Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a very deep and complex game with lots of neat tricks. It is also a very buggy game. For the past few years it's been a personal desire of mine and several others to have a glitchless category for speedrunning, but no matter how much we try we can not come up with a concise and meaningful definition which in turn means it can not be added as a category.

If we define glitches as errors in the execution of the code then glitchless still leaves all the zips and wraps which is not what most people would think of with this category.

If we make a list of glitches and tricks that are not allowed, we would first need to agree on what to include and not to include (and there is no such consensus at the moment). Then if we could agree we would most likely end up with a large and confusing list full of very specific cases.

Additionally, glitches and similar issues just sort of happen in this game on a regular basis and there's currently no protocol for handling rare or edge-cases. Also it would royally suck to void a good run because of a random occurence that ruin it.

With all this said, please don't feel discouraged from doing runs of glitchless as you see fit. Glitchless run submissions are perfectly valid for the existing categories and the main issue here is agreeing on how to define the category to make as many as possible happy. If eventually a true category starts to form, we might reconsider.

Regards, TimpZ.