Today I looked into an uncommon bug where Jak 1 can completely freeze up on an empty pause menu screen. Zed mentioned to me that he had looked into this before, and determined it was related to conflicting autosave and pause menu popups.
In Jak 3 speedrunning there is a trick sometimes used called the "Super Fast Hover Bike Glitch", or SFHBG, where you use Light Jak Flash Freeze and the Wave Concussor to launch zoomers at crazy high speeds. However on console, if you overdo the launch (e.g. charge the Wave Concussor too long) the game will actually crash upon launching the zoomer. Let's look into what causes this crash!
In the early days of OpenGOAL development/modding, adding some kind of multiplayer support was of course one of the most common topics to come up. It was surely possible given we had the source code, but there would be a lot of hurdles to get over, and we would see a variety of different approaches over the years.
A user in the OpenGOAL Discord today asked about a bug they encountered in Jak 2 and 3 where the Dark Eco HUD would stop flashing after reaching around 70% game progress. They claimed that the issue even persisted after saving, rebooting console, and loading the save.
I had never heard of such a bug, so my first guess was that this was another high FPS bug. But the user said no, it happens at 60 FPS and on console as well. Plus the claim that it only happened after progressing far enough into the game, and that it persisted after a reboot was strange...
In the 2025 Jak 3 No Out of Bounds speedrun route, players would need to perform a glitch to get invulnerability by getting their health down to 1 hit left, and then spin kicking and shooting on the exact same frame as they touch a source of damage, like a torch. This particular setup "confuses the game" and leaves Jak alive but with certain flags set that grant him invulnerability.
To get Jak's health down to 1 hit, players would often stand on the torch and take several hits. But they started to notice something weird - the cooldown time in between taking damage from the torch would sometimes be longer than the normal 2 seconds. After encountering the issue several times, theUsual figured out a particular sequence of actions in the speedrun route that would cause the cooldown time to increase (the Temple climb and 2 restart missions to break into Temple), though it wasn't clear exactly what was happening.
Eventally I realized this was something I had also seen happen to Blahpy in Jak 2, on the hot plates in the Palace Cables level. But I still wasn't sure what exactly triggered the bug in either game.
Years ago, the Jak 1 speedrun community came up with an NG+ category where you start the game with all of the Power Cells except for the ones in Citadel. There was a bug players would run into while running this category where under certain conditions, if you picked up some collectables (e.g. Precursor Orbs) and then (without saving) loaded a save file, those collectables would still be missing from the level, though you wouldn't have gotten credit for picking them up. It's actually part of the reason you'll see console speedrunners load a dummy save in Sandover before they start a new run back in Geyser, to ensure levels get fully unloaded and the glitch is avoided.
When I first learned about the OpenGOAL project, I was immediately excited for a couple reasons - I loved the Jak games growing up, and as a software engineer, I was curious to see the source code behind a video game engine. As a kid, I made some Flash games, Pokemon mods, custom Guitar Hero discs, etc, so I guess I was always kind of interested in building/modding games. And as I learned more about OpenGOAL, and more about the unique development of Jak 1, my fascination continued to grow.
A mod by Bin & Barg - see the trailer here!
Over 25 bugs added to the game to completely change the speedrun - think you can find them all?