Gameplay Journal #6: Glitches Part 2

We’re back at it again with another post about glitches! This week I want to write about a game that’s full of them. WWE 2K20 was released at the end of 2019 with negative reviews across the board thanks it’s overabundance of bugs and glitches. To clarify, glitches were always present in all the WWF/E games from the late 90’s / early to mid 00’s but none of them compare to WWE 2K20. Glitches in the old games like WWE Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain and Smackdown vs Raw 2007 were always a sight to behold; they were rare occurrences that were always treated as an event whenever I played those games with friends. They were met with hilarity and accompanied with the feeling of accomplishment.

Now in WWE 2K20, it’s a constant annoyance. Pedro Ferreira and Luísa Ribas said it best when defining what a glitch is, “…both the product of malfunction and artificial creation” (Ferreira & Ribas, page 3). If your game starts malfunctioning when you play the game itself, it should not have been released in the first place. It’s a constant annoyance that plagues the game’s experience and became the straw that broke the camel’s back as WWE 2K20 was the last full-fledged WWE 2K game since it’s release.

The glitch I chose from WWE 2K20 is one that I saw around the time of the game’s release. What makes it compelling to me is the way the glitch is being performed. It is a broken mess. As soon as I saw this on my feed in 2019, I knew that this game was nowhere near finished. Seeing this happen to someone helped me make a decision whether or not to purchase this game for myself. As requested for compilation videos, the glitch I’m talking about is at the 04:37 mark.

Works Cited

Ferreira, Pedro and Ribas, Luísa. “Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art.” n.d. PDF file.