don't let this glitch distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
There definitely was a recall . I ran into the glitch in the US version . I bought the game when it released , and after about 2 months I glitched on Andre the Giant. I went to EBGames to see if it could be fixed, and they gave me the details to send it back to THQ since all EBGames could do was replace it with another cart that would glitch. I shipped it to THQ, and then it hit me that I probably wouldnt play this game for months. It took about 6 months for the game to come back. I remember checking the version on the back of the cart to make sure they didn't just send me the same version , but it was the 1.1 version . After that, I don't remember the glitch happening again.
If you still have the cart, you’re sitting on a big windfall. So few people sent it in that a revised cart goes for $250+ where the original is closer to $20
@@GamerFolklore I do recall hearing/reading about the recall, it might be in the Official Nintendo Magazines or GamesMaster in the UK from the same period, I was heavily reading both back then, but think the Nintendo magazine was the more logical source,
I don’t think they will go for that much - in last few years you could still get a none glitched recall cart on eBay fairly easily (you need to zoom in on the label and check the serial number to distinguish) a lot of the time they would be going for the same price as the glitched copies because people didn’t know what they had; I guess this may have dried up now but I’ll bet with a bit of patience you can still get one with this method. People, trying to sell for $250 will know what they have and are trying to jack up the price - I once bought up about 10 none glitched carts and made a tidy profit a few years back.
Hey! massive wrestling fan and WWF No Mercy player here. Ugh, yeah I had this happen to me too. I didn't own it on N64 but I got into it on emulator around when I first got into wrestling in maybe 2003 or 2004. My original rom was a 1.0 rom and it did eventually get this glitch. Interestingly enough, you could play against the default create-a-wrestler sometimes! I don't remember exactly how but they'd show up in exhibitions sometimes. I distinctly remember them being very short, and there was an odd glitch where any time you tried to do a grapple move on them, you'd both do the animation of a knife edge chop past each other instead of performing the grapple move. It's the same knife edge chop that many wrestlers have as a secondary punch move, but it can't normally be done in a grapple. I later got the 1.1 rom and in my many, many years of playing it, I've never had the glitch happen again.
Interesting that you can attest to *not* getting the glitch with Version 1.1 (or USA-1). I wonder if it'll happen someday, or if it really was a true patch that fixed it!
@GamerFolklore man the more I watch this video, the more the memories come back! I for sure had the glitch happen more than once shortly after filling my last CAW slot. I also did often use CAWs in season mode, so I could see that being related I remember specifically never filling my last CAW slot after the 3rd time just to prevent the glitch and I never had it again. That said, maybe a coincidence? I never had the glitch on 1.1 though, even after filling my CAW slots. Also I know a guy with 1.0 from Ireland who had the glitch. I think his was PAL? So it can happen on PAL, but I don't know how rare that is in comparison to NTSC
It is so crazy that despite millions of people playing it, and 25 years passing, we still don't have a clear understanding of what does or doesn't cause the glitch. Nor what they 'changed' (if anything) on the v1.1 carts to "prevent" it, if it even did! I feel like this is a rabbit hole that will never end.
@@GamerFolklorein wondering if it is a buffer overflow or incorrect address reference to the same memory locatiin. A 1.0 vs 1.1 comparison would probably answer that. It might not exist in pal because they usually had a delay in release. Possibly their 1.0 was patched similar to 1.1
Just seeing that thumbnail caused my heart to drop down into my left ankle. I barely cared about the CAW being gone, but whenever i saw that generic mf'er, I knew that a bunch of hours of Championship mode had gone down the drain and i would never get them back. AGAIN.
I love the mental image of being conditioned to see some generic looking man walking into a wrestling ring as the herald announcing the deletion of your save file, like some dreaded harbinger of death! 😆
FYI, No Mercy uses FlashRAM, not SRAM. FlashRAM is really flash ROM but they call it that because it is addressed like SRAM by the N64. Indeed, you can even make an SRAM N64 game PCB that also supports FlashRAM in the same chip footprint with the major difference being no battery. Mario Party 2 uses 4k EEPROM, so no battery and it is not addressed through the memory map like FlashRAM/SRAM. What this means is that it’s definitely not RAM corruption due to a failing battery, though it can still be corrupted by something like a software glitch. I actually do own one game with a confirmed failing EEPROM and it keeps losing saves. It’s a Japanese copy of Goldeneye 007 and I confirmed it with board and chip swapping in other known-good cartridges. Also, I have a DX256 that can save 4k EEPROM to a bank of battery-backed memory (has 255 banks!). I confirmed every which way. The bad EEPROM sometimes loses its save after about a dozen plays and sometimes after one or two. The way N64 games are made, they will reinitialize the EEPROM and wipe the save if they don’t recognize it so perhaps the save isn’t getting corrupted. It’s just as likely that the game is erasing it after a bad read and successive reads would have resulted in a good dump.
Those games have the best custom character creation. If y'all are living in a roommate situation, nothing is funnier than making all your roommates/family members and giving them personality appropriate moves. The character creation is so good, it lets you put tattoos where you want and make them bigger and smaller.
You should talk about perfect darks EEPROM glitch. It’s a 1.0 exclusive glitch that if stimulants enter the air ducts in warehouse the data becomes corrupt.
I had never heard of this glitch, this is brutal. This is a good game for someone to make a master fully unlocked savefile, or modernized modification of the game with everything unlocked, enhancements, etc. Understanding this glitch seems like a good programming challenge for the fans.
I’m one of the many victims. Got it for Christmas in 2000, along with Majora’s Mask, Pokemon Gold AND Silver(I was spoiled that Christmas, definitely my most memorable one from my childhood). No Mercy was THE gift I was most excited for, which just goes to show how popular WWF was at the time, taking priority over Zelda and Pokemon! It deleted after like a week and I was devastated, I’m one of those weirdos that likes updating the wrestlers’ attires to match what they currently wear on TV, just to keep the game feeling fresh. That’s like 50+ wrestlers that I had updated, not to mention all the unlocks and my own created wrestlers. My mom called Nintendo and they told us to initialize the cartridge data, which got my hopes up, but it was short lived because my data deleted again after a few more days. My cousin got the game the following summer and his never deleted once(he had the new version 1.1)....I was sooooooo jealous, thinking I had the only defective copy, but it makes me feel better knowing I wasn’t alone lol.
Another GameFAQs reference! I keep hoping one day I'll see myself in one of these videos because of a post in some ancient nearly-forgotten GameFAQs thread. I spent _so much_ time on the game boards during the N64 era.
WWF No Mercy uses flash memory to store saves and not volatile SRAM, so it actually does not have a battery to fail. I had this glitch happen to me and it was a traumatizing experience for me and my brothers who played the game all the time back then. We all kind of went through the stages of grief over losing our created wrestlers. We were able to re-unlock Andre the Giant and other hidden characters though - it was as if the save data was wiped. I personally think it's a software defect that causes invalid data to be written to the flash RAM rather than any hardware flaw as it's been known to occur on emulators. I only play it on the EverDrive to this day since powering on my cart makes me anxious - at least there you can back up save data easily.
I grew up with both versions of No Mercy as a kid and I can confirm for my cartridges that the original version would erase the save while the other wouldn't. I can also confirm that the glitch only ever happened while playing a CAW in the story mode, once I learned that was what was causing it, I stopped using CAWs in it and have never had the glitch happen again.
I remember back then people were nervous and had no clue how it was happening. EVERY time I turned my game on I expected it to all be gone... never happened.
i remember this game destroyed my soul after i created a wrestler called American Boxer. had a moveset with only punching moves or grapples with a punch in it. lost him the next day
Our copy of No Mercy (PAL) glitched out constantly, sometimes more than once during a game session. Fortunately my brothers and I had all our CAWs saved to a memory card, but it was still a pain that we never got to complete story mode or unlock every character.
Right? That's the thing. Many of the entries could be 10-25 minute videos themselves. I wonder I should just make the iceberg a sort of "all-encompassing arc" of my channel for the next little while.
@GamerFolklore I think it would make great content, but the image you put on screen was HUGE. If you think you can hammer it out, I would be more than happy to watch, but I don't want you to get burnt out or have it interfere with whatever else you want to do.
A random character selector spawning somebody who isn't supposed to appear (the generic create-a-character template, in this case) reminds me of a silly glitch in Bleach: Dark Souls for the Nintendo DS. In FFA matches, you can select a "No Entry" slot so as to play with fewer than 4 people. In Survival Mode, which pits you against random characters as you progress, go long enough and you'll eventually be paired against "No Entry" and crash the game. Though at least that crash doesn't permanently reset everything.
As someone who grew up with a PS1 instead of an N64, picking up what I have about the N64's "mythology" so to speak by pure cultural osmosis is compelling. I would love a deeper dive into the iceberg, either in a series of videos, or in one or two longform videos.
It's -40 Celsius here this morning on the east side of Canada and I am stoked to see you upload a new video ! I love your content especially as an old geezer myself (36) haha I would love to see your iceberg video or all the small videos individually!! Cheers
Yep, had this glitch on my first copy of the game. I remember N64 Magazine saying that there was a recall, but had already returned it to EB Games by that point. In the UK, if the barcode ended in a certain 2 digits (can't remember the exact numbers, it was 24 years ago), it meant that the game had the glitch in it. EB Games had two copies on the shelves, a glitched one, and a safe one. I picked up the safe one and after way over 100 hours in single player, I never had the glitch.
Hey Goose! If you were to continue on with the iceberg content I would truly believe you’d be the guy qualified to do it. Most iceberg videos I get doled from TH-cam are just plain boring, dry, and hardly will elaborate about the stories they contain. But your commitment to storytelling and video game histories would be just about the perfect recipe that I would hope to see someday.
I think re: the Iceberg, some topics may warrant their own long video, but some of those could probably be summed up in a few lines. So I vote for both. Make an Iceberg video that covers the shorter points, make individual videos for the ones that need it!
Ah, I was wondering, when the Iceberg was going to continue. I would sure enjoy a 2 hour video by the fireside and just hear some old n64 storys. Better than individual videos in my opinion.
i experienced this glitch multiple times on a copy I regularly rented (PAL version, Australia.). It was so disappointing! Still my favourite wrestling game to this day! My experience with the glitch was it was totally random, and not exclusively linked to CAW, altghough I did have CAW characters saved on the cart. You could turn the game back on after a play session and have all of your progress gone. At the time it was said by a worker at the rental shop that it was caused due to bad batteries in the carts but I don't think that was actually the case.
When i was a kid my dad bought me a n64 and we used to play games together. I remember that one time we played Turok2 and progressed a lot in that game. Then one morning when i woke up and turned my n64 console on, I realized the safe file had erased itself. It was a big disappointment and still to this day my father thinks i intentionally deleted that save file which never came back.
I remember this glitch happening to me on my Australian (PAL) copy at least twice when I bought this game at release. The first time was after about a week of playing. It then happened again, a few days later. I was so devastated as I’d spent hundreds of hours playing the previous game, Wrestlemania 2000, and was looking forward to doing this again with the expanded roster and game modes of No Mercy. After a couple of weeks I found out my friend had the same issue with his cartridge and I assumed all the cartridges were affected. I returned the cartridge to the store where I bought it and exchanged it for Banjo-Tooie. I never heard about the recall and didn’t get the chance to play No Mercy again after that.
Wow, a wrestling video from Goose! 😍 These games were huge for me - mom never let me watch wrestling on TV, but I was allowed to play the games since they seemed less violent. So my first exposure to wrestling was through the THQ games on the N64! My main game was WrestleMania 2000, which had the same engine, mechanics, and animations as "No Mercy". Thankfully I never experienced this glitch, so I can still go back to enjoy my old created characters! I should really make a review video or something on them comparing them to my real life experience ahahaha
This happened on my Pal cart (UK), I remember taking it back to the store thinking they were going to give me a hard time but to my surprise they said it was an issue and exchanged it for a newer version. I was annoyed but to be honest I got to play more of the game so it was not the end of the world. I also seem to remember some issue with Blood not appearing as well,
This is the comment i was looking for. The mention of blood. I brought this game on release day and the glitch happened to me early on. We never had the internet so i had no idea what was going on. I must have called THQ who told me to return the cart to the store. I did just that, It was Comet in the UK. I remember the customer service rep calling the hotline, listening to a message saying to return it. Problem is, they wouldn't take it back as they was unaware of any issues. I don't remember much else apart from getting a letter from THQ saying that a new batch was out and to look for a certain barcode. I don't recall ever sending it back to THQ. I'm guessing Comet at some point, just refunded me. I then got a letter and brought a new version. But yes. The new one had a blood glitch. You'd smash someone in the head. You'd get the sound effect and the animation but blood would never appear.
Pre-ordered this game in the UK it was this glitch that happened 3 or 4 times which made me take it back to the game store. I told the manager the reason for return which he looked like me as if I'm lying I did make K-Kqik to go through story. Iv only ever played random emulator versions for random matches since. But did ruin my N64 fun after that as I heavily played Nwo Revenge and WM2000 on the N64 as that was the main reason I bought one. My friend also told me, as long as you turn it over after an hour of play and restart it it'll stop the glitch from happening... ofcourse no idea if this is true as he never mentioned it again and we no longer talk..
Yes. Omg yes. Years later I got a copy that didn't have this issue but during my childhood the amount of times I restarted and tried again is a testament to how good this game really was.
Yep, this happened repeatedly on my No Mercy cartridge as a kid. Me and my friend made so much progress and bought stuff from the store, only yo play days later to find our progress completely erased! We thought it was just us!
Interesting, and the sad story at the end is a good example of how video games are another way people create valuable memories with each other. I wonder if any of the original developers could give a deeper insight into what caused this glitch and if it was fixed in later releases?
I'm from Scotland, and I got this when it first came out. I can confirm that the PAL version had the same bug. I exchanged mine for a patched version, and it fixed the bug. I used to read N64 magazine when I was a kid, and it told you if you were having issues that you could exchange the game. I remember going to HMV with my dad, and they just switched it over for us. If I remember correctly, the patched version took the blood out of the game but I'd need to dig it out to check.
My buddy and I bought this game at the same time way back at launch, and I didn't have the issue. However, he did. I felt really bad for him, because he would try several times to unlock everything just to have it all disappear. He said he would he like a click/pop sound when booting up the cart, and that is when he knew it would all be reset. There were some funny things that happened as a side effect from this though. Like he was playing a Royal Rumble match and Kane came running out in Mae Young's wrestling gear with no hear or mask. Good times.
Whether you want to do the iceberg as one video or break it into several, I say go with whatever is more fun for you. I will gladly listen to you talk about N64 games by the fire regardless of how you segment it!
I had a friend back in the day that got this glitch on his game and he was not happy. But I have some assorted info on this topic. The 1.1 version is indeed different enough to where Gameshark won't work with it. You have to unlock everything legit. Also once I was starting up a match on 1.1 and I noticed my unlocked wrestlers were gone. I thought "this can't be this version is immune to the glitch!!!" I restarted the N64 right away and when I looked again everything was restored. I guess it was a hardware issue reading the cart so if your save data ever appears "missing" give the console a reset before you do anything else! Lastly, some sad news for that story you told at the end. While you can't back up your game data for No Mercy you CAN back up CAWs onto a controller pak. That guy could have backed up his friend's CAW....... Always back up your save data when possible people! 😎
My brother and myself had a copy that fully broke. When it glitched out every single wrestler on the cartridge turned into the default CAW. I dont remember losing progress with unlockables interestingly enough. We might have, but the game was just so broken at that point it didn't matter.
I'd love to see the iceburg done! It probably makes the most sense to dedicate a video to each tier of it. Making a video for each individual thing would probably be overkill, but I'd watch each one as it comes out just the same.
Referring to the Goldeneye save bug. It happened to me a few times but it didn’t actually corrupt my saves. If I place my cartridge a certain way, the saves don’t appear. If I start a game of Dam, for some reason there is no music, and that is because the music setting was defaulted to 0% instead of 100%. The game still runs normally. After beating the level, even if I passed all objectives, the game cannot progress to the next level, Facility stays locked and so I’m stuck at Dam.
I didn't expect a video about a wrestling video game of all things to get this deep, but I'm honestly not even the tiniest bit surprised. I'm not into wrestling at all in the slightest, but I have one group of friends who is, and they loved this game. I saw the customized wrestlers and intros and even though I didn't care for the sport, I was impressed that the game allowed so much. I was even surprised one day to hear that one of the friends made a character for me in the game! I never really hung out with that group outside of school, so it was really confusing and yet heartwarming that they thought enough about me to give me a character. Apparently he was an absolute beast in the game too, and none of my friends could beat him! I can definitely see how disheartening it would be to lose all of that and be left with only your memories as evidence that it all happened. I have nothing but respect for the characters they made, the times they had, and patchwork coding that made it all happen.
I played thousands of hours of this game and never had the glitch. I was on message boards of the time and learned of the recall through them. So when I purchased my game I instantly checked the card to make sure it was USA-1, it was and never had a single issue with it.
I would say that you should make a video like this for every item on the iceberg. Then, when you have finished the iceberg video production run, you can stitch them all together into a mega video for people that want to watch them all back to back. This is a pretty common thing that youtubers with long running series have been doing, to get another crack at the algorithm. This way, the people that like to watch each video as it comes out can do it then, and the people that like putting on long videos while doing something else can enjoy it in the long format.
How to cover the iceberg?... I come watch your content for the deep analysis and typically long format. That iceberg you have is huge. I would like to see episodic content. One video for each item on the iceberg. All tied back to the iceberg chart shown each episode. Every episode released we get to check off an iceberg item together. There may be need to lump 2+ small items into a single video sometimes.
Today is gonna be the last chilly day here where I live before it shoots back up to 80F. Gonna enjoy one last sit at the fireside and listen to another story!
Me, my brother and spent HOURS playing this game, making our CAWs, fine tuning their moves and appearance to be perfect only to have it delete our progress once. Man, it sucked
This sounds a lot like a memory corruption such as a pointer leading to garbage data or an unintended area in either ram or rom space. Possibly something being written to ram that in an area that was still being used.
I think you should turn the iceberg idea into a series instead of one long video. This one could be the first and a template for the others. I had no mercy growing up in the states, I played the hell out of it and never had the glitch. I did however get it second hand, when I get home I’ll check which version
17:45 Goose, you know we will love it; you better finish! 🤣 The No Mercy glitch is crazy though, I never knew about it until many years later through videos on here. I played it for literally thousands of hours and had a full Create A Wrestler set. I was very fortunate that it never did that to me, and I know I had a near-launch copy.
can confirm this glitch existed in pal territories, my friend owned the game and experienced the same glitch. but we found from magazines out that EB would swap the defective game for a fixed one, albeit with the blood removed because germany had different certification laws so they had to publish it later on with the fix applied and censored lol. we went to EB and they swapped the cart without hesitation. the memory glitch didnt happen on the replacement cartridge.
maybe it was a region thing! never had this happen to me here in australia! keen for ice berg stuff to man! an idea ive always wanted to see, esp with GE, how strats and warps on certain levels happen, who and how did they find or now THIS can happen on THIS level
I feel incredibly blessed, since I own this game and 100% unlocked it, but never lost all that progress. Countless custom fighters, my whole family had at least one, competitions to fight for the belts, I'm glad this glitch never occurred. My whole family would be devastated (and odds are, since I'm the youngest they'd have probably thought I'd erased it!!) Here's hoping nobody got the "did you delete everything??" treatment when this glitch occurred lmao
Man this glitch is insane. Not only it deletes your progress it also damages the cart so you can't reunlock any of the unlockables that you already did the 1st time. I also think you should do the N64 iceberg because there are some stuff out there that is debunked already that is buried like the memory leak that people claimed that DK64 has aka the truth behind DK64 needing the 4mb RAM expansion pak AKA if you leave DK64 on too long it would cause it to crash. Man that glitch reminds me of a glitch that an Age of Empires style game on the DS if you use names that are less than 4 characters long it would cause corruption to the cart making it unusable.
There was a WWF N64 game and if you manually saved your create a character and immediately manually saved the character again it wrote over that character and saved it as a fresh default character with no stats and points. I accidentally did this once and it crushed me.
About the iceberg question, if you get to give more context for each subject if you make individual videos, that would probably be better than one long video but with less details. I enjoy your narration Goose. Stay true friend 😊
I was with you until I heard Toronto Maple Leafs Goose, you do what you need to do to make a living brother. I will always follow and I’m sure there are a ton of people just like me.
I loved that space/universe book when I was a kid! I could never find it again since the title is so generic but seeing it again reminded me, so thanks!
About two years ago both of my N64 memory paks dies within weeks of each other, deleting many 100-precented games I had saved over the years. I haven't really played N64 since the incident.
That is very unfortunate. Those memory paks were never great. Thankfully most of the "AAA" Nintendo games saved to the cartridge, but yeah for any third party games, we relied on the paks. PS: Just checked your channel, and glad to see you've had some videos pop off! Here's to 10,000 subscribers soon!
My first experience with similar glitches was the Barracs OL in the Staunton Island safehouse garage save in GTA 3, and casually saving my game in a ice cream factory in GTA Vice City 😂
don't let this glitch distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
The legend lives on
Some say, he was broken in half.
Don’t let this distract you from the fact that Hornswaggle was never eliminated from the 2008 Royal Rumble
I miss shittymorph
Also thru the cell and ontop of thumb tacks
There definitely was a recall . I ran into the glitch in the US version . I bought the game when it released , and after about 2 months I glitched on Andre the Giant. I went to EBGames to see if it could be fixed, and they gave me the details to send it back to THQ since all EBGames could do was replace it with another cart that would glitch. I shipped it to THQ, and then it hit me that I probably wouldnt play this game for months. It took about 6 months for the game to come back. I remember checking the version on the back of the cart to make sure they didn't just send me the same version , but it was the 1.1 version . After that, I don't remember the glitch happening again.
Wow, that is a great first hand account of the recall. Thanks for sharing!
If you still have the cart, you’re sitting on a big windfall. So few people sent it in that a revised cart goes for $250+ where the original is closer to $20
@@GamerFolklore I do recall hearing/reading about the recall, it might be in the Official Nintendo Magazines or GamesMaster in the UK from the same period, I was heavily reading both back then, but think the Nintendo magazine was the more logical source,
I don’t think they will go for that much - in last few years you could still get a none glitched recall cart on eBay fairly easily (you need to zoom in on the label and check the serial number to distinguish) a lot of the time they would be going for the same price as the glitched copies because people didn’t know what they had; I guess this may have dried up now but I’ll bet with a bit of patience you can still get one with this method. People, trying to sell for $250 will know what they have and are trying to jack up the price - I once bought up about 10 none glitched carts and made a tidy profit a few years back.
@@GamerFolklorepretty sure in N64 magazine here in PAL they published details of the recall too….ill rack my brain and try to remember which issue
Hey! massive wrestling fan and WWF No Mercy player here. Ugh, yeah I had this happen to me too. I didn't own it on N64 but I got into it on emulator around when I first got into wrestling in maybe 2003 or 2004. My original rom was a 1.0 rom and it did eventually get this glitch. Interestingly enough, you could play against the default create-a-wrestler sometimes! I don't remember exactly how but they'd show up in exhibitions sometimes. I distinctly remember them being very short, and there was an odd glitch where any time you tried to do a grapple move on them, you'd both do the animation of a knife edge chop past each other instead of performing the grapple move. It's the same knife edge chop that many wrestlers have as a secondary punch move, but it can't normally be done in a grapple.
I later got the 1.1 rom and in my many, many years of playing it, I've never had the glitch happen again.
I somehow knew you'd be here, MDB! Love your videos!
Interesting that you can attest to *not* getting the glitch with Version 1.1 (or USA-1). I wonder if it'll happen someday, or if it really was a true patch that fixed it!
@GamerFolklore man the more I watch this video, the more the memories come back! I for sure had the glitch happen more than once shortly after filling my last CAW slot. I also did often use CAWs in season mode, so I could see that being related
I remember specifically never filling my last CAW slot after the 3rd time just to prevent the glitch and I never had it again. That said, maybe a coincidence?
I never had the glitch on 1.1 though, even after filling my CAW slots. Also I know a guy with 1.0 from Ireland who had the glitch. I think his was PAL? So it can happen on PAL, but I don't know how rare that is in comparison to NTSC
It is so crazy that despite millions of people playing it, and 25 years passing, we still don't have a clear understanding of what does or doesn't cause the glitch. Nor what they 'changed' (if anything) on the v1.1 carts to "prevent" it, if it even did! I feel like this is a rabbit hole that will never end.
@@GamerFolklorein wondering if it is a buffer overflow or incorrect address reference to the same memory locatiin. A 1.0 vs 1.1 comparison would probably answer that.
It might not exist in pal because they usually had a delay in release. Possibly their 1.0 was patched similar to 1.1
Just seeing that thumbnail caused my heart to drop down into my left ankle. I barely cared about the CAW being gone, but whenever i saw that generic mf'er, I knew that a bunch of hours of Championship mode had gone down the drain and i would never get them back. AGAIN.
I love the mental image of being conditioned to see some generic looking man walking into a wrestling ring as the herald announcing the deletion of your save file, like some dreaded harbinger of death! 😆
This insidious glitch. We lost our saves so, so many times. Shame too, because it is still my favorite wrestling game even today.
FYI, No Mercy uses FlashRAM, not SRAM. FlashRAM is really flash ROM but they call it that because it is addressed like SRAM by the N64. Indeed, you can even make an SRAM N64 game PCB that also supports FlashRAM in the same chip footprint with the major difference being no battery. Mario Party 2 uses 4k EEPROM, so no battery and it is not addressed through the memory map like FlashRAM/SRAM.
What this means is that it’s definitely not RAM corruption due to a failing battery, though it can still be corrupted by something like a software glitch. I actually do own one game with a confirmed failing EEPROM and it keeps losing saves. It’s a Japanese copy of Goldeneye 007 and I confirmed it with board and chip swapping in other known-good cartridges. Also, I have a DX256 that can save 4k EEPROM to a bank of battery-backed memory (has 255 banks!). I confirmed every which way. The bad EEPROM sometimes loses its save after about a dozen plays and sometimes after one or two. The way N64 games are made, they will reinitialize the EEPROM and wipe the save if they don’t recognize it so perhaps the save isn’t getting corrupted. It’s just as likely that the game is erasing it after a bad read and successive reads would have resulted in a good dump.
It’s like having your Lego creations dropped on the ground losing valuable pieces in the process never to be able to rebuild it again
Those games have the best custom character creation. If y'all are living in a roommate situation, nothing is funnier than making all your roommates/family members and giving them personality appropriate moves. The character creation is so good, it lets you put tattoos where you want and make them bigger and smaller.
You should talk about perfect darks EEPROM glitch. It’s a 1.0 exclusive glitch that if stimulants enter the air ducts in warehouse the data becomes corrupt.
I had never heard of this glitch, this is brutal.
This is a good game for someone to make a master fully unlocked savefile, or modernized modification of the game with everything unlocked, enhancements, etc. Understanding this glitch seems like a good programming challenge for the fans.
fully unlocked file wouldn't help with custom characters though
@@renakunisaki Just add every possible combination of custom character in the fully unlocked file, I'm sure it won't be impractical at all!
I’m one of the many victims. Got it for Christmas in 2000, along with Majora’s Mask, Pokemon Gold AND Silver(I was spoiled that Christmas, definitely my most memorable one from my childhood). No Mercy was THE gift I was most excited for, which just goes to show how popular WWF was at the time, taking priority over Zelda and Pokemon! It deleted after like a week and I was devastated, I’m one of those weirdos that likes updating the wrestlers’ attires to match what they currently wear on TV, just to keep the game feeling fresh. That’s like 50+ wrestlers that I had updated, not to mention all the unlocks and my own created wrestlers. My mom called Nintendo and they told us to initialize the cartridge data, which got my hopes up, but it was short lived because my data deleted again after a few more days. My cousin got the game the following summer and his never deleted once(he had the new version 1.1)....I was sooooooo jealous, thinking I had the only defective copy, but it makes me feel better knowing I wasn’t alone lol.
Another GameFAQs reference! I keep hoping one day I'll see myself in one of these videos because of a post in some ancient nearly-forgotten GameFAQs thread. I spent _so much_ time on the game boards during the N64 era.
The game really had no mercy for people's save files.
I bet some people laid the smackdown on their faulty cartridges after this glitch happened to them.
Really enjoyed the video! Thanks for the inclusion, I enjoyed replaying the game and revisiting the memories.
Please continue the iceberg! Preferably more long form videos
WWF No Mercy uses flash memory to store saves and not volatile SRAM, so it actually does not have a battery to fail. I had this glitch happen to me and it was a traumatizing experience for me and my brothers who played the game all the time back then. We all kind of went through the stages of grief over losing our created wrestlers. We were able to re-unlock Andre the Giant and other hidden characters though - it was as if the save data was wiped. I personally think it's a software defect that causes invalid data to be written to the flash RAM rather than any hardware flaw as it's been known to occur on emulators. I only play it on the EverDrive to this day since powering on my cart makes me anxious - at least there you can back up save data easily.
I grew up with both versions of No Mercy as a kid and I can confirm for my cartridges that the original version would erase the save while the other wouldn't. I can also confirm that the glitch only ever happened while playing a CAW in the story mode, once I learned that was what was causing it, I stopped using CAWs in it and have never had the glitch happen again.
I remember back then people were nervous and had no clue how it was happening. EVERY time I turned my game on I expected it to all be gone... never happened.
i remember this game destroyed my soul after i created a wrestler called American Boxer. had a moveset with only punching moves or grapples with a punch in it. lost him the next day
Our copy of No Mercy (PAL) glitched out constantly, sometimes more than once during a game session. Fortunately my brothers and I had all our CAWs saved to a memory card, but it was still a pain that we never got to complete story mode or unlock every character.
Iceberg by the fire please 😊
It was the shame of this incident that brought about the very demise of The WWF
I would love to see the iceberg broken into videos, especially if you go into the level of detail you did in this entry.
Right? That's the thing. Many of the entries could be 10-25 minute videos themselves. I wonder I should just make the iceberg a sort of "all-encompassing arc" of my channel for the next little while.
@GamerFolklore I think it would make great content, but the image you put on screen was HUGE. If you think you can hammer it out, I would be more than happy to watch, but I don't want you to get burnt out or have it interfere with whatever else you want to do.
"Star Fox Feet Implications" would make an iceberg video worth it o_o
It's a pretty well known theory. I guess I just described it uniquely.
A random character selector spawning somebody who isn't supposed to appear (the generic create-a-character template, in this case) reminds me of a silly glitch in Bleach: Dark Souls for the Nintendo DS. In FFA matches, you can select a "No Entry" slot so as to play with fewer than 4 people. In Survival Mode, which pits you against random characters as you progress, go long enough and you'll eventually be paired against "No Entry" and crash the game.
Though at least that crash doesn't permanently reset everything.
👀
Whether you do the iceberg or individual videos on those topics, I'll watch any and every video of yours.
Great video goose.
Thanks for posting!
As someone who grew up with a PS1 instead of an N64, picking up what I have about the N64's "mythology" so to speak by pure cultural osmosis is compelling. I would love a deeper dive into the iceberg, either in a series of videos, or in one or two longform videos.
Nothing makes me happier than opening You Tube and seeing a Goose video.
this is why I got myself a cart dumper, so I could have both my own ROMs and on-cart save files backed up.
The animations for the characters is really good for for the era
Luckily my copy was a later release so my CAWs still exist to this day!
Mario party 2 doesnt have a battery. So it can't be that , which wiped your save.
Awesome video Goose! I like the idea of using ultra widescreen to show gameplay footage the whole time. I'd love to see that iceberg video!
It's -40 Celsius here this morning on the east side of Canada and I am stoked to see you upload a new video ! I love your content especially as an old geezer myself (36) haha I would love to see your iceberg video or all the small videos individually!! Cheers
Happened to me on PAL. The one with visible red blood has the glitch. The newer version has no blood.
That's how to notice it in the PAL version, the blood removal I believe is due to Germany's censorship, so when patching it it got fixed too.
My pal version with blood luckly does not have this glitch 😊
@@philwarren6346 don't worry, it will.
Yep, had this glitch on my first copy of the game. I remember N64 Magazine saying that there was a recall, but had already returned it to EB Games by that point. In the UK, if the barcode ended in a certain 2 digits (can't remember the exact numbers, it was 24 years ago), it meant that the game had the glitch in it.
EB Games had two copies on the shelves, a glitched one, and a safe one. I picked up the safe one and after way over 100 hours in single player, I never had the glitch.
My sister found my old N64 just before Xmas, and "re-gifted" it to me. One of the games she found was No Mercy.
Do I dare fire it up?
(UK/PAL version)
Hey Goose! If you were to continue on with the iceberg content I would truly believe you’d be the guy qualified to do it. Most iceberg videos I get doled from TH-cam are just plain boring, dry, and hardly will elaborate about the stories they contain. But your commitment to storytelling and video game histories would be just about the perfect recipe that I would hope to see someday.
I think re: the Iceberg, some topics may warrant their own long video, but some of those could probably be summed up in a few lines. So I vote for both. Make an Iceberg video that covers the shorter points, make individual videos for the ones that need it!
Ah, I was wondering, when the Iceberg was going to continue. I would sure enjoy a 2 hour video by the fireside and just hear some old n64 storys. Better than individual videos in my opinion.
i experienced this glitch multiple times on a copy I regularly rented (PAL version, Australia.). It was so disappointing! Still my favourite wrestling game to this day!
My experience with the glitch was it was totally random, and not exclusively linked to CAW, altghough I did have CAW characters saved on the cart. You could turn the game back on after a play session and have all of your progress gone. At the time it was said by a worker at the rental shop that it was caused due to bad batteries in the carts but I don't think that was actually the case.
When i was a kid my dad bought me a n64 and we used to play games together. I remember that one time we played Turok2 and progressed a lot in that game. Then one morning when i woke up and turned my n64 console on, I realized the safe file had erased itself. It was a big disappointment and still to this day my father thinks i intentionally deleted that save file which never came back.
damn man. the story of buddy having his friend die in 2001 than his game resetting 20 years later... i even felt that.
Id love to see the iceberg video, you could release them individually and when you cover them all you can put them all together into a larger video.
I remember this glitch happening to me on my Australian (PAL) copy at least twice when I bought this game at release. The first time was after about a week of playing. It then happened again, a few days later.
I was so devastated as I’d spent hundreds of hours playing the previous game, Wrestlemania 2000, and was looking forward to doing this again with the expanded roster and game modes of No Mercy.
After a couple of weeks I found out my friend had the same issue with his cartridge and I assumed all the cartridges were affected. I returned the cartridge to the store where I bought it and exchanged it for Banjo-Tooie.
I never heard about the recall and didn’t get the chance to play No Mercy again after that.
Wow, a wrestling video from Goose! 😍 These games were huge for me - mom never let me watch wrestling on TV, but I was allowed to play the games since they seemed less violent. So my first exposure to wrestling was through the THQ games on the N64! My main game was WrestleMania 2000, which had the same engine, mechanics, and animations as "No Mercy". Thankfully I never experienced this glitch, so I can still go back to enjoy my old created characters! I should really make a review video or something on them comparing them to my real life experience ahahaha
I would absolutely love to see that review Video!!!
This happened on my Pal cart (UK), I remember taking it back to the store thinking they were going to give me a hard time but to my surprise they said it was an issue and exchanged it for a newer version. I was annoyed but to be honest I got to play more of the game so it was not the end of the world. I also seem to remember some issue with Blood not appearing as well,
This is the comment i was looking for. The mention of blood. I brought this game on release day and the glitch happened to me early on. We never had the internet so i had no idea what was going on. I must have called THQ who told me to return the cart to the store.
I did just that, It was Comet in the UK. I remember the customer service rep calling the hotline, listening to a message saying to return it. Problem is, they wouldn't take it back as they was unaware of any issues.
I don't remember much else apart from getting a letter from THQ saying that a new batch was out and to look for a certain barcode.
I don't recall ever sending it back to THQ. I'm guessing Comet at some point, just refunded me. I then got a letter and brought a new version. But yes. The new one had a blood glitch. You'd smash someone in the head. You'd get the sound effect and the animation but blood would never appear.
Pre-ordered this game in the UK it was this glitch that happened 3 or 4 times which made me take it back to the game store.
I told the manager the reason for return which he looked like me as if I'm lying
I did make K-Kqik to go through story. Iv only ever played random emulator versions for random matches since. But did ruin my N64 fun after that as I heavily played Nwo Revenge and WM2000 on the N64 as that was the main reason I bought one.
My friend also told me, as long as you turn it over after an hour of play and restart it it'll stop the glitch from happening... ofcourse no idea if this is true as he never mentioned it again and we no longer talk..
Yes. Omg yes. Years later I got a copy that didn't have this issue but during my childhood the amount of times I restarted and tried again is a testament to how good this game really was.
The worst part was having to try to win that cage match against Chris Benoit of the IC Belt. That match was nearly impossible
Yep, this happened repeatedly on my No Mercy cartridge as a kid. Me and my friend made so much progress and bought stuff from the store, only yo play days later to find our progress completely erased! We thought it was just us!
12:24 it happened IRL 11 times.
Interesting, and the sad story at the end is a good example of how video games are another way people create valuable memories with each other. I wonder if any of the original developers could give a deeper insight into what caused this glitch and if it was fixed in later releases?
I love N64 folklore, these kind of videos are so cozy to watch.
I'm from Scotland, and I got this when it first came out. I can confirm that the PAL version had the same bug.
I exchanged mine for a patched version, and it fixed the bug.
I used to read N64 magazine when I was a kid, and it told you if you were having issues that you could exchange the game.
I remember going to HMV with my dad, and they just switched it over for us.
If I remember correctly, the patched version took the blood out of the game but I'd need to dig it out to check.
Played WWF No Mercy a bunch but never knew this glitch was a thing!
Break the iceberg up into individual smaller videos 😁 I’m finding this type of video very cosy to watch
I'd vote for the iceberg getting a few different videos for various groups.
I played this game a ton and never experienced this glitch. This is actually the first time I've ever heard of it.
It never happened to me but I was scared because of the nightmare erase stories I read on the web back then. 😬
My buddy and I bought this game at the same time way back at launch, and I didn't have the issue. However, he did. I felt really bad for him, because he would try several times to unlock everything just to have it all disappear. He said he would he like a click/pop sound when booting up the cart, and that is when he knew it would all be reset. There were some funny things that happened as a side effect from this though. Like he was playing a Royal Rumble match and Kane came running out in Mae Young's wrestling gear with no hear or mask. Good times.
Whether you want to do the iceberg as one video or break it into several, I say go with whatever is more fun for you. I will gladly listen to you talk about N64 games by the fire regardless of how you segment it!
I had a friend back in the day that got this glitch on his game and he was not happy. But I have some assorted info on this topic. The 1.1 version is indeed different enough to where Gameshark won't work with it. You have to unlock everything legit. Also once I was starting up a match on 1.1 and I noticed my unlocked wrestlers were gone. I thought "this can't be this version is immune to the glitch!!!" I restarted the N64 right away and when I looked again everything was restored. I guess it was a hardware issue reading the cart so if your save data ever appears "missing" give the console a reset before you do anything else! Lastly, some sad news for that story you told at the end. While you can't back up your game data for No Mercy you CAN back up CAWs onto a controller pak. That guy could have backed up his friend's CAW....... Always back up your save data when possible people! 😎
Awesome video man!
I think it would be cool to cover each subject one at a time, and then to make a 'marathon' iceberg video.
This is probably the best idea tbh, though it would end up being like 8 hours, lol.
@@GamerFolklore N64 mythology to sleep to 😆
Instant joy when your vids pop up!
My brother and myself had a copy that fully broke. When it glitched out every single wrestler on the cartridge turned into the default CAW. I dont remember losing progress with unlockables interestingly enough. We might have, but the game was just so broken at that point it didn't matter.
I'll almost certainly watch your glitch videos whether you make them individually or as one giant iceberg.
I'd love to see the iceburg done! It probably makes the most sense to dedicate a video to each tier of it. Making a video for each individual thing would probably be overkill, but I'd watch each one as it comes out just the same.
My brother, you deserve a big comfy chair.
Referring to the Goldeneye save bug. It happened to me a few times but it didn’t actually corrupt my saves. If I place my cartridge a certain way, the saves don’t appear. If I start a game of Dam, for some reason there is no music, and that is because the music setting was defaulted to 0% instead of 100%. The game still runs normally. After beating the level, even if I passed all objectives, the game cannot progress to the next level, Facility stays locked and so I’m stuck at Dam.
I didn't expect a video about a wrestling video game of all things to get this deep, but I'm honestly not even the tiniest bit surprised. I'm not into wrestling at all in the slightest, but I have one group of friends who is, and they loved this game. I saw the customized wrestlers and intros and even though I didn't care for the sport, I was impressed that the game allowed so much. I was even surprised one day to hear that one of the friends made a character for me in the game! I never really hung out with that group outside of school, so it was really confusing and yet heartwarming that they thought enough about me to give me a character. Apparently he was an absolute beast in the game too, and none of my friends could beat him! I can definitely see how disheartening it would be to lose all of that and be left with only your memories as evidence that it all happened. I have nothing but respect for the characters they made, the times they had, and patchwork coding that made it all happen.
I played thousands of hours of this game and never had the glitch. I was on message boards of the time and learned of the recall through them. So when I purchased my game I instantly checked the card to make sure it was USA-1, it was and never had a single issue with it.
I would say that you should make a video like this for every item on the iceberg.
Then, when you have finished the iceberg video production run, you can stitch them all together into a mega video for people that want to watch them all back to back. This is a pretty common thing that youtubers with long running series have been doing, to get another crack at the algorithm. This way, the people that like to watch each video as it comes out can do it then, and the people that like putting on long videos while doing something else can enjoy it in the long format.
How to cover the iceberg?... I come watch your content for the deep analysis and typically long format. That iceberg you have is huge. I would like to see episodic content. One video for each item on the iceberg. All tied back to the iceberg chart shown each episode. Every episode released we get to check off an iceberg item together. There may be need to lump 2+ small items into a single video sometimes.
Today is gonna be the last chilly day here where I live before it shoots back up to 80F. Gonna enjoy one last sit at the fireside and listen to another story!
Me, my brother and spent HOURS playing this game, making our CAWs, fine tuning their moves and appearance to be perfect only to have it delete our progress once. Man, it sucked
i had this version of no mercy. absolutely devastating for me as a massive WWF fan
This sounds a lot like a memory corruption such as a pointer leading to garbage data or an unintended area in either ram or rom space. Possibly something being written to ram that in an area that was still being used.
I think you should turn the iceberg idea into a series instead of one long video. This one could be the first and a template for the others.
I had no mercy growing up in the states, I played the hell out of it and never had the glitch. I did however get it second hand, when I get home I’ll check which version
No Mercy was my jam.
One cryptic vote for +3h n64 iceberg vid ✍🏻
i'm fairly new to your channel and i'd love to hear you talk about an iceberg next to the fire side.
Please please please still do the iceberg :) I personally love that format of content
17:45 Goose, you know we will love it; you better finish! 🤣
The No Mercy glitch is crazy though, I never knew about it until many years later through videos on here. I played it for literally thousands of hours and had a full Create A Wrestler set. I was very fortunate that it never did that to me, and I know I had a near-launch copy.
I think you should break the iceberg content into individual videos, and just go down the list. Either way, looking forward to it!
can confirm this glitch existed in pal territories, my friend owned the game and experienced the same glitch. but we found from magazines out that EB would swap the defective game for a fixed one, albeit with the blood removed because germany had different certification laws so they had to publish it later on with the fix applied and censored lol. we went to EB and they swapped the cart without hesitation. the memory glitch didnt happen on the replacement cartridge.
maybe it was a region thing! never had this happen to me here in australia!
keen for ice berg stuff to man! an idea ive always wanted to see, esp with GE, how strats and warps on certain levels happen, who and how did they find or now THIS can happen on THIS level
man, this game was notorious for not being able to save, i remember it needed some extra pak to be able to save
I feel incredibly blessed, since I own this game and 100% unlocked it, but never lost all that progress. Countless custom fighters, my whole family had at least one, competitions to fight for the belts, I'm glad this glitch never occurred. My whole family would be devastated (and odds are, since I'm the youngest they'd have probably thought I'd erased it!!)
Here's hoping nobody got the "did you delete everything??" treatment when this glitch occurred lmao
Man this glitch is insane. Not only it deletes your progress it also damages the cart so you can't reunlock any of the unlockables that you already did the 1st time. I also think you should do the N64 iceberg because there are some stuff out there that is debunked already that is buried like the memory leak that people claimed that DK64 has aka the truth behind DK64 needing the 4mb RAM expansion pak AKA if you leave DK64 on too long it would cause it to crash. Man that glitch reminds me of a glitch that an Age of Empires style game on the DS if you use names that are less than 4 characters long it would cause corruption to the cart making it unusable.
Truly remarkable content here. Keep making content goose.
There was a WWF N64 game and if you manually saved your create a character and immediately manually saved the character again it wrote over that character and saved it as a fresh default character with no stats and points. I accidentally did this once and it crushed me.
My entire channel is dedicated to no mercy... it's actually my duty to show them no mercy.
Yes me and friends all hated it after all the work we did during story mode and building our characters.
They could of known about the glitch but didn't expect anyone to put that many hours into the game
I had the game growing up and never had this glitch, let alone ever knew of its existence.
About the iceberg question, if you get to give more context for each subject if you make individual videos, that would probably be better than one long video but with less details. I enjoy your narration Goose. Stay true friend 😊
I was with you until I heard Toronto Maple Leafs
Goose, you do what you need to do to make a living brother. I will always follow and I’m sure there are a ton of people just like me.
I loved that space/universe book when I was a kid! I could never find it again since the title is so generic but seeing it again reminded me, so thanks!
About two years ago both of my N64 memory paks dies within weeks of each other, deleting many 100-precented games I had saved over the years. I haven't really played N64 since the incident.
That is very unfortunate. Those memory paks were never great. Thankfully most of the "AAA" Nintendo games saved to the cartridge, but yeah for any third party games, we relied on the paks. PS: Just checked your channel, and glad to see you've had some videos pop off! Here's to 10,000 subscribers soon!
My first experience with similar glitches was the Barracs OL in the Staunton Island safehouse garage save in GTA 3, and casually saving my game in a ice cream factory in GTA Vice City 😂