David Wonn’s Nintendo 64 glitch page is what happens when enough players spend enough time poking old games in places the developers never expected anybody to reach.
Visit David Wonn’s Nintendo 64 Glitches archive
The archive is huge. The first page alone runs from A through K, with separate pages continuing through the rest of the alphabet. Entries are organized by game, and many preserve the name of the person who submitted the discovery.
That makes the site more than a cheat list. It is a record of a particular kind of player research from the cartridge era: people repeatedly trying jumps, camera angles, collision seams and button combinations, then emailing somebody when the game did something stupid.
Banjo-Kazooie is especially well represented. The page documents ways to slip through polygon seams, stand on the bottom of a lake, fall forever without actually falling, pass through a snowman, bypass windows and abuse the Beak Buster move for temporary invulnerability.
Some instructions are almost archaeological field notes.
A player notices two sand polygons meeting at a line, follows the seam into the ocean, presses Banjo’s head into the geometry and eventually gets the engine to stop drawing part of the island. Another entry describes a floating tree in Aidyn Chronicles that is visibly disconnected from the ground and hollow underneath.
Bugs were social objects
Before YouTube walkthroughs made every exploit instantly visible, a glitch could circulate as text. Somebody discovered it. Somebody else reproduced it. Somebody wrote down the sequence carefully enough that strangers could try it on their own hardware.
The tone reflects that. Instructions include warnings about sharks, comments about attempts that took “about 100 tries,” and occasional admissions that a trick might not technically be a glitch at all.
There are also hard crashes. One Banjo-Tooie entry explains how releasing a battery in the wrong place can freeze the game while the music keeps playing, requiring a reset. That is exactly the sort of detail a polished strategy guide would normally omit and exactly the sort of thing players remember.
For game researchers, these pages preserve behavior that can disappear when software is patched, emulated differently or simply stops being played on original hardware. They also preserve the informal language players used to document technical behavior before “speedrun tech” became a much more formal discipline.
The page design is basic because it only needs to do one thing: hold an absurd quantity of very specific information.
It succeeds.