This Penguin Adventure Glitch Was A Weird & Interesting Childhood Memory To Me.
Back when I was a kid, I discovered a Penguin Adventure glitch with a pure coincidence. I remember having the day off from school, and I played my favorite game ever, Penguin Adventure on MSX. At the time, I remember I entered a shop warp in stage 15, and that led me to what I call “the glitch world”. Lucky for me, that’s all I needed to know to replicate it, as the glitch was so easy to trigger. All you had to do to enter the glitch world was to enter the same warp in the shop in stage 15 at 480KM, and you’re off to go.
Many years later, I told my colleague in university about the glitch & showed it to him in action. He never knew about it but found it interesting.
The glitch works on both emulators & real hardware. I originally found it on the original hardware, and I played through it many times on the emulator.
Quickly go to:-
How To Trigger The Glitch World
Simply enter the shop to the right of stage 15 at 480KM. Once you leave the shop, keep pressing down until the penguin enters the warp. That will lead you to a glitched version of stage 17.
The Strange Things That Happen In The Glitch World
First, you are welcomed by rocks on both sides of the stage. It’s as if the game is saying, “Welcome to the weird stage”:-
You face the same flying enemies that appear only in the river or underwater stages:-
In the glitched stage 17, the pits will look weird. Because they are, in fact, tree trunks drawn badly (more on that later). They can even be destroyed if you have the yellow heart invincibility:-
Because the pits are actually tree trunks, if you died during the river stage that was turned into dessert, you would sink underground, as if you had drawn in the water:-
At the end of the stage, you face the Freezaurus boss inside a turn, which is something that never happens in normal gameplay. If you don’t have the red shoes, the penguin will slip to the side:-
You face the Freezaurus boss above the water in stage 20. You have to jump to be able to hit it with the gun:-
You also face the Freezaurus boss underwater in stage 23, and the penguin sprite will glitch during the fight, but the game will work fine nevertheless:-
When you reach the end of stage 24, you face no final boss. That’s because the stages where the boss appears were shifted somehow:-
When you finish the game, you get no ending scene, and you always get the bad ending. No matter how many times you pause the game. I tried getting the good ending in many ways; even editing the pause counter using poke commands doesn’t work:-
My Guess As To Why The Glitch World Happens
Shop warps are different from normal warps in that the environment stays the same as the stage where you entered the warp. e.g. if you entered a shop warp in an ice stage, you would end up in an ice stage, even if the stage at the destination is not an ice stage. That’s why the shop warp in stage 12 leads you to ice in stage 15, despite the fact that stage 15 is supposed to be a dessert. The shop warp in stage 15 leads you to stage 17 (instead of stage 18 like the actual warp at 78KM). Stage 17 is supposed to be a river stage, but the warp forces it to be a desert, but the enemies and the tree trunks stay the same.
The game uses MSX text mode to draw the whole environment, with the exception of the penguin & a few other things, which are drawn using sprites. This works by redefining how the characters look & using them for drawing everything on the stage. Because the characters used to draw the tree trunks are somehow not defined correctly, they appear like badly drawn pits, but they are still deadly. Overall, the game acts as if you’re in the river stage, so if you die during stage 17, which turned into dessert, you sink underground as if you have drowned.
None of that happens in the normal shop warps because in all the other warps, you move from a land stage to another. Plus, the other warps appear to be tested by the developers, unlike this lovely pit, which stayed there after the release of the game. Luckily for us.
The glitch changes the boss’s order somehow, which is why it appears in the stages where it’s never supposed to appear in, like underwater.
Almost No Website On The Internet Talks About This Glitch
For a long time, I tried looking for a discussion or a website that mentions this glitch. I almost failed every time. After a lot of searching, I found it was mentioned briefly in this French MSX site, but without mentioning all the stuff that appears in the later stages (it also states that the pit leads you to stage 16, not 17). None of the other sites I found mention it; this includes the guides that list all kinds of secrets in the game, like the secret bags & all the warps. It could be that search engines & AI chatbots are failing me, or it could be that no one found it interesting enough to mention it or that the guides only cared about the official way to play the game. It could also be that I am one of few people who knew about it in much detail, but I have real doubts about this.
And Finally
I am more than happy to help people know about this fun & strange bug. Especially since it was never mentioned in English-speaking sites (as far as I know). If you knew about the glitch before, let me know; I want to meet someone who did. If this glitch is new to you, you have one more thing to explore in the best MSX game ever.
I hope you found this glitch interesting, and I will see you in another Tech Fairy article. Check out the mobile apps I developed, which I hope you find useful & interesting.