up

By exploiting quirks and glitches, some highly advanced players have finished the biggest games in record time

How fast can a game be beaten — and how many tricks can a player use as they do it? With “game breaking,” users look for loopholes in a game’s design and use them to get past difficult enemies. Different players have different approaches: Speedrunners, for example, find the fastest way to finish, while “map clippers” twist “mechanics” — the rules by which the digital universe is bound — to see what they can get away with before it becomes a problem for developers, or crashes the game completely. Here, five prominent game breakers explain what they do — and how they get away with it.

This story is part of Gaming Levels Upa special section that celebrates the proliferation of video games throughout our entire culture. A version also appears in the Jan. 2023 issue of the magazine.