What is your opinion on the potential of runs that feature glitches, that can’t be replicated? My mind goes to Yoshi’s Island (I think?) which features a frame perfect glitch that warps you to the credits.
Do you think runs that feature random, unplanned, and unrepeatable glitches that give large advantages, should be considered invalid?
I think you're thinking of Zool, not Yoshi's Island. And that was fairly quickly figured out and replicated, but we'll disregard that. That said, I think that if that if the community really can't figure it out, as much as it sucks to the person that got it, it shouldn't be on the board if it can't be achieved again. But it definitely should still be preserved so that people know the glitch exists and hopefully it can be figured out at some point. Plus it makes for a great story.
If it's not possible to replicate, then it's often most likely just a random hardware failure, especially if we are talking old consoles like nes, snes and so on. I had that in Kid Icarus once where I was warped too early to the next stage. Or people randomly getting warped to the final stage on Castlevania 1 thanks to the cart being tilted in the console. Definitely would not submit a run with anything like that in the first place. And at that point you could sometimes also not rule out if some form of concious cheating is involved.
In my opinion, so long as you can prove you didn't cheat, any method you used to complete a game quickly is a valid strat.
In the conversation of unrepeatable glitches, there is a glitch that allows you to duplicate a star found in a barrel in Stage 3 on Streets Of Rage 4. Now sadly, this is probably the least useful stage to have an extra star, however there is a barrel in Stage 11 that has a star that if we were able to replicate this (or at least figure out how it works) it could be very useful.
Now sadly:
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Only 4 or 5 people have managed to pull it off on Stage 3, most accidentally. I have tried hundreds of times to do it on purpose, and done it exactly ONCE (this week in fact, and I've been trying since JUNE!), and it was during offline practice so I don't even have a video. I have seen two videos. No-one has done it on Stage 11.
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There was a lengthy analysis of theories on how the trick can be replicated, but the person who wrote that theory deleted their account so there theory is lost.
So technically it is not "unrepeatable" but of the hundreds of active runners, thousands of casual players, many hours of runs being watched and verified by the community, we only have a couple of video documents of the glitch being pulled of and only a couple more verbal accounts of it being done? Yeah, it's up there.
I have personal experience with this!
That's me finding a basically un-replicate-able (? is there an actual word for what I'm going for here?) glitch in inFAMOUS, my very first speed game! This clip isn't from a speedrun attempt, it's from a challenge run done on the hardest difficulty, and I'm now 99% sure that's what made this work. By taking damage (from a rooftop gunner) just after hitting the mission marker (possibly a frame-perfect interval after), the game acts as though I've completed this mission. You gain a superpower during said mission and, without going through a loading screen at any point, I have that superpower after experiencing this glitch.
I've never been able to make this happen again, even with grenades (which are used for death abuse frequently throughout the run, and are unlocked a little later in the game than is shown in this clip).
I call this the "nonspecific full mission skip" (as there are two other full-mission skips in the game, but they're situational and for particular missions) and we've formally banned it in the rules unless/until it becomes repeatable. And if it ever did, we'd make a new category for it because WHOO BOY that would change the routing of this game tremendously.
I've had an unreplicable glitch happen to me while speedrunning Skylanders: Swap Force Wii Any%. At the end of the level, I was hit by an enemy in such a way that I was launched very far away from the level. These enemies also appear half-way in the level, and I've been trying to replicate this in hopes of a huge shortcut (to no avail).
Here's the clip if you want to see it: https://twitter.com/Walgrey_Tweets/status/1313185135253229578