Minus World

Level -0: NEGATORY!

Sometimes the best level is one the designers never made. Minus Worlds are areas of the map a player can reach only by glitching or hacking. These secret areas do not typically correspond to valid, intentional level data at all - it is only by dint of the game's programming that these 'junk data' manifest as a mostly playable level.

With the advent of modern 3D games, this has mostly fallen by the wayside, as random data would never create anything remotely close to a functioning 3D mesh. However, the collision detection in some 3D games is suspect; in some of them, you can actually leave the game world and explore a weird wasteland of partly implemented scenery and flickering polygons. In that case, the level is still there; the player has simply found a way to be where the game doesn't expect the player to be. (See Dummied Out.)

Related to Kill Screen. If a sprite appears in the game that was made out of similar 'junk data', see The Missingno. If a Minus World is used for Sequence Breaking, see Fake Skill.

Examples of Minus World include:

Note: non-Video Game examples are at the bottom of the page.

Action-Adventure Games

Action Games

  • The Guardian Legend also has a vast Minus World you can explore at your leisure but it doesn't seem to be nearly as well-known as the other examples above.

Adventure Games

  • There are many interesting experiences and fights to be had if you can get beyond the walls of the Dimension of Death in King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. You can go all sorts of otherwise inaccessible places in many other worlds too using cheats to teleport.

Arcade Games

  • Due to its' Kobayashi Mario nature, the fan reimagination of Super Bomberman 2 has a legit way of accessing the pretty literal world with the number blanked out... Well, if only you can call blazing through all-same twenty-one level of hell, which includes five skull enemies [1] and no powerups at all legit. Infiniting your Bomber's lives helps a lot in discovering a stage named "-1" with the same stuff happening during and after it. Have fun messing up with it!

Driving Games

  • Using the drive on water and speed mods for Midtown Madness 2, once can explore areas beyond the roads of London and San Francisco. Because these areas were never meant to be explored, there are holes in the terrain, flat areas hidden from view during normal gameplay by buildings, and in the San Francisco map, part of Alcatraz and Marin can be visited using the drive on water hack.
  • The city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Driver is shown during the credits, unfinished in many places, and can only be accessed in-game by hacking. It was apparently meant to be a playable level, but Dummied Out due to time constraints.
    • Falling into the skybox in the sequel normally registers as a Bottomless Pit death, but with a certain glitch, you can survive the fall and drive around in the void.
  • The "underworld" in San Francisco Rush and its sequels, which you can fall into by glitching off the track.
  • The void outside the track in Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.
    • That is, assuming that the entire game doesn't qualify.
  • Go far enough off the track area in Track Mania and you'll encounter in order: the background scenery with simple graphics; the edge where the skybox meets the ground; a black void beyond the skybox, or in the stadium environment you can fall off the edge of the map and land on the bottom of the spherical skybox. Going beyond the skybox will show the sun/moon as a sprite in the distance and a field of 3D clouds stretching to infinity. Interestingly, the sides and bottom of the stadium map terrain are actually modelled and textured just to ensure you wouldn't see any graphical glitches while falling off the world and hitting the bottom of the sky below. The outside of the skybox is even textured. With the right tricks using a third party replacement for the track editor, you can build tracks in this twilight zone.
  • In Vette!, you could sometimes glitch through the walls and drive outside the game world, although an Invisible Wall beyond that prevents you from going into infinity like Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. Also, since the game uses Dynamic Loading, you can outrun the load with the faster cars and end up in a glitch world.
  • In Gran Turismo 3, you can break out of the track on some courses and drive around in the scenery (which of course, is not solid). If you have a fully-powered and properly-tuned Escudo you can cause the speedometer to overflow to 2147483647 mph(the highest 32-bit signed integer) and the game freezes. GT 2 also had a couple Dummied Out courses that could be found with a Gameshark.

Fighting Games

  • In the Netherrealm area of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, on or around the initial stairway, it is possible to fall under the landscape while engaging in aerial maneuvers. The camera will zoom into or slightly past the ground and your character(s) will be completely hidden from view. The only indication of where you are will be a peculiar blue triangle which apparently marks your position. While sometimes it is possible to bumble your way out of this literal minus world, most of the time the only course of action is to reset.
    • Falling through the ground is very common.
  • The original Mortal Kombat, at least the SNES version, has a duplicate version of the Courtyard with Goro's battle music, and if you perform a Fatality here, the game glitches up and crashes. Maybe you were intended to fight Goro in the courtyard?
  • Mortal Kombat again, and this time, the Mega Drive port of part 3. After the successful battle against Shao Kahn, the second player should join in (although his cursor won't appear on the screen at all) right when Kahn's palace is shown. After the player is selected, you will need to fight him again, but on the same background you saw before hitting the Start button.

First-Person Shooter

  • Trespasser had a debug level accessible by a cheat. It contained a bunch of items, one enemy and all the weapons in the game. The in-game levels also had several blocked-off areas which contained extensive scenery, including the basics of an entire extra level; the game had been rushed to completion, and the extra level had been scrapped before completion.
  • The monsters in Quake are not spawned to order as you progress through a level, but teleported into position from an ordinarily unreachable room that's chock full of baddies. You can fly to the room with a noclip cheat and provoke them into massacring each other for kicks.
  • In the Unreal games you can find each level's skybox by using a noclip cheat. If you then use the spawn cheat to put monsters into these rooms and return to the regular level the spawned beasts will appear huge, filling the sky!
  • In Turok: Dinosaur Hunter there's a pit in the "beginner" area where you can squeeze into one of the corners when you fall in and get stuck. If you keep looking up and down repeatedly it will somehow propel you up above the clouds.
  • There was a bizarre room in Jedi Knight which was accessed by flying through the rafters in Morgan Katarn's house.
  • There are many weird normally-inaccessible areas of Halo levels that can nevertheless be accessed by grenade jumping, hijacking a Banshee, or other glitches, eg Assault on the Control Room, Outskirts, and Metropolis (where you can find a giant soccer ball, etc). On Assault on the Control Room, you can also glitch your way into one of the pulse generator rooms from Two Betrayals, however, the only way out is suicide.
    • In the "Delta Halo" level of Halo 2, it is also possible to drive a vehicle up a particular slope to gain access to the surrounding terrain and the lakebed, while falling into the lake normally results in death.
  • Deus Ex Invisible War has an out-of-world example in Kairo. When searching for the hellfire boltthrower, the player has to reach a roof and then go in to find the item. If the player now instead goes further, there comes a point where the player can stand on top of the highest roof, look into a purple void and see all the interiors from outside. While it is impossible to go into them, one can jump on them and run around in what would logically be a wall. The music is out in this region as well. The only solution to leave this space once entered is suicide by jumping to death or not jumping from the roof at all.
    • This is also similarily possible in Lower Seattle near the lofts. When jumping on the dumpster after throwing stuff on it, it should be possible to reach the roof, and look into a purple void. Unlike Kairo, there are no interiors, and jumping to death is not necessary.
  • In Borderlands it is possible to park vehicles very close to certain cliffs, exit the vehicle and pass through the cliff, allowing the player to run around on the expansive but fairly featureless 'background' landscape. Until finding the actual edge of the world and falling for a long, long, long time to your death.
  • The buggy Medal of Honor (2010) has a huge glitch that can turn an entire level into Minus World (the floors disappear), allowing you to fall into the skybox (which is a Bottomless Pit).
    • Allied Assault has an empty level labeled "void", which is what its name suggests. The game autosaves here when you access the Bazooka-Med bonus mission, and when you reload, it skips to the King Tiger level.
  • Jumping off the edge of the world in one particular level in Darkest of Days treats you to the true nature of the level's skybox: specifically, that it's actually a picture of a stormy Midwest plain. The sedan the photographer drove to get there is plainly visible.
  • Sniper Path Of Vengeance allows you to fly out of the map by exploiting a glitch in the jumping function. You never fall into the skybox, though - you just keep walking on the same (invisible) plane that the map was laid out on. Especially funny on the level with the helicopter.
  • In Doom and other 2.5D shooters nocliping out of the map will cause the Hall of Mirrors efect where every thing repeats.

Miscellaneous Games

  • In Action 52, if you fall down a hole in Cheetahmen, you end up in Level 9, which is a room with a 1-up. If you exit the room, you go to Level 10, which is garbled and you fall to your death.
    • In the second level of Thrusters, the screen starts blinking, and you can't progress any further. If you crash here, your ship scatters into a glitchy mess that can still move around. It can be avoided only with a right emulator and rom.
    • The "lost levels" of Cheetahmen 2, which are Remixed Levels from Cheetahmen 1 where the music is all glitched, and your Cheetahman is invincible for some reason. Once you play through here, the game locks up, just like at the end of Level 4.
    • The third level of Lollipops, with its musical mind rape, that results from the game interpreting other game data as music.
    • The last level of Ninja Assault is populated by Missingnos, and you're stuck in limbo at the end.
  • Dance Dance Revolution Extreme has several messed-up or Dummied Out Challenge step charts that can be found with the "Oni glitch".
  • In Winx Club, it's possible to go through a rock in the first level and walk onto the sky; if you walk far enough into the skybox, you disappear. You can get into a (small) normally-inaccessible area as well.
    • It's also possible to jump into the air and land on it as though it was solid in one section.

MMORPGs

  • The Arachnos Lab maps in City of Villains is a 3D example of this. Though most of the holes have been closed up by now, it was possible to drop through the metal mesh surfaces and explore the pipe dream like areas that extended quite far beyond the parts of the map you are normally confined within. This was an annoyance too as often NPC foes would sometimes fall through these holes, making a "defeat all" mission impossible to complete.
    • There was an Explorer badge in City of Heroes which was difficult to reach through normal means, and the preferred method of picking it up was finding a particular spot in a hillside where you could manage to slip through the mesh, then fly under the world through grey mist and weird planes to the badge's approximate location.
  • World of Warcraft has some unfinished zones as well as places where it's possible to fall outside the game world. Most of such places have been made inaccessible though. Examples include a village of dancing trolls (near Darkshore, if memory serves), Mount Hyjal, the Ironforge Airport (you actually fly above it if you take the gryphon from anywhere within southern Eastern Kingdoms to the northern Eastern Kingdoms, but actually having time to see what's going on is more fun. Hint: Dwarves killing ice trolls. Fun!), and an area under Stormwind that was basically just unfinished texture patches. You'll usually get teleported out of these areas by a GM and sanctioned for entering them, which has led many players to question Blizzard's decision to still leave areas such as the dancing troll village 'accessible' (to be fair, Mount Hyjal shouldn't have been accessible without using exploits or wall climbing).
    • The latest expansion, Cataclysm, plans on making some of these areas accessible. Namely Hyjal, the Dancing Troll Village, and the Ironforge Airport.
    • Other notable areas include a prototype of Outland, the Emerald Dream, Karazhan catacombs, fake Zul'Gurub, an untextured prototype of Zin-Azshari, fake Northrend, sealed-off pieces of Silvermoon, GM Island and Developers' Island. Most of those can only be accessed via third-party tools.
    • There are also myriad ways to "fall through the world." placing you in a bizarre freefall where you can run around under the continent, but not cast anything or recall back to the real world. Sometimes the game will detect this glitch and drop you to a set area that seems to be the official graveyard for Minus World (For the alliance this is westfall's deadmines graveyard).
      • One of the weirdest was the "Dwarf Farm Tunnel" in Wetlands. Originally, there was a Dwarf farm on the northern face of the mountain containing Ironforge. Up the road from it was a tunnel entrance that, when entered, would cause you to fall through the world and into an area of blank sky. It was the same as falling off of Outland. You would fall until you eventually died. If you were stupid enough to fall in as a ghost, your only hope was to pray that the weird circular movement you moved in would somehow launch you back up onto land. Of course it was a little difficult to get to this tunnel, and as of Cataclysm, it's sealed off.
      • And now with the launch of Cataclysm allowing flight in old world, if you do manage to glitch beneath the terrain you can fly around safely down there. Dangers abound, however. Flying into a "No flight allowed" region will dismount you to your death, and water seems to extend infinitely down.
    • This troper once experienced a Blink failure in Ulduar where his mage blinked through the floor in the Conservatory of Life and after a short fall through blank space landed right into inactive content that looked like a deserted version of the portal room underneath Wyrmrest temple.
      • That place is a part of the Yogg-Saron encounter, when you enter his mind.
  • The MMO Asheron's Call takes place on an island surrounded by impassible water. The walls in some places would come together at the angles, allowing you to pass between them and explore the normally inaccessible area of the game world.

Platformers

  • The original minus world from Super Mario Bros. is the Trope Namer. The player can reach it by entering a pipe in the first Warp Zone after walking through a wall (thus, before the Warp Zone message appears). It consisted of the level design of the Water Level 2-2 repeating over and over. It's called the "Minus World" because the World number is 36. In this case, "36" is too long to be shown, leaving a blank space and the dash that normally follows it. It's then followed by the level number, "1", showing up as -1.
    • There are also many, many Game Genie codes for Super Mario Bros. that can allow you to play seemingly random levels taken from other data in the ROM (though many of these aren't actually playable, and several more still aren't beatable).
    • The Updated Rerelease for the Famicom Disk System (never released outside of Japan) replaced the Minus World with a different series of levels. World -1 uses the design of 1-3 with underwater tiles and different enemies, world -2 is identical to 7-3, and world -3 is 4-4 with underground tiles and underwater enemies.
    • Super Mario Bros 3 also contained several unfinished Dummied Out levels, including a rising and sinking ice level. One of these was a copy of World 7-8 with a The Missingno enemy. There's also World 0, which is complete garbage.
    • Several people have done Romhacks to place a flag and castle at the end of 8-4, right before the Bowser fight. The result is even worse than the minus worlds.
    • Super Mario World has numerous iterations (about 150 or so) of a "TEST" level embedded in the ROM data, with a sprite not seen elsewhere in the game.
    • World 9 in The Lost Levels is one big reference to the FDS minus world.
    • Mario Forever, a PC remake, starts up with a world similar to 1-2 with save states. If you go through that and right, it allows you to pick a mushroom or a flower right off the bat (at cost of 1 and 2 lives respectively), and if you go even further, you can find a pipe that leads to the world named "www.gry.o2.pl" with enemies taking a strangely human shape.
  • The Metroid games have this: the original Metroid, its sequel for the Game Boy, and the Prime games have these, generally called "secret worlds". In the NES Metroid, this is also abused for Speed Runs.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 infamously had four such levels: Wood Zone, Genocide City Zone, Dust Hill Zone, and Hidden Palace Zone (yes, you read that right). Game Genie codes would get you into a very glitchy version of each of them, but gamers have kindly taken the time and effort to pick apart the game for the graphics needed to reconstruct the levels in full.
    • Of these, only Hidden Palace Zone's data is widely known to be in Sonic The Hedgehog 2's final release, the music accessible via the Sound Test (Track 10) but the level itself only accessible through Game Genie codes (ACLA-ATD 4 along with level select, after which you have to hit A+Start to get the level select menu and select Death Egg or Emerald Hill to be sent there), and even then with severely glitched graphics, and a large possibility of falling through what is supposed to be the ground unless you use the debug code to keep from falling. The beta version contained a more complete, if still largely unfinished, Hidden Palace Zone, as well as an even less finished Wood Zone. Trying to access Dust Hill Zone sends the player to the final's Mystic Cave Zone (although with a slightly different layout), while accessing either act of Genocide City causes the player to fall to his death, as the level is blank and created as a placeholder for future levels. Barring the names and a few pieces of concept art, there is nothing in any version of the game as for Genocide City or Dust Hill.
      • Genocide City was supposed to be called Cyber City, and would have been a single act. Its map was repurposed for Metropolis Zone Act 3.
      • Death Egg was originally going to be two acts, as evident by the empty second act in the beta.
      • And let's not forget the many Wild Mass Guessings that the beta sparked on forums dedicated to prototypes and hacking of Sonic games.
      • Wood Zone seems to have a few leftovers in the final, which can be accessed via Game Genie codes (the link here also includes the full code for Hidden Palace Zone)
      • Sonic 3 has the normally-inaccessable Gold Chaos Emerald stage, inserted as an 8-bit placeholder.
      • In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you can glitch your way into Knuckles' part of Lava Reef as Hyper Sonic, where you can trigger further glitches, such as ending up back in Act 1 with Act 2's palette (like SMB's minus world, there's no escape other than resetting), and turning Sonic into Blue Knuckles. These glitches can also be performed in other acts with certain cheat codes enabled.
      • While you can't access much else that was planned for Dust Hill, there is an object placeable in Debug mode in Mystic Cave Zone that's invisible when you're going through the various things in the level. When you place it, it looks like a bunch of vertical blue lines. It behaves exactly as the crocodile badnik that was planned for Dust Hill would have.
    • Sonic Adventure 2 Battle had a gap in the invisible wall in the Chao Garden, where, by somersaulting or bouncing, you could leave the garden area and enter a big black void where the Chao Garden itself appears as a blue cylinder. Getting back inside may or may not be possible, but you can still exit the garden from the pause screen.
  • In Mega Man 2, it was possible to trick the boss door for Air Man's stage by standing on a rising Item 1 placed next to it while fighting the boss. The boss door would open from the inside and the screen would scroll over beyond the boss—to the second level of Wily's fortress, using the Airman stage tileset! The boss doesn't load.
    • This can also be done in Heatman's stage, which takes you to the first level of Wily's fortress with the Heatman's stage tileset.
  • Castlevania series examples: Symphony of the Night, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow have their own Minus Areas outside of the Chaotic Realm:
    • Symphony lets Alucard abuse his familiar spells to warp through walls into areas outside the normal castle map. As the game covers two different castles, the max percentage of map coverage should be 200%, but glitch abuse has managed to more than double this amount.
    • Aria allowed Soma to use the Devil and Kali souls to clip through certain low-hanging platforms to reach areas of the castle out of bounds, which would cause him to warp repeatedly if he did it correctly, until the game "clips" him into a stable place.
      • If you do this trick right, you could do this to clip into the Chaotic Realm and beat the game as soon as you get the "walk under water" soul.
      • Fun Fact: Doing this correctly in a New Game+ with the map fully explored increases the map reveal to up to 100.3%.
    • Dawn featured the Succubus glitch, which could also put dummy and glitched items into Soma's pockets, besides the out-of-bounds travelling it allowed.
    • The staircase glitch in Castlevania 3's Clock Tower. A similar glitch can be performed in the Swamp area.
  • Press "0" on the starting screen of Syobon Action, I dare you!
    • If you manage to beat the first level of the minus world it takes you to a minus world version of the second level, I haven't yet discovered if you can beat the game in minusmode.
      • It is wholly possible to beat the Syobon action in this mode, in two ways. You can either beat every randomized level like normal or successfully pick up the sword item that normally only appears in the castle without dying to get the ending credits to show up. Syobon Action 2, on the other hand, does not seem possible to beat without the sword in this mode.
  • Indie platformer Eversion is the absolute epitome of this trope with TEN minus worlds. The normally accessible levels are worlds 1 through 8. World 9 is a black world where the enemies look like you and everything else except you is invisible. And then there are worlds 0 and -1, which are completely unplayable (The computer usually freezes if you try to load them) and consist of two different sets of glitched graphics. 0 has a black background and -1 has a purple background. Worlds -2 through -8 are versions of worlds 7 though 1 where everything is invisible except you and there are no enemies or gems.
  • Super Mario 64 has the Black Room of Death, a small-but-nonetheless-too-large-to-exist-where-it-does room inside the front wall of the castle. It's actually the darkness behind the castle door, where the game transitions to the next area. Via a glitch, you can fall into the black space, and when you go through the door, you end up in the other black void behind the door inside the castle. From this side, you can actually glitch through the section of wall next to the door and end up back in the castle.
  • The first part of the original Duke Nukem for DOS (again, not the 3D versions) had a glitchy area that you fell into if you were missing some file(s) containing the later level data.
  • In the NES game piece of unlicensed garbage Silent Assault, if you jump off the top of the screen in Level 2, you end up in Level 3.
  • Older Than the NES Mountain King for the 2600 has a glitch world that can be accessed by a very precise jump at the top of the level. Toggling the console switches will mess things up even further.
  • Super Meat Boy had these implemented in the game intentionally - you could get to a glitched screen and an extra level in each chapter, for seven in total, by rescuing Bandage Girl when she randomly had graphic glitches and weird beeping. Once you made it to each chapter's minus world, you could go back by moving to the left of each chapter's first level in the light world.
  • It appears the Glitch Gremlin made a deal with the developers of the Mega Man Shoddy Knockoff Product Rocman X (aka Thunder Blaster Man), as some of the levels can get totally messed up (eg scrambled graphics and walking on Bottomless Pits) and nearly unplayable.
  • Parodied in Stinkoman 20 X 6. "Level -0" (which the title character gets to by blowing a hole in the middle of a normally impassable wall) features a random assortment of enemies and platforms, many of which don't behave quite normally.
  • In Bugdom, if you jumped against a wall at the right angle, you'd end up in a landscape similar to the one you'd just left, but totally empty of enemies and items. If you kept walking, the landscaping would eventually give way to a white void.
  • In the original DOS Prince of Persia, one can access one with the help of cheat codes.[2] The prince must die and be resurrected right next to a wall on the right side. A good place to try this on is the right edge of the 3rd level. Just climb up, go right until you see the wall and jump down, then press "R" to resurrect.
  • The first three Commander Keen games have many of these. If you use the no clipping cheat in the world map, wander off the edge of the screen and continually hit the key for entering normal levels, you will sometimes enter a minus level. These include the levels shown on the title screen, which don't actually correspond to any actually in the game, and levels composed of random gibberish.

Puzzle Games

  • Portal: the final cutscene takes the camera through a system of pipes leading to a room with the cake and the Companion Cube. The level geometry for this is part of the final level, and it's possible, without noclipping, to reach this room AND return to the main level area with the cube, by way of a glitch where firing both portals at some surfaces would cause the second portal to bounce around to the other side of the wall, letting you glitch through the wall and out of the map. Along with the bizarre fact that all of the external walls of the map appear to conduct portals, this lets you reach the room and carry your beloved Companion Cube all the way as far as the grille just before the final boss.
  • Portal: The Flash Version: using the console cheat "gotolevel X" where X is any number but 1-42 (here level 41 is cake and 42 is the credits), weird things happen. Level 0, marked with a "?" mark, is a level that is nothing but surfaces, with the wall in the background saying "zomg owned!", and any other level makes you go through the level in which you typed in the command over and over and over again.

Real-Time Strategy

  • Syndicate Wars had a few unrelated missions left on the disc from aborted plans for an Unguided campaign, if you knew how to access them.

Role-Playing Games

  • In Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, Glitch City is the Fan Nickname for any of several areas consisting of a jumbled assortment of tiles with highly glitchy behavior, where some very unusual wild Pokémon can be encountered. Getting to Glitch City requires using a save trick to walk out of Safari Zone (impossible in later generations) and traveling to another area (preferably the Cinnabar Island coast) before reaching the limit of 500 steps.
    • The "Mystery Zone" is another example, which occurs when one walks into an inaccessible area through the "Tweaking Glitch" or cheating in Diamond/Pearl.
  • Fallout 2 You can access the unimplemented Den area by pressing 3 when choosing your destination on the town map. You can whack Anna's double, get a Shovel from Smitty's evil twin's shack, and in case you're wondering, if you kill everyone here no one in the "real" Den will care. It's important to note that this does not occur on either the Restoration project or the Mega Mod, as they use the unused map for the Den residential area.
    • Better (or worse?) yet, there is an unfinished interior area for the Hubologists' faulty spacecraft, missing textures and likewise accessible from the San Francisco town map.
  • Fallout 3: Residents of Megaton could periodically disappear to an exterior cell that wasn't connected to the rest of the overland world, but could be reached through console codes. It was also possible to port into the in-game location where the opening cinematic was shot, proving that it was done purely in-engine; this was also disconnected from the rest of the city.
  • There is no "death" in Ultima VII. Creatures were removed from the game field proper and replace with a corpse/container item. The "dead" creature was taken to an area known as the land of the dead. Legitimately, it was not possible to visit there, but hex hacking of the save game could temporarily take the Avatar there. Or simply use the teleportation or noclip cheat.
    • There is also Alagnar's other house, which could be seen through his crystal ball when viewing his death at the hands of Elizabeth and Abraham. It is hidden in a mountain to the far southeast.
    • Likewise, Ultima VII part two has numerous secret areas hidden under mountains, including cut scenes, another Land Of The Dead, and a copy of the starting area with a staircase to a mountaintop.
  • On older computers (like C64 old) Ultima IV came on four floppy disks which had to be swapped during gameplay to access different parts of the world. By placing the wrong disk in the drive, for example inserting the dungeon disk when the game called for the city disk, the PC would end up in a glitchy-but-navigable world devoid of foes but fairly laden with treasure chests. Alas, this troper doesn't remember much more about the trick world after more than 25 years.
  • In the first Avatar: The Last Airbender game, you can fall into one of these in Omashu.
  • Final Fantasy VII has a testing room that can be accessed with a code. It has the ability to put Aerith into places she cannot normally reach, further fueling the rumors that her death could be undone.
  • As mentioned on the Dummied Out page, the original Breath of Fire has several Minus World-type or unfinished areas that can be accessed with the Dr. Warp developers tool, obtained by hacking the ROM.
  • The super loot bags in Wasteland (themselves a Good Bad Bug) can cause weird map errors. Exits may deposit you in the wrong area: for instance, leaving Fat Freddy's once led into Base Cochise. Another time, all the slot machines one at a time turned into cheap doctor's offices. There seems to be no pattern to these bugs and some leave the game unplayable. Mess around at your own risk.
  • In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, there are some mountains seperating Cyrodiil from Morrowind, but by riding a horse up the mountain near Hero Hill and following a 'path' of sorts, it is possible to reach the top and go down the other side. What awaits you on the other side? Not Morrowind (although mods can allow you to go from Oblivion to Morrowind), but a massive randomly generated landscape. What lies beyond the mountain will always be different for everybody. The map will eventually end and dropping off the edge of the map will take you to even more landscape to explore.
  • The original Fable (i.e. before The Lost Chapters fixed it) had a glitch involving the shovel item that allowed you to reverse through walls and the like. Using the glitch to go off the edge of the map in certain areas (e.g. through the back of the tent in the trader camp before Oakvale) allowed access to incomplete map areas never utilised in-game. These areas actually look more like real landscape than the utilised game areas do due to the lack of artificial boundaries, but since they were never meant to be navigated, one has to get through them by very glitchy movement.
  • Two Worlds 2 has an entire large island that's supposed to be inaccessible, but there is one spot in the cliffs and invisible walls where it's possible to slip through and explore the mostly barren landscape, including doing some Sequence Breaking in areas you're only supposed to travel to later in the game.

Shoot Em Ups

  • Area 0 in Zanac, which has a featureless gray background, uses Area 12's music, loops indefinitely, and lacks any weapon powerups.
  • R-Type: If you get killed just as your shot kills the first boss, when you respawn, the "stage clear" music will play and your ship will be on auto-pilot, causing you to be killed again. Then on your next life, although you're still in Stage 1, the game will switch to Stage 2's graphics!

Wide Open Sandbox

  • Grand Theft Auto III has the "Liberty City Underworld", a small area with buildings where the opening cinematic takes place.
    • Accessible through the use of the "Dodo," a plane that, as the name implies, had its wings cut-off after being confiscated from a drug-runner. It had just enough wing area left such that it could make short hops (the game's physics engine treated this as if it were a car going off a ramp in a really weird way) and a particularly skilled player might be able to successfully "fly" it to the Underworld.
  • Grand Theft Auto Vice City has a glitch where you could use a helicopter to fly under Diaz's mansion (easily done once you take over the mansion and collect enough hidden packages to unlock the helicopter there) and fly beneath the sea and land. Some Easter Eggs are more easy to find this way.
    • There was also a glitch involving driving a golfcart into/inside the mall. IIRC, if you could get it through the entrance, the mall turned into a weird Blue Negative World.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there was a mission where you had to fly on a jet to Liberty City, which was really just a small area situated on the northwest corner of the map, so high up physically that there's normally no way to get there without the mission triggering it. However, there are several methods that one can use (either with glitching or by using a Game Shark) to get there. You can even walk around in parts of the area which you never use in the mission, but are there anyway for the cutscene - just be careful, because it was never intended for use beyond the one mission, and most of the street outside isn't actually there. Unless you have a jetpack with you, coupled with the unlimited height Game Shark code, you'll fall through and end up out in the middle of the ocean back in San Andreas.
    • San Andreas also had a whole weird, trippy section of the game world reachable by using the jetpack in a particular store, or during a sneaking-related glitch in some indoor missions. Flying around this part of the world with the jetpack, one could find things such as corridors and doors floating in the void with people walking across them, various indoor spaces and some buildings. The game uses parts of this world for the indoor missions, but not everything is used, and what isn't is apparently left there with no purpose.
  • In Red Dead Redemption, you can either end up inside a building (by disembarking a stagecoach parked right up against the building) or get under the map by crouch-walking into the space between a potted plant and a corner in the Mexican General's mansion. There's nothing to really SEE there, except the lack of internal textures, but it's enormously advantageous since the walls (and floor) is only solid from the outside. That means you can shoot from inside the map, but enemies can't shoot back... unless they bring dynamite, that is.
  • The Far Lands of Minecraft, the result of going far, far away from the world's center. It would take 800+ hours of walking to reach them without cheating, and things get strange when you arrive. Word of God is that while it's possible to fix the strangeness of the Far Lands, Notch likes the idea of the world turning into an Eldritch Location at the extreme edges. It is mostly removed in version 1.8, although there are still some strange glitches.
    • Additionally, below the bottom of the map there is a void that drains 2 hearts per second, killing you. You can get there by digging down below the bedrock in creative mode.

Non-Video Game Examples

Anime and Manga

  • The second season of Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds has a miniarc called "Minus World." Interestingly enough, the first episode of the four-episode arc had barely ended before the fandom was joking that it took place in Hyrule. Given that the series is a gaming anime with references elsewhere to Final Fantasy VI and Street Fighter (and other series in the same franchise providing huge Shout Outs to Illusion of Gaia, 1990s virtual-reality gaming that may further have been a nod to a Dummied Out Final Fantasy boss, and Dance Dance Revolution, among others), it would be interesting to know if the "Minus World" name is only a result of the time-changing staffs used in that dimension . . . or if it's another nod to the gamers in fandom.
  • The original Net Slum in the .hack series is basically a huge, Root Town-sized minus world. The admins don't want to acknowledge it is there and basically want to keep it Dummied Out, but alas, our intrepid heroes manage to get there anyway. It became some sort of a hacker's as well as game enthusiast's haven since a lot of unused game sprites and data are there. However, during the events of Quarantine, the Net Slum became an alternate Omega Server Root Town after Morganna's corruption on The World R:1 made the original Root Town of Omega Server Lia Fail so unstable it wouldn't hold out. As such, the Net Slum is inhabited solely by TheMissingnos, usually known as Wandering AIs, some of which wanders outside and get themselves deleted by the Admins. In the non-canon .hack//XXXX, Net Slum becomes an official Root Town. The de facto "leader" of this place? The enigmatic Playful Hacker Helba.
    • On the other hand, the Net Slum Tartarga in .hack//GU is less of a Minus World and more of an illegal server.
  • Similar to the .hack Metaverse example above, Dennou Coil has Obsolete Space, a creepy a Dark World Ghost Town version of reality with floating 2D walls that extends beyond cyberspace.

Film

  • Tron. The heroes first escape the game grid into Minus World (and then the rest of mainframe memory) through a hole in the confining walls.
    • They do it again in the sequel, Tron: Legacy, and the vehicle they use to navigate through that part of the system uses knobby tires, presumably to prevent clipping.
  • In The Matrix films, the Trainman's domain appears to be one of these.
  • Inception has Limbo, the space below dreams.

Literature

  • In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, there is also a Minus World (called "Minusland") that can be accessed by the great glass elevator. Willy Wonka and Charlie journeyed there when Charlie's grandma Georgina ate too much of the age-reducing candy (Wonka-Vite), which resulted in her age being negative.

Radio

  • The Big Finish Doctor Who audio "Neverland" has the Eighth Doctor, Charlie, Romana and some other Time Lords travelling to an alternate universe for Ret-Gone people.

Web Animation

  • The Super Mario Bros. glitch, and repetitive world therein, was a plot point in the fan-made Mario/Sonic crossover flash series Super Mario Bros Z by Alvin-Earthworm. The pipe to Minus World was discovered by literally going through a wall, albeit in a much less subtle (but still more plausible) manner. An antique stopwatch belonging to the grandfather of Professor Kolorado (from Paper Mario 64) inadvertently dissipated the "negativity," allowing those trapped in the Minus World to escape.

Western Animation

  • This concept was used in an episode of Danny Phantom where the main characters all played a game called "Doomed", the usual cartoon mix between a FPS and MMORPG (whose prize was apparently access to the Internet), which had 'Level Zero', a glitch area with "one way in, no way out". They trap Technus in there, though he later escapes when the game is deleted.

Computer Programs

  • In UNIX, displaying a binary file with cat will cause all text on the screen to be replaced with random characters
  1. ↑ These bastards are invicible, but are not obligatory to blow up, considering your goal is to blast all the blocks. It's not recommended to blow the skulls up either, even accidentally, because once they're "wounded", they begin to spin faster than you. Note that the speed powerup is nowhere to be seen in the singleplayer mode and that the skulls are already boosted up since the level 7-8.
  2. ↑ The command line parameter for activating cheats is either MAKINIT or IMPROVED, depending on version.
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