There are a lot of urban myths, from crocodiles living in the sewer to the mysterious creature called ‘Slender Man‘, but did you know that there are also urban myths of gaming? From haunted arcade cabinets to a cartridge graveyard in the middle of the New Mexico desert, urban legends surrounding video games are about as old as the games themselves.
Mind control? Check. The hand of Satan? Check. Enough conspiracy theories for an entire season of X-Files? Check. Some legends are totally fake, some are likely legitimate, and others are… well … we may never know.
Here’s the Top 20 Video Games urban legends, myths and conspiracy theories. For more weird Facts: kruetlikriegr.blogspot.com
20. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
We can thank 4Chan for the origin of the origin story behind the legend of the haunted Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask game cartridge. One 4Chan user posted a story about how he came into possession of a blank N64 cartridge with Majora’s Mask written across it in black magic marker. Upon starting the game the user noticed that there was already a game saved on the cartridge titled “Ben.” He ignored the save file and started a new game and noticed that all the NPCs would refer to him as Ben. He deleted the ‘Ben’ save file and started a new game again but the game became even more erratic, the music played backwards and his character began to be followed by a statue of the game’s main character with a creepy smile on its face.
The ‘Ben’ file appeared again together with a new file named ‘drowned’ and after that every time he tried to play the game his character simply died and a message showed on his screen saying “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”.
19. Pokemon
Why is a ten year old running around unsupervised? Pokemon Red and Blue was a massive success for Nintendo but did anyone bother to ask, where the hell are the adults in this game? Some believe the Pokemon actually takes place at the end of, a large scale, global war. One of the biggest clues to support this theory is that both Ash, and his rival, Gary, have no male parent figure throughout the game. And right before battle Surge he states “my electric Pokemon saved me during the war” adding further legitimacy to this theory.
18. Final Fantasy VIII – Squall is actually dead in the second half of the game
Squall was the hugely popular protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII and one prevailing conspiratorial myth is that Squall is actually a ghost. While fighting Edea, Squall is impaled by a shard of ice tight at the end of disc one. On the second disc however Squall appears with no wounds and no other character brings up the fact that he was, you know, killed.
Some hold to the theory that Squall actually dies from his wounds at the end of disc one and the rest of the game is actually Squall’s dream as he passes away.
17. Pokemon Red and Green – Lavender Town caused a suicide spike
Back in 1996 Pokemon Red and Green was slotted in nearly everyone’s Gameboy around the world but when the game was first launched in Japan it was fast linked to series of child suicides and illness. Children from the ages of 7 to 12 were either falling sick or taking their own lives outright. But the thing is nothing happened until players reached Lavender Town where the town’s specific music caused nausea and eventually suicidal tendencies in children. The music was eventually changed before it was shipped abroad. Here’s a video from the original game: https://youtu.be/-sOadAaGiq4
16. Braid – anti-nuclear message
Braid is deceptively simple in its narrative: boy sees girl, boy tries to rescue girl. But the twist comes at the end of the game where the boy catches the girl and right when they finally meet a bomb explodes and your screen turns bright. Off screen, a voice intones: “Now we are all sons of bitches.” quote that can be directly tied to Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the heads of the Trinity atomic bomb tests.
15. Killswitch
Killswitch is a game that it was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989. While gamers in the States were playing Mega Man 2, russians were playing one of the earliest iterations of a survival horror title where you were give the choice between a young girl or an invisible demon as playable characters. The strange thing about Killswitch is that it would self-delete from your hard drive upon beating the game. A copy of Killswitch was bought on eBay for $733,000 by a Japanese man named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube but the only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
14. Legend of Zelda – Nazi swastika
When The Legend of Zelda was launched back in 1986 it immediately arouse controversies. The map was shaped like a swastika but while the dungeon is shaped like a swastika, it’s not the Nazi one. This swastika faces to the right and is actually an ancient symbol of peace in Hindu mythology. The makers of Zelda were, it turns out, only wishing players good luck.
13. Blowing into the NES cartridges
While the instruction booklet that came with every NES title explicitly instructed against blowing into your game cartridge, that didn’t stop anyone from doing it. Blowing into the cartridges actually was a short-term solution but over the years ‘blow damage’ degraded games. The whole thing got sorted out with the Super Nintendo’s top loading design.
12. Berzerk – the mark of the beast
Jeff Dailey died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berzerk in 1981. One year later, 18 year old Peter Burkowski also died of a heart attack moments after cracking the Berzerk top-ten high score list twice in fifteen minutes. Some say that the mark of the beast, 666, being in their score had something to do with their deaths. Coincidence?
11. Fallout 3 predicts the future
Some players claim that they have found something in the game that predicts the future. Some say that you can hear a DJ on the station rambling off such cryptic phrases as “The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these we are all Brits” and “I can’t believe Britney’s actually won an Oscar!” followed by a series of numbers in Morse code that can be interpreted as dates. Bethdesa, the company that designed the game, denies that these cryptic radio stations exist.
10. Lara Croft in her birthday suit
When Tomb Raider first dropped on Playstation 1 rumors began circulating that there is a certain code that lets you see Lara in her birthday suit. The internet was flooded with fake codes, but that’s all they were: fake.
9. New Mexico is home a video game mass grave
In September 1983 about 10 million copies of Pac-Man and E.T movie adaptation video games were returned to Atari by disgruntled fans. It is said that the unwanted game cartridges were shipped to New Mexico where they were dumped into a video game mass grave and paved with concrete.
8. GlaDOS from the video game Portal
Have you ever gotten a good look at GLaDOS? If you look closer ‘she’ kind of looks like a human being flipped upside down. The game’s art director, Jeremy Bennett says that was intentional.
“Eventually, we settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS’ raw power and her femininity.”
But why does she look like a woman who has been bound and gagged?
7. GTA V and the Black Dahlia
There’s a certain website in GTA V, whokilledlenorajohnson.com, that is filled with fake newspaper stories and a trail of breadcrumbs that lead players to an in-game murder mystery. The players read about the death of Lenora Johnson, a fictional actress killed during the golden age of Vinewood cinema. This story is actually based on very real and very famous Black Dahlia case in 1940s Hollywood.
On one page of the site, players are directed to another murder in Los Santos. The murder of Jolene Cranley Evans is strewn with clues on where to find Evans’ ghost on Mount Gordo. At 11pm, players will find a ghost in the distance and she looks like that terrifying ghoul up there. She disappears just after midnight.
6. World of Warcraft and the Seventh Circle of Hell
The Karazhan Cryptsis was an abandoned level from the earlier days of World of Warcraft that was only accessible trough an in-game glitch. The easiest way to access the dungeon was die on one side of the door that walled of the level, and resurrect on the other side. The strange thing about this dungeon is that it was filled with decomposing corpses and the main room full of prisoners sentenced to death by drowning with their hands and feet cut off. After The Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard built an invisible wall around the door of the dungeon. The creepiest part? They never actually took it out. It’s still just sitting there inside the game.
5. Super Mario Galaxy 2 and the mystery figures of Hell Valley
In the level Shiverburn Galaxy, you can catch three figures on the ridge of a mountain looking down at you. Anywhere on that level, if you look up and to the left, you will find the same three hollow eyed figures watching you. The sky art for that area is called “BeyondHellValley” but Super Mario Galaxy 2 has no level anmed Hell Valley.
4. Saddam Hussein and Playstation 2
When the PS2 was first released reports emerged that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was stockpiling PlayStation 2 consoles. Why? Rumors said that he was planning to use the PS2 chips as a missile guiding system .
3. The Madden curse
In the early 2000s Electronic Arts began featuring NFL stars on the cover of their sport games and star players were lining up to get a slice of that free advertising. For the next several years every player that was featured on an EA’s cover got injured in the next season. That’s how the Madden curse started circulating but you know what? American football is dangerous guys. Sometimes people get hurt, that’s it!
2. Morrowind Mod jvk1166z.esp
The Elders Scrolls 3: Morrowind is considered the best game in the Elder Scrolls series by many. It’s so popular that it has an online community where users mod the game to add custom quests, characters, weapons and armors. One of these mods is Mod jvk1166z.esp, a mysteryous mod that is only playable on DOSbox, a software that allows gamers to play older PC games on their modern computers. When you start the game using this mod all the main characters from the game are dead and if you stay still for too long your health starts to drop and eventually you die. And if you die from that a new character appears who players call “The Assassin”. Another strange thing about this mod is that the remaining living characters come outside at night and just stand there. If a players tries to interact with them they would simply say “Watch the sky.”
1. Polybius – the oldest gaming myth
Polybius was an arcade cabinet was released in incredibly limited numbers in the early 80s. When played, it supposedly caused all sorts of health problems including amnesia, blackouts, nausea, seizures, headaches, nightmares and, in some cases, players were reported to commit suicide not long after playing. Even stranger are reports that once a week men dressed in black would come through and collect the data stored on the game’s memory.
The legend of Polybius is likely the oldest gaming myth and had the honor of guest starring in an episode of The Simpsons.
( http://teehunter.com/2014/10/20-urban-myths-of-gaming/ )
Mind control? Check. The hand of Satan? Check. Enough conspiracy theories for an entire season of X-Files? Check. Some legends are totally fake, some are likely legitimate, and others are… well … we may never know.
Here’s the Top 20 Video Games urban legends, myths and conspiracy theories. For more weird Facts: kruetlikriegr.blogspot.com
20. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
We can thank 4Chan for the origin of the origin story behind the legend of the haunted Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask game cartridge. One 4Chan user posted a story about how he came into possession of a blank N64 cartridge with Majora’s Mask written across it in black magic marker. Upon starting the game the user noticed that there was already a game saved on the cartridge titled “Ben.” He ignored the save file and started a new game and noticed that all the NPCs would refer to him as Ben. He deleted the ‘Ben’ save file and started a new game again but the game became even more erratic, the music played backwards and his character began to be followed by a statue of the game’s main character with a creepy smile on its face.
The ‘Ben’ file appeared again together with a new file named ‘drowned’ and after that every time he tried to play the game his character simply died and a message showed on his screen saying “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”.
19. Pokemon
Why is a ten year old running around unsupervised? Pokemon Red and Blue was a massive success for Nintendo but did anyone bother to ask, where the hell are the adults in this game? Some believe the Pokemon actually takes place at the end of, a large scale, global war. One of the biggest clues to support this theory is that both Ash, and his rival, Gary, have no male parent figure throughout the game. And right before battle Surge he states “my electric Pokemon saved me during the war” adding further legitimacy to this theory.
18. Final Fantasy VIII – Squall is actually dead in the second half of the game
Squall was the hugely popular protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII and one prevailing conspiratorial myth is that Squall is actually a ghost. While fighting Edea, Squall is impaled by a shard of ice tight at the end of disc one. On the second disc however Squall appears with no wounds and no other character brings up the fact that he was, you know, killed.
Some hold to the theory that Squall actually dies from his wounds at the end of disc one and the rest of the game is actually Squall’s dream as he passes away.
17. Pokemon Red and Green – Lavender Town caused a suicide spike
Back in 1996 Pokemon Red and Green was slotted in nearly everyone’s Gameboy around the world but when the game was first launched in Japan it was fast linked to series of child suicides and illness. Children from the ages of 7 to 12 were either falling sick or taking their own lives outright. But the thing is nothing happened until players reached Lavender Town where the town’s specific music caused nausea and eventually suicidal tendencies in children. The music was eventually changed before it was shipped abroad. Here’s a video from the original game: https://youtu.be/-sOadAaGiq4
16. Braid – anti-nuclear message
Braid is deceptively simple in its narrative: boy sees girl, boy tries to rescue girl. But the twist comes at the end of the game where the boy catches the girl and right when they finally meet a bomb explodes and your screen turns bright. Off screen, a voice intones: “Now we are all sons of bitches.” quote that can be directly tied to Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the heads of the Trinity atomic bomb tests.
15. Killswitch
Killswitch is a game that it was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989. While gamers in the States were playing Mega Man 2, russians were playing one of the earliest iterations of a survival horror title where you were give the choice between a young girl or an invisible demon as playable characters. The strange thing about Killswitch is that it would self-delete from your hard drive upon beating the game. A copy of Killswitch was bought on eBay for $733,000 by a Japanese man named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube but the only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
14. Legend of Zelda – Nazi swastika
When The Legend of Zelda was launched back in 1986 it immediately arouse controversies. The map was shaped like a swastika but while the dungeon is shaped like a swastika, it’s not the Nazi one. This swastika faces to the right and is actually an ancient symbol of peace in Hindu mythology. The makers of Zelda were, it turns out, only wishing players good luck.
13. Blowing into the NES cartridges
While the instruction booklet that came with every NES title explicitly instructed against blowing into your game cartridge, that didn’t stop anyone from doing it. Blowing into the cartridges actually was a short-term solution but over the years ‘blow damage’ degraded games. The whole thing got sorted out with the Super Nintendo’s top loading design.
12. Berzerk – the mark of the beast
Jeff Dailey died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berzerk in 1981. One year later, 18 year old Peter Burkowski also died of a heart attack moments after cracking the Berzerk top-ten high score list twice in fifteen minutes. Some say that the mark of the beast, 666, being in their score had something to do with their deaths. Coincidence?
11. Fallout 3 predicts the future
Some players claim that they have found something in the game that predicts the future. Some say that you can hear a DJ on the station rambling off such cryptic phrases as “The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these we are all Brits” and “I can’t believe Britney’s actually won an Oscar!” followed by a series of numbers in Morse code that can be interpreted as dates. Bethdesa, the company that designed the game, denies that these cryptic radio stations exist.
10. Lara Croft in her birthday suit
When Tomb Raider first dropped on Playstation 1 rumors began circulating that there is a certain code that lets you see Lara in her birthday suit. The internet was flooded with fake codes, but that’s all they were: fake.
9. New Mexico is home a video game mass grave
In September 1983 about 10 million copies of Pac-Man and E.T movie adaptation video games were returned to Atari by disgruntled fans. It is said that the unwanted game cartridges were shipped to New Mexico where they were dumped into a video game mass grave and paved with concrete.
8. GlaDOS from the video game Portal
Have you ever gotten a good look at GLaDOS? If you look closer ‘she’ kind of looks like a human being flipped upside down. The game’s art director, Jeremy Bennett says that was intentional.
“Eventually, we settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS’ raw power and her femininity.”
But why does she look like a woman who has been bound and gagged?
7. GTA V and the Black Dahlia
There’s a certain website in GTA V, whokilledlenorajohnson.com, that is filled with fake newspaper stories and a trail of breadcrumbs that lead players to an in-game murder mystery. The players read about the death of Lenora Johnson, a fictional actress killed during the golden age of Vinewood cinema. This story is actually based on very real and very famous Black Dahlia case in 1940s Hollywood.
On one page of the site, players are directed to another murder in Los Santos. The murder of Jolene Cranley Evans is strewn with clues on where to find Evans’ ghost on Mount Gordo. At 11pm, players will find a ghost in the distance and she looks like that terrifying ghoul up there. She disappears just after midnight.
6. World of Warcraft and the Seventh Circle of Hell
The Karazhan Cryptsis was an abandoned level from the earlier days of World of Warcraft that was only accessible trough an in-game glitch. The easiest way to access the dungeon was die on one side of the door that walled of the level, and resurrect on the other side. The strange thing about this dungeon is that it was filled with decomposing corpses and the main room full of prisoners sentenced to death by drowning with their hands and feet cut off. After The Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard built an invisible wall around the door of the dungeon. The creepiest part? They never actually took it out. It’s still just sitting there inside the game.
5. Super Mario Galaxy 2 and the mystery figures of Hell Valley
In the level Shiverburn Galaxy, you can catch three figures on the ridge of a mountain looking down at you. Anywhere on that level, if you look up and to the left, you will find the same three hollow eyed figures watching you. The sky art for that area is called “BeyondHellValley” but Super Mario Galaxy 2 has no level anmed Hell Valley.
4. Saddam Hussein and Playstation 2
When the PS2 was first released reports emerged that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was stockpiling PlayStation 2 consoles. Why? Rumors said that he was planning to use the PS2 chips as a missile guiding system .
3. The Madden curse
In the early 2000s Electronic Arts began featuring NFL stars on the cover of their sport games and star players were lining up to get a slice of that free advertising. For the next several years every player that was featured on an EA’s cover got injured in the next season. That’s how the Madden curse started circulating but you know what? American football is dangerous guys. Sometimes people get hurt, that’s it!
2. Morrowind Mod jvk1166z.esp
The Elders Scrolls 3: Morrowind is considered the best game in the Elder Scrolls series by many. It’s so popular that it has an online community where users mod the game to add custom quests, characters, weapons and armors. One of these mods is Mod jvk1166z.esp, a mysteryous mod that is only playable on DOSbox, a software that allows gamers to play older PC games on their modern computers. When you start the game using this mod all the main characters from the game are dead and if you stay still for too long your health starts to drop and eventually you die. And if you die from that a new character appears who players call “The Assassin”. Another strange thing about this mod is that the remaining living characters come outside at night and just stand there. If a players tries to interact with them they would simply say “Watch the sky.”
1. Polybius – the oldest gaming myth
Polybius was an arcade cabinet was released in incredibly limited numbers in the early 80s. When played, it supposedly caused all sorts of health problems including amnesia, blackouts, nausea, seizures, headaches, nightmares and, in some cases, players were reported to commit suicide not long after playing. Even stranger are reports that once a week men dressed in black would come through and collect the data stored on the game’s memory.
The legend of Polybius is likely the oldest gaming myth and had the honor of guest starring in an episode of The Simpsons.
( http://teehunter.com/2014/10/20-urban-myths-of-gaming/ )