Bippo Ernesti | The Goonies - Death Bugs @BippoErnesti | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated December 09 2022
So, I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep a few days back when a sudden thought about this game came to me, saying "what would happen if you died right as you touched a stage exit?", so I spent a couple hours exploring it. The video is probably doesn't make much sense on its own, but I'm going to try to elaborate here in the description.

0:00 Bug 1 - Death Softlock
- When you receive fatal damage, you don't die instantly, rather the game keeps going until your LIFE bar fully reduces to 0. If you get hit, touch an exit, then die after that, it kills and respawns you, but the game hasn't finished transitioning you to the next stage, so it autowalks you left forever, taking any downward ladders on the way. This is an automatic softlock on every stage except stage 5, where it will lead to an eventual game over.
1:16 Bug 2 - Successful Exit
- If the timing is slightly different, it will successfully exit the stage, but as the game attempts to restore some LIFE, it starts doing wacky things. I'm not 100% sure how original hardware reacts to this, but using BizHawk, the NESHawk core would crash soon after, while the QuickNes core would still remain playable, if buggy. Enemies won't spawn and you can't interact with any Goonies until you die, at which point the game fixes itself.
2:16 Bug 3 - Successful Exit (Bomb/Time Over)
- Similar to the previous bug, but far harder to pull off due to timing precision. Time Over has a smaller, separate bug where the TIME OVER text will stay at the top of the screen. The only real difference to Bug 2 otherwise is that the LIFE bar doesn't get buggy.
2:48 Bug 4 - Final Goonie Softlock
- If you reach the final Goonie and die at the same time (Bomb or Time Over only, can't interact while taking damage), it'll remove the Goonie, softlocking the game.

On a mostly unrelated note, I learned that if you were to finish 64 consecutive playthroughs of the game, you would become completely invincible for the next 192 runs. Enemy damage continues increasing with each playthrough, but after a while, the damage will start to overflow and actually heal you instead. You'd need to survive many, many runs with one-hit kill stuff though. The overflow starts happening earlier, but the lower the damage initially is, the more loops you need to overflow it. Bats still one-hit you 63 runs in.