Out-of-Bounds and Out of Excuses: Ranking Video Game Sequence Breaks From 'Certified Genius' to 'I Softlocked Myself Again'
There is a very specific kind of person who finishes a video game and thinks, okay, but what if I skipped all of that? These people are speedrunners. They are also, depending on your perspective, either the greatest minds the gaming community has ever produced or the reason developers now spend an extra six months patching things nobody was supposed to find.
We love them either way.
Today we're slapping a full tier list on the most iconic video game sequence breaks, soft locks, and out-of-bounds exploits ever discovered. Our ranking criteria: How satisfying is it to actually pull off? How game-breaking is it on a scale of "minor inconvenience to the developers" to "this invalidates the entire narrative"? And most importantly — is it so clean that Nintendo, FromSoftware, or whoever should have just shipped it as a feature?
Buckle up. The load zone is right through this wall.
S-Tier: Sequence Breaks That Slap So Hard They Should Be Canon
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Wrong Warp
If you have spent more than fifteen minutes in speedrunning circles, you already know. The Wrong Warp is the crown jewel of OoT glitches, allowing runners to manipulate the game's internal scene index and essentially teleport to Ganon's Tower without completing... most of the game. It's the gaming equivalent of skipping to the last chapter of a novel, reading the ending, and somehow that being considered a valid literary experience. The execution requires frame-perfect inputs, a deep understanding of how the game loads memory, and the patience of someone who has clearly made peace with their life choices. Absolute cinema. S-Tier, no debate.
Celeste — Hyper Dashing and Extended Hyper Chains
Here's the thing about Celeste's movement tech — it's so elegant that the developers kept it in on purpose after the speedrunning community discovered it. Hyper dashes, extended hypers, and wavedashes are all part of the game's assisted and advanced movement vocabulary now. That's not a glitch. That's a game designer looking at the community and saying "yeah, actually, that's cooler than what we had." Respect. Peak S-Tier energy.
A-Tier: Legitimately Impressive, Slightly Evil
Super Mario 64 — Parallel Universes (0xA Press)
Look, pannenkoek2012's video explaining the 0xA press challenge is one of the greatest pieces of content the internet has ever produced. The explanation of parallel universes — floating-point math errors creating ghost versions of Mario's position data — is so absurdly technical that it stopped being about Mario and started being about the nature of computation itself. Does the average person ever need to know this? Absolutely not. Is it one of the most impressive rabbit holes in gaming history? Without question. A-Tier because it's brilliant but also completely unhinged.
Resident Evil Village — The Duke Skip
Skipping an entire merchant interaction in a survival horror game by clipping through geometry to grab key items early feels like exactly the kind of thing that would make a game designer cry into their coffee. The Duke deserved better. Still a clean skip, though. A-Tier.
Dark Souls — Asylum Demon Skip
The very first boss in Dark Souls — the game's opening statement, its big "welcome to suffering" handshake — can be completely bypassed by rolling off a ledge at a specific angle and landing in a previously inaccessible area. FromSoftware built a game about perseverance and consequence, and the community's first order of business was skipping the tutorial boss entirely. Iconic. The lore implications are staggering if you think about them too hard. A-Tier.
B-Tier: Solid Finds, But You're Explaining This to Your Friends for Twenty Minutes
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — Stasis Launch
Using the Stasis rune to freeze an object, beating it with a weapon to store kinetic energy, then riding it like a rocket? That's not a glitch, that's physics. Beautiful, unhinged physics. The issue is it takes a solid explanation to get a non-speedrunner to understand why this works, and by the time you're done talking, they've wandered off to go climb a mountain. B-Tier — great tech, rough elevator pitch.
Pokémon Red/Blue — Mew Glitch
A classic. Getting Mew before you're supposed to have any business owning a Mew by manipulating a trainer's line-of-sight and the game's encounter data is the kind of thing that made childhoods feel genuinely magical. It's technically brilliant and historically significant. It lands in B-Tier only because at this point, literally everyone knows about it, which strips away some of the chaos points.
C-Tier: Technically a Skip, Spiritually a Coin Flip
Any Clip-Through-a-Wall That Requires Forty-Seven Attempts
You've seen these. The runner spends six minutes in a corner, wiggling at a very specific angle, occasionally clipping halfway into geometry before being spit back out. When it works, the chat explodes. When it doesn't, the runner just keeps going like nothing happened, which is somehow more unsettling. These are C-Tier — the concept is great, the execution variance is giving anxiety.
GTA V — Various Out-of-Bounds Map Exploits
Grand Theft Auto has so much geometry that finding holes in it almost doesn't feel like an achievement. There are entire Discord servers dedicated to cataloguing every spot where a motorcycle can phase through a wall in Los Santos. Respect the hustle, but the sheer volume devalues the individual discovery. C-Tier.
D-Tier: You Found Something, But What Was the Cost
Any Sequence Break That Immediately Softlocks Your Save File
We've all been there. You watched a video. You tried the skip. The game froze. The music looped. You closed the application. You reopened it. The save file said something cryptic. You started over. This tier exists to honor the fallen — the brave runners who discovered the hard way that some walls are load-bearing. D-Tier not because the attempt wasn't noble, but because the result was a corrupted file and a long conversation with yourself about your hobbies.
Final Verdict: The Speedrunning Community Might Actually Be Running This Simulation
Here's the honest take: sequence breaking is one of the most genuinely creative things the gaming community does. It's not cheating — it's archaeology. These players dig through the geometry of a game and find things the developers buried, forgot, or never imagined anyone would look for. Sometimes it breaks immersion. Sometimes it breaks the entire game. Sometimes, like with Celeste, it makes the game better.
The tier list shakes out like this: elegant, technically demanding skips that respect the game's internal logic while obliterating its intended structure are S-Tier every time. Anything that requires a fifteen-minute YouTube explanation to understand earns bonus points for the content alone. And anything that ends with a corrupted save is a cautionary tale we tell at the speedrunning campfire.
Now if you'll excuse us, we have a wall to clip through. Third attempt. It's definitely going to work this time.
