No patches required

Early Super Mario Bros. games may have had their little quirks, but we didn't dare ask for a way to fix them.

Patches. Patches. More patches. Why does it seem almost every day we're hearing about some kind of glitch (sometimes even a fatal one) that one of the latest, greatest (?) consoles or one of their games is having. Example: Just this morning, I saw a story about how Ninja Gaiden II for the Xbox 360 has sold more than a million copies, touting Microsoft and Tecmo for reaching this milestone. Still, the forum associated with the story managed to creep into the direction of - surprise! - patches. I don't own the game or a 360, but apparently one guy knew of a patch that messed the game up, while another suggested the game needed patching to fix some of its quirks.

Now I don't know how long these people have been playing video games, but when I was growing up in the era of Atari and NES consoles, glitches were cool. They were those little tricks we actually tried to make the game do - Like how on Excitebike you could make your bike jump out the top of the screen and come out the bottom. Or how on Super Mario Bros., you could jump on that Koopa shell like a thousand times and get a ton of extra lives. We lived for those things.

Today, games have to be too perfect. And when they're not, people want a fix for it. While I enjoyed the little quirks of video games of old, I can understand the pro-patch player's argument. If I spent more than 300 bucks on a console and 60 more on a game for it, I'd want nothing short of perfection as well. But at 8 or even 16 bits, perfection was quite difficult to come by.

Any search engine will lead you to pages upon pages of glitches and cheats for video games, both old and new. But in 1985, there wasn't any way to download a software patch for a console game. What you got was what you got. With today's online access via console, fixing the little snafus developers don't see right away is a simple task. Me, well, I needed Justin Bailey's help and the Mega Man "pause" trick, too.