Manimals!

MANIMALS!

There is a scene from ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, in which the Oracle explains to Neo how all supernatural occurrences are actually glitches in a virtual reality in which, unknown to most, humanity actually lives”.

“There are programs running all over the place. The ones doing their job, doing what they are meant to do, are invisible. You’d never even know they are here. But the other ones, you hear about them all the time...Every time you heard someone say they saw a ghost [it’s] some program doing something they’re not meant to be doing”.

Such a comment might well have struck a chord with videogame players, most of whom are bound to have come across some unintentionally weird thing at one time or other, while playing a game. Given the sheer complexity of today’s titles, no game can be completely free of bugs and glitches so if you play long enough, chances are you will encounter some aspects of the game “doing what they’re not meant to be doing”.

For example, I can recall that there is a stretch of particular road in Grand Theft Auto III where the cars float above it rather than ride along it like they are supposed to. Levitating cars!

However, for sheer weirdness I think little can beat a certain odd thing that several players have discovered in another Rockstar title, namely Red Dead Redemption.

This game was set in the Wild West, and along with various human characters who help or hinder the player, you also get various animals such as birds, cougars and snakes. All of this would be what the Oracle would describe as programs ‘doing their job’, not just in the sense that they actively work to aid or thwart your goals, but because they are part of the overall intention to build a virtual Wild West World the player can believe in.

But, every now and then things went a bit weird with these animals and people. For some unknown reason, there used to be this glitch and the effect it had on the game was to mix up human models with animal behaviours. How this glitch manifested itself to players who noticed it was by producing ‘Manimals’. This inadvertently created a whole new genre of gameplay within Red Dead Redemption, as players could become sort of naturalists, searching for and identifying new species of ‘manimal’.

The various kinds that were found included Birdmen, people who flew around the map flapping their arms just like our feathered friends do. There were ‘snakemen’; people with contorted bodies and unnaturally large eyes who would slither through the grass. There were cougarmen who would attack the player in exactly the same way cougars in the game do. There were even donkeywomen, who would not only bray but could also be ridden by the player, just as if they were like normal equine animals in the game.

I say there used to be a glitch that caused the appearance of manimals because, since 2010, that particular bug has been patched. So, sadly, just as you can now only see Tasmanian wolves in the form of that one and only film footage of the last surviving creature, so too can you only see Red Dead Redemption's manimals in the various YouTube vids people have posted. You can no longer venture out into the wilderness of the game’s setting in the hope of witnessing the weird spectacle of birdmen flying through the sky, or snakemen with their grotesque bulging eyes slithering snakelike through the grass.

I think it is rather a pity that the game was patched, causing the extinction of these unique species of hybrid human-animals.

Thanks to Rockstar for the images.