19) has there been a UX/UI "glitch" or easter egg that stayed with you a long time?
(( replying to the #s i got for this meme one at a time, since i wonāt be able to answer them all in one sitting!))
i imagine the canonical answer to this is going to be MissingNo in the original PokĆ©mon games. Ā remember how fantastically fruitful that little glitch was? Ā the stern warnings to absolutely never capture MissingNo because it could erase your save, and also people speculating MissingNo was a fallen form of Mew, or a PokĆ©mon they deleted from the game, or THE MOST POWERFUL POKĆMON, yada yadaā
except i was a sanctimonious know-it-all asshole who shut down my best friend when he came running to me with wild speculation about what does MissingNo mean.  it's not a secret pokémon, Eric, the computer in the Game Boy just pointed to the wrong number and that's why you see a glitch instead of a Pokémon.  (yes, i was also the asshole who informed my two best friends that Santa wasn't real.  when we were five.)  (also, lol, i forgot that baby-me was frantically yahoo! searching the glitch and reading up on integer overflows and shit to try and grok it; small wonder i became a hacker)
BUT, that's just a fun little pop culture footnote these days. Ā a cute memory. Ā see, the glitch that wigged me out the most was for a game that i had not even played when i heard of it. Ā i still haven't played the game. Ā i just read an article about it in Electronic Gaming Monthly.
see, apparently Phantasy Star Online had a bad glitch for a while, where your character might randomly freeze, unable to move, and then stuff around you would stutter and stop, and then your whole fucking screen would turn blue. Ā you'd turn you Dreamcast off and on again, and when you logged back in, all your character and save data was gone.
EGM described this under a huge bold headline in the back of the magazine, WARNING: ALL PHANTASY STAR ONLINE PLAYERS, or something like that.
i was ten or eleven at the time. Ā the idea of losing everything, just like that, and in such a horror-movie fashionāi mean, damn, that article in EGM felt like being in a zombie apocalypse movie and reading some vague rumors about a weird flu in Santiago or whatever. Ā i thought about losing all of my game saves just like that. Ā then i thought about losing everything, just like that.
i was already a pretty existential ten-or-eleven-year-old; i generally read EGM by flashlight around 1am; it didn't take much to freak me out, in that state.
for months afterward, i had nightmares where i was walking around, and suddenly i couldn't move, i'd be paralyzed. Ā then all my friends would freeze up, too, and everything around me would turn into a solid sheet of blue andāwell, then i woke up, because you know what happens next. Ā character-death, or real-death, take your pick.
lots of games (Undertale, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc) have fucked around with the delete-your-save meta stuff in recent years, but none of them had the horror of that one little EGM writeup.
(i still have nightmares about blue-screen-of-death and other exciting forms of Total Disastrous Software Failure, except now it's because i stare at this shit for my day job. Ā in hindsight, going into a field that has me confronting my literal childhood nightmares on the regular is a little... um... look i just kinda fell into this gig, okay)