I wrote a piece for Crispy Gamer this week about glitches from video-game history that, in my opinion, actually made the games better.

I’ve watched this video of the Super Mario Bros. minus-world bug a number of times now. I find myself anthropomorphizing the game, standing in awe of it, feeling sorry for it. Look at the glitch and its aftermath from the program’s perspective. How does it continue to work after everything goes so FUBAR? I can’t help but admire the fact that it doesn’t simply give up and crash (i.e., off itself—not “Hello, world!” but “Goodbye, cruel world!”). There seems to be a stubborn, resilient intelligence at work. The game’s entire world is thrown out of whack—the rules are thrown out—but it tries to soldier on, fights to make sense of its situation.

This imagined psychodrama has two different endings. In the Japanese version, the game succeeds in working its way out of the crisis. If Mario completes the three glitched minus worlds, you are returned to the title screen and everything is mercifully returned to normal. But in the U.S. version—this is the haunting part—the minus world is an endless underwater stage that loops back on itself. Neither Mario nor the game can escape this glitch-induced purgatory.

Of course, you could say that the only thing at work here is a few shifted memory registers and some abnormal pixels; there’s no underlying meaning to any of it. Careful how far you take that line of thinking, though. You may not like where you end up.