I’m a real big Zelda fan and today I came across this site where people discover/discuss about glitches in Zelda to beat the game as fast as possible, also known as Speedruns. There is a section in ‘Zelda Ocarina of Time’ called Reverse Bottle Adventure and it explains how they use a glitch in the game to modify a value in a memory address. It can write any value to certain addresses quite reliably just by switching though various items. If used correctly, one can modify a value in a certain address to make the game ‘think’ that all stages are cleared except Ganon’s Castle, and upon saving and restarting the game, one can go straight to Ganon’s Castle without beating ANY bosses. That’s quite awesome I must say.

There was another case a long time ago in Starcraft where one can generate a specially crafted map to write any value to any address which extends the map’s features. However, running on a PC, it posed a serious threat to all the starcraft users(naively downloading and playing a malicious map without knowing the game is executing arbitrary code injected by the map) so Blizzard ended up patching it, and the Starcraft Map making community, mainly the people who spent lots of time creating a map with the extended features went completely berserk cursing Blizzard for the next couple months. I just thought it was interesting to see hardcore gamers use a flaw in the game to their advantage and end up with some arbitrary memory write vulnerability.