When Nintendo was making the game Link’s
Awakening for the Game Boy, producer Shigeru Miyamoto had a nightmare. He said in an interview “I dreamt I found
a huge bug... one that stopped you from progressing in the game.” But that was just a dream. When Zelda: Link’s Awakening came out that
June, the launch went great! No game-breaking bugs to speak of! But 18 years later, Miyamoto’s nightmare
would finally come to life, when only weeks after Skyward Sword was released on the Nintendo
Wii, a game breaking bug was discovered in the game. Players around the world were getting completely
stuck right before the end of the game - and if they didn’t have another save file to
fall back upon, those players would have to start Skyward Sword again from the very beginning. All of their progress was completely lost. If you were a Zelda fan in 2011, you probably
know a little about this already, but I hope to fill in some of the details of what exactly
went wrong here. And if all of this is new to you, then strap
in for a wild ride. Because let me tell you about the worst glitch
in Nintendo history! Part 1: The glitch So, our story starts in November 2011, which
is when Skyward Sword made its debut on the Wii. The launch seemed to be going great at first,
with the game selling almost 200,000 copies in Japan alone in the first 5 days of release. That’s pretty impressive! But all that time, in a quest near the end
of Skyward Sword’s main story, there lay a problem. The quest in question is called The Song of
the Hero. In this quest, Link must once again visit
the game’s three areas - Faron, Eldin and Lanayru - in order to meet with three dragons
who live in those places. Each area has a quest you have to solve before
moving onto the other two areas. Now, the game will try and suggest you visit
those three locations in a specific order - Faron, then Eldin, then Lanayru - but, you
don’t have to follow that suggestion. You can actually tackle the three areas and
their respective quests in whichever order you like. In a game that usually doesn’t offer you
a whole lot of choice about what to do and when, this is a surprising bit of freedom. Unfortunately, that freedom caused some problems. So if you visit Faron, Eldin and Lanayru,
in the order the game suggests, you’ll be totally fine. But if you tackle Lanayru first or second
instead, then you can pretty easily end up with the game becoming softlocked. When you enter Lanayru and talk to this Goron
here called Golo, the game raises a flag in the code to say “the player is doing the
Lanayru quest, so don’t trigger the other quests.” If you then complete this region’s quest,
and talk to the Lanayru dragon, that flag will be removed. You can then safely head to Faron, which has
flooded underwater, or Eldin, whose volcano has erupted, and complete the final two parts
of The Song of the Hero. But, when you’re leaving the Lanayru region
after talking to the dragon and completing the quest, you actually have the opportunity
to talk to Golo a second time. And that’s a pretty normal thing to do - to
let him know you’re leaving! But doing that will actually retrigger the
flag that says you’re in the middle of the Lanayru region’s quest. And there’s no way to remove that flag - you’ve
already finished the quest and talked to the dragon, so you don’t have any way to re-do
the quest, or get rid of the flag. And so, because the game still thinks you’re
in the middle of Lanayru region’s quest, it won’t let you begin either of the other
two quests - if you visit Faron, it won’t have flooded yet - and if you go to Eldin,
the volcano won’t erupt. All of this means that you’re totally stuck. You’ve done the Lanayru quest, but because
of silly old Goron Golo, the game won’t trigger either of the remaining quests, and
you can’t progress. You can run freely around the world of Skyward
Sword, you can visit all three regions, but you have no way to make any progress in the
game. If you have an earlier save file, you'll have
to revert back to that one. But if you’re unlucky enough to have just
one, single save file, well, you’re screwed. You’ve gotta start the game over from the
very beginning. And this “Song of the Hero” section occurs
right near the end of Skyward Sword, so starting over is a big deal. And as the days, and then weeks went by after
Skyward Sword’s release, more and more players began encountering this glitch. Nintendo had to do something. So, here’s what they did! Part 2: What Nintendo did I asked Kit Ellis, who was Skyward Sword’s
North American PR Lead, about what it was like inside Nintendo when this bug was discovered. You’ll likely recognise Kit as one half
of Kit and Krysta. He told me: It wasn't long after this glitched started
being noticed by players, and those players started contacting Nintendo, that the company
kicked into action! Game testers worked to quickly isolate what
actions exactly were causing this glitch, developers in Japan worked to fix the code
itself that was causing things to go wrong, and Nintendo’s PR and customer service teams
prepared to brief customers about what the heck was happening! Nintendo of America soon prepared the following
statement, which would be sent to any customers who emailed the company. In it, those customers were told how this
glitch would occur, tips for how to avoid it, but notably, there wasn’t any kind of
actual solution yet. Which is like, great, I’m glad you’re
documenting all that feedback but what about my broken save file?! Needless to say, behind the scenes, Nintendo’s
developers were working on how to fix the issue itself. Number 1) how to stop this glitch from happening
in new copies of the game, and number 2) how to get people who were stuck, unstuck! And that was absolutely the harder of the
two tasks. The Wii lacked any way of patching games after
they were released, so the Zelda team had to come up with another solution for rescuing
stranded players. And that solution came one week later. If Wii games couldn’t be patched, then how
about Nintendo come up with a way of patching them? Enter “The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Save Data Update Channel” also known in Japan as the “Zelda Data Restoration Channel”. That's right - Nintendo launched a brand new
Wii channel - you could download it from the Wii Shop Channel - it cost 0 points, which
is like - yeah, obviously! So Zelda fans could download this Zelda Update
Channel, and it would fix their save data - essentially removing that flag which stopped
the game from loading in the Faron and Eldin quests. That was the one and only purpose of this
entire Wii channel. It’s an unprecedented solution to a problem
like this! But for users who couldn’t install the channel,
Nintendo UK had an alternate solution... That’s right - customers could send their
entire Wii console over to Nintendo, where the patch would be applied, and the console
would be sent back to the customer in question - in the mail! That might sound like a pretty big step to
take, but Skyward Sword was one of Nintendo’s most important games of the year! Again, in the words of Kit Ellis... But what’s surprising, is this isn’t the
first time this has happened in a Zelda game. No, just 5 years earlier, almost the exact
same story of Zelda glitches and softlocks played out once before. That’s right - it’s time to jump back
in time! PART 3: Five years ago Imagine the moment you find out your big new
Zelda game has a game-breaking bug in it, after the game’s already out on store shelves. What an awful feeling, right? Now imagine how the Zelda developers felt
when it happened to them twice! Twilight Princess was released in 2006 on
two consoles simultaneously - Nintendo’s old GameCube system, and their brand new Nintendo
Wii. Originally the game was intended for GameCube
alone, but as the launch of the Wii grew closer, the dev team suddenly had to get the game
running on two different game systems, which is no small task! And perhaps that explains why the game features
not one, but two major game breaking bugs. First is the Cannon Room glitch - if you save
your game in a certain room of the game - this one, featuring the broken Sky Cannon, and
then quit, when you next load your save-file, you won’t be able to leave the room. You’ll be trapped in there, and the only
solution is to start the game over! The other glitch is similar. Earlier in the game, part of the iconic Bridge
of Eldin is destroyed - sucked away into a Twilight Portal. If you save and quit right after that happens,
when you next load your save file you’ll be stuck on the wrong side of the bridge. You’re totally stranded, and the only option
you have is, again, to start the game anew. Now, both of those glitches are fairly specific,
more so than the Skyward Sword glitch which is so very easy to accidentally trigger. But still, if saving and quitting in the wrong
area completely stops you from making any more progress through the game, that is a
huge problem! According to one internet user who phoned
Nintendo of America, Twilight Princess players who encountered one of these game-breaking
glitches could send their physical game disc to Nintendo’s offices in Redmond, Washington,
and Nintendo would send back a new, fixed game disc. And because the game’s save-data is stored
on the Wii hard drive not the disc itself, players should be able to pick up right where
they left off. And of course, Nintendo soon patched this
bug entirely, and so it’s only early launch discs that have these two major glitches. Still, it's not great. The fact that two 3D Zelda games in a row
shipped with massive, game-breaking bugs might give the impression that Nintendo’s bug
testing isn’t very thorough, or even that Zelda's developers are incompetent. But, neither of those is true! The Zelda devs were just extraordinarily unlucky
that twice, or three times, if you include both of Twilight Princess’s issues, major
bugs slipped through the cracks of the otherwise thorough bug testing process. It's hard to believe how much things have
changed in the last 15/20 years, though. Because nowadays, Twilight Princess and Skyward
Sword’s glitches would be much less of a disaster. Nintendo’s developers could easily issue
patches to instantly get rid of the issues, without players having to press a single button. Plus, with social media, warning players not
to do XYZ to avoid triggering a bug is quite a bit easier. With Skyward Sword, the company did what they
could, but there just wasn’t an easy way to spread information to millions of Zelda
fans. Of course, every game has bugs and glitches
of some kind, but neither of the major 3D Zelda releases since Skyward Sword have had
anything quite as game-breaking as the issue that game had. As Kit Ellis said, Nintendo has a lot of pride
in its QA teams, and for good reason! But video games are very big, and finding
and rooting out bugs isn’t a simple task! And sometimes things do slip through the cracks. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video! I hope you enjoyed it. And also a huge thank you to Kit Ellis of
Kit and Krysta fame for helping out with this video by answering a few questions via email. If you enjoy my videos, you'll almost certainly
enjoy Kit and Krysta's weekly podcast - they talk about their experiences working at Nintendo,
gaming news - yeah, it's really interesting! Plus, if you enjoy my videos and want to help
support the channel, then a great way to do that is via Patreon! Patrons get perks like access to my Patron-only
Discord server, bonus monthly videos, behind the scenes update posts... So if any of that sounds interesting, then
definitely go check it out at Patreon.com/ThomasGameDocs. And I'll see you
in the next video! Bye!
