When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…
I remember weirdness in c64 games because of tape errors. I remember playing tusker and it was like it was haunted. Main character changed colour and disappeared entirely, hud elements turned Eldritch between game screens. It was wonderful
I had a corrupted save of Ultima III for the C64 on a disk. The game worked normally, but the world data had been corrupted into a bizarre mis-mash of all available terrain types and monsters. I kept that disk around and periodically loaded it just to fool around.