The 10 Funniest GTA 5 Glitches From 2013-2014

Before Rockstar's patches smoothed everything out, GTA 5's 2013-2014 launch era was full of glitches that were less "game-breaking" and more "game-improving" - ghost bus drivers, floating barber scissors, planes that flew themselves into the sunset. These are the ten funniest ones, and most still show up in clips today.

The essentials:

• Most of these glitches date from the PS3/Xbox 360 launch (September 2013) through the first year of GTA Online.
• Several were patched within months; a few, like Blue Hell, still exist in some form.
• None of these require mods or third-party software - they were emergent bugs in the base game and are described here for historical interest only.
• If you want the technical breakdown of specific exploits rather than the funny ones, see the dedicated guides linked throughout.

What Was the Funniest Glitch in GTA 5's Launch Era?

Ask ten different players and you'll get ten different answers, but a handful of glitches came up again and again in forums, YouTube compilations, and GTA Online chat in 2013 and 2014. What they have in common is that none of them needed a mod menu or a hack - they were physics quirks and animation errors that Rockstar's QA team simply didn't catch before launch, on hardware (PS3, Xbox 360) that was already straining to run the game.

1. Blue Hell

The oldest glitch in the franchise's history, and GTA 5 brought it back on day one. Fall through a gap in the map's collision geometry - a stairwell, a subway tunnel, a badly rendered rooftop - and instead of dying, the player drops into a bright blue void underneath Los Santos for five to ten seconds before getting teleported back to the surface. It became a rite of passage: everyone who played long enough eventually found their own way into Blue Hell. The full mechanics, including how to trigger it on purpose, are covered in our Blue Hell glitch guide.

2. The Ghost Bus Driver

Steal a bus, any bus, and abandon it, and a phantom driver would sometimes spawn in the seat the moment the camera looked away and back. The AI driver would calmly pull the bus back into traffic as if nothing had happened, often with the player's own character still standing on the roof or clinging to the door. It worked on the regular Bus, the Airport Bus, and even the Dashound coach, and it turned an empty vehicle into a slapstick chase scene in seconds.

3. The Floating Barber Scissors

Kill an NPC near a Herr Kutz Barber shop, walk in for a haircut, and pick up a wanted level mid-cut, and the animation would freeze in a strange limbo: the player's character locked in place, unable to move, with a pair of scissors floating in mid-air next to their head where the barber's hands should have been. The barber himself would have vanished, leaving the scissors to do the job alone.

4. The Runaway Airplane

Bail out of a plane in mid-flight with a parachute equipped, and the empty aircraft wouldn't crash immediately - it would keep flying in a straight line, slowly losing altitude, sometimes for minutes. Fly far enough away and the plane could freeze completely in mid-air, hanging motionless over Blaine County like a piece of scenery until a player got close enough to load it back into physics.

5. The Duplicate Character

Switch between Michael, Franklin, and Trevor rapidly enough in single-player, and occasionally the game would spawn a second copy of whichever character you'd just left. The duplicate had no real function - it just walked off down the nearest sidewalk like an ordinary pedestrian, indistinguishable from the crowd except for the fact that it was, unmistakably, also Trevor.

6. The Frozen Dance Pose

Open the interaction menu, start a dance animation near a vehicle with an open door, then hit a specific button combination right after, and the animation would lock the character in place mid-move - arms out, weapon frozen and unusable until the next death or another dance cancelled it out. Combined with the game's already exaggerated dance emotes, it produced some of the most-clipped screenshots of 2014.

7. The Old-Physics Ragdoll

Get hit by a vehicle that had glitched out of the current physics state, and instead of the usual ragdoll reaction, the player's character would flail using an older, stiffer animation set that predated GTA 5's launch build. The effect looked like watching a mannequin get thrown down the street, and it was jarring enough that players started deliberately hunting for "ragdoll cars" just to record it.

8. The Quicksave Ejector Seat

Quicksaving while driving and then reloading that save could delete the vehicle out from under the player entirely, launching their character forward at whatever speed the car had been going. Depending on the road, that meant anything from a short stumble to a full ragdoll flight across an intersection, with no car in sight to explain it.

9. The Stiff-Back Cab Walk

Try to hail an occupied taxi and get turned down, and some players found their character's spine would lock completely upright for the following jog or sprint animation, turning a normal run into a stiff, marching shuffle that looked like a Buckingham Palace guard sprinting for a bus. It was harmless, entirely cosmetic, and one of the easiest glitches to reproduce on purpose.

10. The Invisible Getaway Car

Early in GTA Online's October 2013 launch, some players reported vehicles that would render as fully invisible while still being solid and driveable - the car cast a shadow, made engine noise, and could be crashed into, but the model itself simply never loaded. Chasing (or being chased by) a car that looked like an empty road was one of the stranger sights of GTA Online's first weeks.

Why These Glitches Became Legendary

None of the ten above needed a save editor, a mod menu, or any third-party tool - they were pure emergent bugs, born from a huge open world running on hardware that was already showing its age in 2013. That's part of why they aged so well as comedy rather than as exploits: nobody could "cheat" their way into Blue Hell or a ghost bus driver, they just had to keep playing and eventually stumble into one.

The launch era also produced its share of glitches players actively farmed rather than laughed at - the 2013 car duplication glitch and the later GTA Online garage duplication exploit are the best-documented examples, and both eventually triggered Rockstar bans and patches. If you want the more cosmetic, harmless side of the era's bugs, the hat, mask and glasses glitch and the North Yankton glitch are worth reading next.

For a broader sense of what the game and its economy actually looked like back then, our history of GTA Online's 2013-2014 money glitches and our GTA 5 in 2013 vs today comparison both fill in the context around why this specific window produced so many strange bugs at once: a new engine, a new online mode, and millions of players hammering on both simultaneously.

Rockstar patched most of the outright exploits within a year, but the purely cosmetic ones - Blue Hell above all - have stuck around in some form ever since, which is probably why they're still funnier in hindsight than anything a mod menu could produce on purpose.