Introduction
Please note that this wiki is still heavily in development.
Corruptions or the act of corrupting is taking a video game and breaking it using whatever means necessary, usually with a program called a corruptor. This software can either modify the bytes in a ROM or a game's files to produce unexpected or unusual graphics, gameplay or audio, often resulting in hilarity and or invoking Satan.
2D and 3D visuals can be affected by corrupting a game. For example, if you were to corrupt a sprite on the SNES it would result in different colors, offset pixels, flipped textures, or a change in hue. If you were to corrupt a model in a 3D game it would result in stretched, distorted, flat or just plain broken polygons and mesh.
Mario's head mesh totally mashed up from Super Mario 64 on the N64. Source​
Corrupting a game can modify it's audio and music, depending on how you corrupted the game. For example, if you corrupted a SNES ROM and modified music data it can crackle, scramble, pitch up or down, slow down, speed up, change the track entirely or all at the same time.
The startup music to Donkey Kong Country for the SNES corrupted. Source​
Gameplay corruptions happen when a gameplay mechanic is altered by a corruption which can result in anything from misplaced characters to the player being able to jump 10 times higher than usual. Gameplay corruptions are not as common as audio and video corruptions because it requires game code to be altered but still run correctly.
While there are no broken models or glitched sounds, the car shouldn't have phased through those trucks like that. Source​
Corruptions are great fun but there can be a danger to them both for you and your computer.
Sometimes when corrupting games a wild stretching polygon or a broken color palette can fill your screen and flash rapidly which could cause epilepsy in some people. If you're epileptic, corruptions might not be for you.
When corrupting certain games on certain platforms you may encounter a blue screen of death (BSOD), while these are very rare and don't have any major adverse effects on your computer nothing gets in the way of a BSOD and it will restart your computer. So make sure you aren't doing anything important while corrupting.
Corrupting system processes? Not a good idea. If you really wanted to, do it in a virtual machine.
