It doesn’t happen often but I’ve seen it a few times. Why would NES graphics turn into numbers when they glitch out?
In: Technology
The video rendering chip has its own memory, consisting mainly of a big table of images stored as small rectangles (aka tiles) and then all things – objects, characters, and the background and foreground – are assembled by clipping together the tiles into a grid. This simplifies controlling what’s on screen for the game since the NES CPU is slow – around 1.7 megahertz.
A common need is for numbers and text for scores, number of lives, whatever so a big chunk of those tiles are probably letters and numbers. While normally tiles are swapped in an out as needed (eg: enemies that do or don’t appear in an area will be moved in or out of the video memory), those letters and numbers are usually kept around all the time for convenience, just in case. No point in swapping in the number ‘8’ when a player with 7 lines gets a 1-up.
So all those letters/numbers are already loaded into video memory, just waiting for a glitchy accident to instruct the video chip to draw them all over the place.
The numbers aren’t intentional per se. The data indicating what to draw for the sprites and backgrounds got corrupted and now indicate the tiles that contain numbers.
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