Pop Culture Urban Legends / Video Games

See also Urban Legend of Zelda for rumors specifically about gameplay.

Pokémon has its own page.

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• On Japanese message boards in the early 2000s, rumors spread of a so-called "cruel version" of AIR that featured much bloodier and disturbing content than the original. It was supposedly created by an unidentified doujin group, who depending on the story, either consisted of staff related to Key or angry fans against the studio at the time. Many claimed CGs float around the internet and a very rare fan game with a similar concept was discovered, but there is no evidence of the 'real' cruel version ever existing other than anecdotal accounts.
• Animal Crossing:
  • There tends to be a rumor (or an accusation) made that a certain male townsperson (specifically, a cat named Bob) wears a dress. According to some, this is a programming error — he's supposed to have normal "guy" clothing. However, this is false— Bob wears the same type of sacklike clothing both male and female cats wear. His "default" shirt pattern has flowers on it, but it's a flower shirt that is available to all characters (players included) and is worn indiscriminately regardless of gender. New Leaf makes it more noticeable that it's a shirt. It wasn't until Animal Crossing: New Horizons that the animal villagers could actually wear different types of clothing with different models, making it possible to actually put Bob in a dress.
  • There was actually a massive hoax perpetrated at one point regarding Animal Crossing: City Folk. A young child was playing the game when supposedly Tortimer asked the child for either a photo or some personal information (most likely the child's birthday, as the game requires the player to tell Tortimer it so that villagers know when to celebrate the occasion). The child's parent apparently saw this and came to the conclusion that a hacker had made his was into her child's Wii. She removed the game, contacted the authorities, and told them. Suddenly, the Missouri Police are sending out threat warnings to everyone that Tortimer is actually the avatar for some pervert who is trying to solicit children for sexual favors, photos, or confidential information. While it didn't take long for gamers to realize the absolute ridiculousness of this (nobody can join a game in Animal Crossing: City Folk without first exchanging a 12-digit code with each other outside of the game; Tortimer is in fact an NPC and not controlled by players, and one can encounter him even offline), it didn't take long for parents in the Missouri area to panic that someone was trying to invade their children's video games. When the state tried to sue Nintendo, Nintendo simply proved them wrong with the coding and hard facts, and the Missouri Police quickly stopped talking about it, egg all over their faces.
• In the early-mid 2000s, a rumor circulated in the Atari fan community that the Atari 2600's originally-intended successor was meant to be the "Atari 3200", a system which would have used a custom 10-bit CPU, but proved too difficult to develop for and so was abandoned in favor of a console version of their 8-bit computer line, which became the Atari 5200. Nothing even remotely resembling the supposed 3200 was ever in development by Atari, and their plan for a 2600 successor was always some kind of console offshoot of their 8-bit computers. Furthermore, Atari always used off-the-shelf CPUs in their systems, and no mainstream manufacturer has ever produced a 10-bit CPU.
• For years, rumors of a new Battletoads game circulated the Internet thanks to rumors from sites like 4chan, a series of relentless prank calls to GameStop demanding pre-orders for Battletoads, and fake websites promised that Battletoads was coming soon. A new entry would eventually release in 2020, possibly in part due to this joke.
• Civilization II was famous for the Nuclear Gandhi glitch. According to legend, the error arose because Gandhi's aggression was set at one (the lowest level) and democracy lowers aggression by two points. This then leads to an underflow error that set aggression at 255 out of 10, making Gandhi by far the most aggressive leader. However, both Brian Reynolds — the Civ II developer — and Sid Meier — creator of the Civilization series — have both confirmed that not only does this glitch not exist; it cannot occur as there are only three aggression levels in Civ II, government doesn't affect AI aggression, and most importantly, an underflow error was impossible in C and C++, which is what Civ II is programmed in. Amusingly enough, Sid Meier in his autobiography claimed This Very Wiki was where the legend started:
  The first reference appeared in July 2012—two years after Jon’s game, and more than two decades after the original game’s release when a user named “Tunafish” added the supposed trivia to the website TV Tropes.org, which can be edited by anyone. It sat, untouched except for cosmetic changes, until November of that year, when a watered-down version of the same story was added by an anonymous user to Wikia, a pop culture site similar to Wikipedia. No other edits were ever made to Wikia from that IP address, and while TV Tropes is not as forthcoming with their user data, it appears that the Tunafish account was never used again, either.
• The bizarre circumstances surrounding the development of Cooking Mama: Cookstar gave rise to the theory that it exists as a way of mining cryptocurrency using the player's console. This is largely thanks to a press release by the game's publisher that claimed the game would be the first to use "blockchain-based DRM"; after the game was removed from sale just hours after its release (as well as people who played it saying that their systems ran hot while playing), the cryptocurrency idea took off. In reality, there is no evidence that the game features any form of blockchain technology, with the likely explanation being that the publisher was merely spouting popular IT buzzwords to try and impress investors. Meanwhile, the actual reason for the game's storefront removal was a dispute between the publisher and the IP holder, and the reports of console overheating seem to just be the game being poorly optimized. The Switch's hardware isn't powerful enough to be an effective crypto-miner either, and such a feature never would've made it through Nintendo's vetting process for new games anyway.
• During the series' hiatus in the 2010s, rumors about a new Crash Bandicoot game (usually involving the franchise's original studio, Naughty Dog) would often pop up, with a frequent title attached to the supposed game being Crash Bandicoot 3D: Uka Uka Resurrection. The series would see some remakes in the late 2010s, but wouldn't see a new entry until 2020 (Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time), and none of these projects had Naughty Dog's involvement.
• Croc 3: Stone of the Gobbos, a hoaxed sequel to the Croc series.
• Back in the early 2000s, rumors were circulating on the Web that Pendulo Studios was working on a sequel to Day of the Tentacle called Maniac Mansion 3: Rise of the Tentacle(s) (an obvious reference to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines). In fact, such a project was never in the works, and the legend originated from an April Fools joke published at the end of March 2003 by the French gaming website Cafzone (and subsequently reiterated in the gaming magazine Joystiq).
• There was an old rumor that Timber of Diddy Kong Racing would have his own game with Pipsy and Bumper as his co-stars, which Rare has denied. While it is true that Timber was the protagonist of Pro Am 64 before it was retooled into Diddy Kong Racing, the alleged Timber 64 was supposed to have been a different game entirely.
• Donkey Kong 64: The game was forced to be bundled with the Expansion Pak purely because it fixed a Game-Breaking Bug that developer Rare couldn't patch up before the deadline. The interesting thing about this legend is that it was started by a former Rare programmer named Chris Marlow, who shared the story at the beginning of a developer's commentary on Conker's Bad Fur Day; however, Marlow never worked on the game himself, being part of a different team at the studio. Someone who did work on the game, lead artist Mark Stevenson, would later explain that Marlow likely conflated two different things about the game's development that were probably heard around the offices. It was decided by Nintendo early in production that Donkey Kong 64 would be a Tech-Demo Game to show off the benefits of the Expansion Pak, hence the device being a pack-in (its extra RAM was used to handle the game's lighting system, which was very advanced for the time), and while there was indeed a major game-breaking bug found near the end of the development, the Expansion Pak didn't serve as a band-aid solution (and the problem was fixed in time anyway).
• Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were said to have created custom made Doom levels that resembled Columbine, populated with representations of their classmates, which they used as a training ground to practice for their mass shooting. While it is true they made some custom levels for Doom, none of the ones currently known to exist resemble the school at all, and there's no reason to believe the supposed "Columbine level wad" exists due to often-overlooked details surrounding the actual shooting^note Shooting up the school wasn't their initial intention; their plan for the massacre was to bomb the building, and they only resorted to shooting once their homemade bombs failed to go off. In addition, Doom's enemy AI is very primitive, simply charging towards the player and attacking when in range; nothing that would've been possible for mods of the time would've allowed them to make enemies that would realistically flee or panic in the way real people would in that situation, so it wouldn't have made an effective training simulation anyway.
• Dragon Quest:
  • It's often said the series' popularity in its home country of Japan is so immense that it's illegal to release a new game in the series on a weekday in fear of kids cutting class to buy the game. This was even purported as fact by video game documentaries and articles. While the series'popularity did cause enough trouble to result in hearings in the National Diet (people often skipped school or work to buy Dragon Quest games at launch, and robberies and muggings just to obtain new copies weren't uncommon), no such law was actually passed; instead, developer Enix voluntarily decided to release the games on weekends as a response to the controversies.
  • In the early days of the Internet, Dragon Quest was the subject of a long-lasting rumor that the giant purple dragon you fight as the second phase of the Final Boss was the Dragonlord's pet trying to avenge its master. Supposedly, the localization team changed this to the Dragonlord's secret true form because the original boss was a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, and Enix liked the idea so much that they worked it into all later remakes and adaptations of the game. While a nice story, it just isn't true — "The Dragonlord revealed his true self!" is a direct translation of the Japanese line.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: Junkyard Scramble was a puzzle game by Crawfish Interactive which, according to rumors, has been cancelled in favor of Jawbreakers!. In 2017, a former employee of Crawfish denied that the game ever existed, which means that everyone was likely confusing it with Jawbreakers!.
• Elf Bowling was rumored to contain spyware. This was during the era when sending executables or Flash games via e-mail was the norm. There was no spyware, but as this game was popular at that time, this widespread rumor caused people to distance themselves from the game, including media outlets that were going to cover the game.
• The colloquially named "Evil Farming Game" stems from a 2016 Reddit thread by a user who claimed to remember a Harvest Moon-type farming game with a dark twist: the protagonist murders his wife when it begins and has to split his time between actually farming and hiding the evidence from authorities and other people. Over the next few years, the game grew increasingly popular as people continued to search for it, eventually receiving its own subreddit in 2020. In June 2021, speculation from another user led to the truth being uncovered: the "game" was purely hypothetical, being invented by Joel from Vinesauce as a joke based on combining Body Harvest with Harvest Moon. The original poster used to listen to Vinesauce-related videos while going to bed, came across an animatic of the moment in question, and ended up misremembering it as an actual game.
• Contrary to popular belief, the title Final Fantasy was not chosen because Square was about to go bankrupt. In reality, creator Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted the initials "FF" for the game, but his first choice, Fighting Fantasy, was already taken.
• The unreleased localization of The Great Gatsby adaptation on the NES, known in Japanese as Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari, was found at a yard sale and purchased for fifty cents, with the instruction manual rubber banded to the cartridge, and a 1990 magazine ad. No further hard copies are known to exist, but luckily, the game was fan translated and made available online. There's a good reason why there aren't any other hard copies: it's not actually an NES game. It's just a Flash game with some cleverly-faked adverts.
• Whenever Hagane is brought up, it's invariably brought up that the game's North American release was a Blockbusters rental exclusive. There is no evidence to suggest this and plenty otherwise.
• There was occasional speculation on the now-defunct Relic Entertainment forums that Homeworld was originally conceived as a Battlestar Galactica licensed game before licensing issues resulted in it being reworked into an original IP. Other than having a few tropes in common the two franchises aren't really similar enough that Homeworld could be called a Spiritual Licensee, so if this was the original intention the idea was dropped at a very early stage in development.
• For years, rumors circulated about the identity of the corpse seen on the Game Over screen in Hong Kong '97. The most common guesses were Polish boxer Leszek Błażynski, Egyptian political activist Farag Foda, or Palestine Liberation Organization member Atef Bseiso, all of whom died violently on the date seen in the timestamp (June 8, 1992)^note Błażynski actually died on August 6, 1992; his inclusion was due to confusion about the DDMMYY format commonly used outside of the USA. It was later revealed that none of these guesses were correct, and it was an image of a victim of the Bosnian genocide from a shock documentary, with director Yoshihisa Kurosawa capturing the image from a LaserDisc copy of the film.
• Kekcroc started out as a joke, but people who didn't get the joke started taking it seriously as an actual piece of lost media. The story goes that Kekcroc is supposedly a 1993 Sega Genesis game that appeared at local discount stores before disappearing. Some have claimed to have played the game, or have played ports on DOS, NES and Game Boy. "Evidence" of the game appears in crude screen shots, box art, and an audio clip.
• Kirby: A number of wild fandom rumors surrounded Shinichi Shimomura, a leading designer for the series credited with directing Kirby's Dream Land 2, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, and Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land (the latter with Masahiro Sakurai). Because of a lack of publicly available documentation and the fact that he disappeared from the public eye after Nightmare in Dream Land, fans started theorizing that Shimomura was either dead or flat-out nonexistent, with some believing that "Shinichi Shimomura" was actually a pseudonym for Satoru Iwata. Eventually, photos of him from a Japanese Kirby's Dream Course guidebook surfaced in 2022, proving that he is indeed real; most fans nowadays believe that he most likely retired.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly, prolific prankster on April Fools' Day, suckered in a lot of people with its claim of a realistic remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker rendered with the graphical engine of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. They claimed it was available with a Twilight Princess pre-order, and the article was accompanied by a Photoshopped screenshot of Link fighting a bird enemy in Twilight Princess's artstyle on Dragon Roost Island. People asked local retailers if the pre-order offer was real, and the May issue included letters mocking those who were fooled.
  • During development, a rumor arose simultaneously about The Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Wind Waker was unique in that Link would have to save his sister, rather than Zelda as usual. Fans remembered a scene from early in Link to the Past when Link's uncle tells him "Zelda is your..." — now they believed that he meant "sister", and Link and Zelda were secret siblings. The Wind Waker revealed that the sister was a completely different character, but that didn't stop people from thinking this was true in both games. The GBA remake of Link to the Past changed the "Zelda is your..." speech entirely, squashing the rumors once and for all.
  • A hoax known as Valley of the Flood was said to be a prequel to The Wind Waker, starring a Fake Ultimate Hero version of Link fighting a version of Ganondorf who was slowly going insane after his conquering of Hyrule, ultimately ending with the flood mentioned in Wind Waker killing everyone and destroying the world. An interview about it can be seen here.
  • A half-finished prototype of an unreleased NES game called The Legend of Zelda: The Triforce Saga was listed for auction on eBay in 2005; few details were given beyond a picture of the cartridge, and a blurry photograph of the title screen. This was a hoax; someone paid $3000 for what turned out to be an empty cartridge shell.
  • The blonde Kokiri girl from Ocarina of Time, known officially as Fado, is speculated to have been developed as the Wind Sage for a scrapped Wind Temple, which ended up being scrapped (and depending on the telling, was replaced with Saria and the Forest Temple). This is simply fan-speculation based on her having a unique design, name, and personality for a minor NPC; while an unused medalian for the Wind Temple still exists in the game's code, proving that a Wind Temple was planned at one point, there's no evidence that Fado was ever connected to it. The Wind Waker would later feature a Kokiri Wind Sage named Fado (albeit male), which fans speculate might have been the developers repurposing the original concept.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Rumors began spreading around the release of Tears of the Kingdom that the Japanese quest log entries were written in the first person, and that the international versions' choice to write them in third-person lost some insight into Link's personality, sense of humor, and feelings about other characters, particularly Zelda. This lasted until someone fluent in Japanese played the game and discovered that the only direct pronoun the Japanese logs use is "jibun" (and then, only sparingly) — which can be used as a first-person pronoun, but can also mean "myself", "yourself", etc. Further hinting that the logs are meant to be interpreted in the third person, the descriptions of the memory cutscenes directly refer to Link by name.
• The Madden Curse is akin to the Curse of the Bambino and other notable sports curses. The superstition states that, when an NFL player appears on the cover of the latest edition of the Madden NFL series, either a) he and/or his team will not be up to snuff in the upcoming NFL season, or b) will suffer a major injury and be sidelined for much of the year.
  Related to this curse are the "Campbell's Chunky Soup" curse, which claims that any NFL athlete featured in a commercial for said soup is bound for misfortune, and the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, which doesn't confine itself to football — when Colorado Rockies pitcher Jeff Francis made the cover when the team was heading towards the World Series, fans wasted no time in their backlash and accused SI of being in cahoots with the Rockies' would-be World Series opponent, the Boston Red Sox. Sure enough, the Rockies lost and the Sox won.
  The curse may be spreading to other EA Sports titles, too. On November 13, 2015,^note a Friday the 13th, mind you EA Sports announced that Ronda Rousey would be the cover athlete for EA Sports UFC 2. She was already on the cover of Men's Fitness and billed as the greatest MMA fighter, male or female, ever. The day after this was announced, Holly Holm, a 20-1 underdog, kicks Rousey's fucking head in and breaks Rousey's undefeated streak. This came not too long after a controversy regarding the cover athlete for NHL 16. Chicago Blackhawks star Patrick Kane was supposed to be on the cover alongside his teammate, Jonathan Toews. Shortly after this was announced, Kane was accused of sexual assault, and EA Sports released the game with only Toews on the cover.^note Ironically enough, after being removed from the cover, Kane went on to have a stellar year with 106 points, becoming the first American to win the NHL's scoring title, while Toews had one of the worst seasons of his career.
  This exists largely because of the regression fallacy; the athletes involved are chosen specifically because of how far above the rest they are, which gives them nowhere to go but down (there's also that bit of Tempting Fate and the added pressure of being thrust into a bigger spotlight). The Snopes.com Urban Legends website has more information on both the Madden Curse and the "Campbell's Chunky Soup" curse.
  • The Madden Curse, if it truly existed, was finally broken in 2020. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was featured on the cover of Madden NFL 20. At first it seemed like he would be another victim; he got an ankle injury shortly into the regular season, and people feared it might be an ACL tear taking him out for the season. Instead, it was a mild sprain, and Mahomes recovered. He ended up leading his team to victory in Super Bowl LIV, winning Super Bowl MVP at that, breaking the curse.
  • The 2021 Super Bowl featured four of the five previous cover athletes (Mahomes, Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, and Antonio Brown). Interestingly, while Brown and Gronkowski scored 3 of the game's 4 touchdowns and Brady won MVP for the game, Mahomes had the worst game of his career.
• There is a rumored Game Boy game called Misfortune (also known as Misfortune.gb). The story goes that it was never released on its own cartridge, and instead was hidden in other more popular games, only accessible by a convoluted sequence of actions or through glitches, and even then whether or not these attempts would succeed was random. Failing at the game would lead to a screen with music that supposedly caused depression and might even lead to the player's suicide. If you won the game, or failed but turned it off before the music in question started, you were safe.
• Back in the 1980s, there were rumors surrounding the old Missile Command game that the Pentagon kept track of high scorers, in case of a real World War III.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound was not re-released outside Japan for the longest time, which led to many rumors as to why. Eventually, people settled on the idea that they couldn't license some of the in-game music samples and Nintendo didn't want to alter the original game. Then the game did get an international re-release on the Wii U's Virtual Console, where it saw no significant changes, let alone any for the music specifically. The actual reason was due to the Dali's Clock enemy, as due to changes in the copyright ownership of the Salvador Dalí painting it was based on, Nintendo was concerned about potential copyright infringement.
  • Mother 3 sees countless theories as to why Nintendo has never released the game outside Japan, the main ones that fans settle on being music samples possibly causing music rights issues, and the appearance of the Magypies putting Nintendo at risk for controversy. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé would say after he left the company that Mother 3 was purely a case of financials: it came out too late to be localized upon its original release, and it didn't make sense to localize a text-heavy GBA game in such a niche series at any point afterwards regardless of its cult status. The rumors are still occasionally circulated, albeit changed from why the game wasn't localized in 2006 to why the game isn't localized now, after the Earthbound re-release sold well on the Wii U.
• MÚSECA is often mis-assumed to have had its online services nixed in 2018 due to the distribution of offline-enabling kits and upgrades and kits to convert MÚSECA cabinets into those for Bishi Bashi Channel, as well as the cessation of new content updates. This is only mostly-true; the game's online service was only terminated outside of Japan. There are still a few arcades in Japan that run the game in online mode rather than offline, and players can still log into the game's portal on the eAmusement website to access their player data. A major part of this misinformation is due to the game's lack of popularity in Rhythm Game social circles.
• Electronic Gaming Monthly came out with an April Fool's joke about a Kingdom Hearts/Super Mario Bros. crossover called Mushroom Kingdom Hearts.◊ Some people bought it.
• NASCAR has had the cover drivers for the annual video game suffer on occasion:
  • Tony Stewart was on the cover of NASCAR 08, and suffered one of the worst seasons of his career at Joe Gibbs Racing, finishing 9th in points and winning only once, as he struggled to adapt to NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow chassis and Joe Gibbs Racing switching manufactures from Chevy to Toyota.
  • Subverted (at least initially) with NASCAR the Game: Inside Line's cover driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. While "Little E" only had one win in the 2012 season, he won the 2014 Daytona 500 and swept both Pocono races that year. He did suffer two concussions in 2012 and another in 2016 (the latter outright ended the season for him, and led to his retirement announcement towards the mid-point of the 2017 season), though.
  • Inverted with Stewart's appearance on the cover of NASCAR 14. He'd already suffered his 2013 season-ending accident when the voting started.
  • Subverted the following year with NASCAR 15's cover driver Jeff Gordon. While his final full-time season had a slow start, he managed to make it to the Championship Four at Homestead via winning at Martinsville, but still came up short of winning a fifth title.
  • Subverted again in 2016 with NASCAR Heat Evolution's cover driver Carl Edwards. Like Gordon before him, he managed to make it to Homestead via a win at Texas, but unlike Gordon, who was still running at the finish in 2015, Edwards crashed with 6 laps remaining in (for lack of a better word) regulation, allowing Jimmie Johnson to tie Hall of Famers Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt with his 7th series title.
  • Beaten outright in 2020 when NASCAR Heat 5's cover driver Chase Elliott managed to punch his ticket to the Championship Four with a walk-off win at Martinsville, then won the championship race to claim his first title the following week at Phoenix.
• In the mid-2000s, a rumor circulated online that Nintendo had created a cat version of Nintendogs named "Nintencats". It was either never released because they believed a cat-based game wouldn't sell or it was a Japan-only game that was too poorly received to be released anywhere else. No such game exists. Ironically, Nintendogs + Cats would be a launch title for the 3DS.
• The "Persona 5 Curse" is a widely spread superstition among gacha communities claiming any game that announces a collaboration with Persona 5 is doomed to shut down a year later, with Star Ocean: Anamnesis, Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag, and Dragalia Lost all pointed to as victims of the curse. However, this is just the result of cherrypicking examples from the many gacha games Persona 5 has crossed over with, the vast majority of which, including the likes of Granblue Fantasy and Another Eden, have gone on for significantly longer than a year after their respective collaborations.
• Polybius: According to the legend, supposedly a mysterious and rare Arcade Game, its gameplay being vaguely described as some sort of Shoot 'Em Up game, which had strange and rather adverse effects on the mental and physical health of the people who played it. The progenitor of all those "creepy/haunted video games" creepypasta stories found on the internet these days. Newer versions of the tale play it from a more supernatural angle than the Government Conspiracy implied in older tellings. There is some grain of truth to the myth: several people got sick from playing games at the arcade, however, these people were playing for long spans of time and it was usually nothing worse than a migraine or stomach ache, and the handful that did—such as a kid who died after getting a high score in Berzerk—had pre-existing heart conditions which caused gaming to be more dangerous for them. ("Video games may represent a serious risk to some children with arrhythmic conditions," wrote one doctor on this very topic.) FBI agents were also known to hang around arcades, however this was because early 1980s arcades had seedy reputations associated with drugs and gambling.
• Originally, Portal 2 had a scene showing Caroline being forced into the mind uploading despite her objections, but the scene was later cut. Since a few of Ellen McLain's lines in the scene were left in the game files, numerous rumors began to circulate that either A) the scene was initially present in the plot but later removed; or B) since the scene played out like a rape, several cast and crew members objected to it (including Ellen McLain, who burst into tears, and J. K. Simmons, who refused to record lines for the scene, hence the absence of his lines in the game files), which ultimately forced it to be cut. Despite the obvious contradiction of J.K. Simmons getting offended at acting in a rape scene despite doing an actual rape scene previously in Oz, Erik Wolpaw has had to confirm that these rumors are false. No comments have been made on the actual reason for the cutting of the scene.
• For the better part of two decades, the English arcade version of Puyo Puyo (1992) was widely "known" to be an unlicensed bootleg. This confusion stems from the emulation community: MAME contributors found the game on a bootleg arcade board years before they found a legitimate board, allowing the idea of the localization itself being a bootleg to take hold. Even before Sega ended the rumor by porting the English version to the Nintendo Switch, the sporatic mentions in 90's Compile magazines and media, hidden Game Gear translation that is clearly based on the English arcade version, and continued used of the Satan -> Dark Prince Dub Name Change made it obvious that the English version is legitimate.
• A rumor spread for a while of Resident Evil 6 getting a special edition subtitled Final Hope which would have added a campaign for Claire Redfield and received a port to the Wii U. The only Resident Evil game the console got was a 2013 HD port of the 3DS installment Resident Evil: Revelations.
• Sega:
  • The Dreamcast was nothing more than a beta test for the Xbox, and once Microsoft learned what they needed to learn they had the Dreamcast killed off shortly before the Xbox was released. The origin of this rumor is the fact that "Compatibile with Windows CE" is written on the front of the console. While Microsoft did work with Sega on the Dreamcast to give it limited Windows capability, this was just to make it easier for developers to port over PC games (by way of including a custom version of the OS on the game disc).
  • As a possible extension of the above, the Xbox being able to play Dreamcast games. Though this was obviously quickly debunked once the Xbox was released and people actually tried it, this one actually does have a grain of truth to it, as there were plans for the Xbox to play Dreamcast titles. The idea was scrapped when Microsoft and Sega couldn't come to terms on whether or not Sega's SegaNet internet service should be implemented.
  • In 2001, it was claimed that a warehouse full of Sega Neptune consoles was discovered. This came from one of Electronic Gaming Monthly's April Fools Day pranks. There's no evidence that a working Sega Neptune (a Sega Genesis and a Sega 32X combined into one unit) has ever been produced, as the project was cancelled long before the stage where retail units would have been manufactured. At least one prototype does exist, but it's widely believed to just be an empty shell.
• SNK:
  • According to Hardcore Gaming 101, there were quite a few sites that alleged that the first appearance of Kyo Kusanagi, main character of their flagship The King of Fighters franchise, was as the Player 1 character in the beat'em up Mutation Nation. That is not true - while Ricky Jones from Mutation Nation may look similar to Kyo (especially on the cover), it is quite clear that he is meant to be his own character.
  • Many who followed The King of Fighters earnestly believed that the reason why SNK went out of their way to avoid talking about K9999 and make it appear as though he never existed for two whole decades was due to legal pressure by Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of AKIRA, mainly due to K9999 being basically Tetsuo Shima with a blue and yellow paintjob. There is absolutely no evidence that Otomo pursued legal action against SNK, and the company eventually confessed when they reintroduced the character as Krohnen in XV that they refused to acknowledge K9999 in order to fuel fan speculation as to what happened to him.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • One pervasive Sonic rumor stems around Tails, more specifically his gender. The rumor stipulates that Tails was originally designed as a female love interest to Sonic (or at least that, like Amy, he had a Precocious Crush), and that Dreams Come True's song "Sweet Dream" (which used Sonic the Hedgehog 2's ending theme as a base) would've been dedicated to this relationship. (It really did not help that a number of old Japanese doujins, for whatever reason, depicted Tails as secretly female, leading Western fans to wonder if the Japanese fanbase knew something they didn't.) This was Jossed by Tails' creator; he was always supposed to be male.
  • There was a rumor of a Wii U exclusive sequel to Sonic Generations, Sonic Dimensions, which would make up for Generations not being released on Wii or Wii U (due to the Wii's low power and the Wii U being released too late for the anniversary). This rumor possibly arose because the Wii similarly missed out the 15th anniversary game Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and got its own original title, Sonic and the Secret Rings, the following year instead. While the Wii U would get a console exclusive Sonic game (Sonic Lost World), it had nothing to do with Generations.
  • After it was confirmed that Michael Jackson really was involved with the third game's soundtrack, there are debates over why he went uncredited; whether it was because he was dissatisfied with how the soundtrack translated to the Genesis's synthesizer, or whether Sega wished to distance themselves from the controversy surrounding Jackson's child molestation accusations.
  • Sonic & Knuckles Collection, a PC port of all three versions of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, uses different music than the Genesis version for Carnival Night, Ice Cap and Launch Base Zones, as well as having several other tracks changed for non-obvious reasons. For years, people assumed these three tracks were created to get around having to pay Jackson and the obscure band the Jetzons, until a beta cartridge of Sonic 3 discovered in November 2019 revealed that all of these "changed" tracks were actually the original themes before they were replaced.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition is a supposed Updated Re-release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which never finished beta testing. Docfuture made a Let's Play, purporting it to be the only surviving evidence of its existence. In fact, Docfuture made up the game specifically for the LP, building it from an anachronistic mishmash of ROM hacks and complete nonsense. He cites the real rumors surrounding Sonic 2 as the inspiration for Sonic 2: Special Edition, going so far as to make a fictitious TV ad in which one of the game's developers says that they "added a shitload of secrets into this thing".
  • UltraJMan made an LP of the "Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Beta Edition", featuring such things as Sonic riding a motorcycle, a boss fight with the Tails Doll, and an implied homosexual relationship between Sonic and Tails. The game is fanmade, but JMan spends the whole LP pretending that it's an official release.
  • From the mid '90s up until the release of Sonic Adventure 2, there floated around rumors of a game called "Sonic and Knuckles RPG"; it wound up on a few "Coming Soon" lists around the time the first Sonic Adventure was unveiled to the public, due to confusion over talking points (Adventure was said to contain RPG elements). When Sonic Adventure 2 was announced, there was some speculation that it was the project that Sonic and Knuckles RPG evolved into. As of this writing, there exists no evidence of a scrapped or retooled Sonic RPG developed in that time frame. And while Sonic Battle does have a few RPG elements in it, it's unlikely that the game is the rumored RPG. It took another five years beyond that (and seven from the release of Adventure 2) for Sonic to finally appear in a true RPG, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.
  • There's a long-standing rumor that Knuckles' fur patch was related to a deal with Nike that fell through. The interview that mentions the Nike promotion implied that Sega had attempted a promotion with Nike because of Knuckles' moon crest, not that the crest itself is due to a Nike promotion. The real reason for the crest is as a reference to the asian black bear, which are occasionally known as "moon bears" and have a similar patch of white fur on their chest; it was included to symbolize Knuckles' physical strength.
  • Another urban legend is that Tails was originally a tanuki. This is a misconception; the tanuki was only a placeholder and was from a different project. Tails was originally a kitsune, before just becoming a two-tailed fox because kitsune are obscure outside of Japan.
  • In June 2022, a video surfaced on Twitter that claimed to be a preview of the theme song to Sonic Frontiers. In reality, the song used was "Deep Resonance" from Love Live! Sunshine!!. Even though the video's creator claimed it was fake, many people still believed that this was the real theme song for the game.
• Splatoon:
  • There's a recurring rumor in the fandom that the various idols and musicians (especially Pearl and Marina from Splatoon 2) sing in English. They don't. A number of songs over the years have received official lyrics via soundtrack releases and Nintendo's social media accounts, confirming that the characters are singing in the series' existing Conlang, and the creators are also open about the vocal aspect of said language being a case of Speaking Simlish with a dash of As Long as It Sounds Foreign. If any song lyrics resemble actual words or phrases in English (or any language, for that matter), it is purely a case of the player hearing things.
  • The idea that Pearl's short height is the result of an electrocution incident that stunted her growth when she was a child. The proof for this being a fan translation of the Splatoon 2 Japanese artbook (with the additional claim that the official English version removed it) paired with the caption for the game's first Sunken Scroll, which states that a shock wave struck the venue where she was performing in a youth singing contest. The art book translation was completely fabricated, with the real page making zero mention of any electrocution. And while the Sunken Scroll is really in the game, it was heavily misunderstood, as not only do shock waves have nothing to do with electricity (they refer to powerful sound waves), but the shock wave was caused by Pearl herself. The game has a Running Gag in Pearl and Marina's stage dialogue about how destructive the character's voice can be that was meant to serve as context, but the randomized nature of the conversations (and the English localization omitting most instances of this gag anyway) resulted in many Western fans failing to make the connection until the Octo Expansion DLC campaign made it a plot point.
  • After the release of the "Salmon Run: Next Wave" trailer for Splatoon 3, there were claims that Nintendo hid a QR code within the footage that, when scanned, revealed the shooter's then-unknown release date to be August 18th, 2022. Over 80 gaming news articles and videos across 15+ languages would end up sharing this news over the next few days, before Reddit user dongxipunata came forth and admitted that they originated the hoax as a small gag, not expecting it to spread so quickly. There is a QR code hidden in the UI that isn't present in the final release, but it is far too low-res to scan or recreate with any accuracy, being purely aesthetic.
• StarCraft is often claimed to have started as a Warhammer 40,000 game due to the superficial similarities between their main factions (Terrans and Space Marines, and Zerg and Tyranids), but the theory has no definite evidence to back it up. Both, however, are heavily inspired by Starship Troopers, Dune, and the Alien films as well as The Lord of the Rings for the original Warcraft and Warhammer Fantasy respectively. World of Warcraft itself was similarly rumored to have been a Warhammer game before Games Workshop supposedly backed out of the deal; while not Warhammer itself, it did begin its life as Nomad, a squad-based game based on 40K spinoff Necromunda, before pivoting to its eventual MMORPG form.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • It is claimed by some people that the name of the main character in the Donkey Kong video games was the result of a mistranslation and that his name was supposed to be "Monkey Kong". Shigeru Miyamoto himself denied this; the character got his name because the word "donkey" describes his stubbornness. (Inevitably, among the dozens of clones of the original game is one titled Monkey Kong for the Color Computer.)
  • That Super Mario 64 was originally supposed to be a SNES game. This one derives from a Nintendo Power article where Shigeru Miyamoto claimed to be working on a 3D Mario game at the same time as the original Star Fox game. It would have been called Super Mario FX, which turned out to be a misunderstanding based on the fact that the Super FX chip was codenamed MARIO; supposedly, it would have powered the game (and it did power Star Fox). The Super FX 2 chip is utilized by Yoshi's Island, which contains Mario, but that's a 2D game that uses the chip for its enhanced sprite-manipulation features.
  • Ashley from WarioWare is usually stated as being 8 years old in Japanese but 15 internationally. The latter is true, but in Japanese, her age is never stated (though her voice acting and speech patterns imply she's supposed to be rather young).
  • Luigi's Mansion: It's widely believed that the game was originally going to be a Timed Mission where Luigi had to save Mario before dawn or the mansion would vanish along with Mario. While there is a Dummied Out timer for the Game Boy Horror that was seen in some pre-release materials, this was simply to keep E3 attendees from hogging the playable demo. Another rumor is that there was originally going to be a hunter ghost in the Safari Room that wanted to add Luigi's head to his collection. There is no evidence of such a ghost, and the rumor came from a Nintendo Power caption warning players to beware of ghosts in the Safari Room, or else Luigi's head might end up mounted on the wall - however, that came out after the game was released in Japan, so it was simply intended as flavor text and not actual foreshadowing of something that might've existed at the time.
  • Prior to the Game Boy Advance coming out, a screencap of a supposed Yoshi's Safari-like game appeared online. It showed a third-person 3D game involving a purple Yoshi. The veracity of the image has never been proven, though either way, no such game ever came out. See a theory regarding its origin here.
  • In 1996, Electronic Gaming magazine mentioned an upcoming game called Mario's Castle coming for the next Game Boy (the unreleased "Project Atlantis"). It's unknown if this rumor was accurate or not. No evidence has ever been found for the game existing.
  • There's an urban legend surrounding an article in the UK version of Nintendo Power. It supposedly revealed that Bowser has, or had, a wife named "Clawdia Koopa". This rumor is so widespread it's appeared on the Mario Wikia (but not Super Mario Wiki, which instead lists it on its "Rumors and Urban Legends" page). Not only does no such quote exist, but Nintendo Power was never released in Europe. Canon has yet to clarify who Junior's mother is, besides Miyamoto joking in a video that it's himself.
• Tomb Raider:
  • For years, fans and media outlets claimed that Lara Croft's distinctively large breasts were the result of a coding error — in which an attempt by Tony Gard to resize them by 50% ended up doing so by 150% — that got left in. However, a 2021 article by TheGamer investigated the rumor, and learned that it was actually a joke Garde made during an interview that got taken at face value, not helped by an April Fools' Day article from GameSpot three years later that repeated the claim but attributed it to a nonexistent developer.
  • There is a rumor that there are unreleased versions of Tomb Raider II and Tomb Raider III on the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast, respectively. The two games are believed to contain various unused assets not included in other releases. These range from different outfits, unused weapons, better lighting (in the case of III), and unreleased levels, such as the entire Peru section that was cut from the final version of III. In reality, while there was originally meant to be a Saturn port of II, it was dropped at an early stage of development due to a combination of the system's hardware struggling to handle the game, and Sega largely abandoning support for the Saturn. As for III, Sony paid for exclusivity on that game from the get-go, so it was never in development for any console except the PlayStation.
• A common rumor about WarioWare: Twisted! is that the cartridge's motion sensor contains mercury, which prevented the game from being sold in Europe. Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (also known as Yoshi Topsy-Turvy), which used the same type of motion sensor, did get an European release, proving this to be false.
• In 2007, people claimed that several characters in Webkinz could potentially kill your pet, ranging from Ms. Birdy sending “black letters”, to Dr. Quack giving your pet a lethal pill, to feral animals hiding in black present boxes inside your house and waiting to attack (other versions replace the stray pets with Neopets, supposedly added via a Neopets developer hacking into the game). The rumor grew to such a level that Webkinz made a post on their official blog dispelling the rumors, saying that Webkinz can't die under any circumstances, and they'd never allow anything harmful to a pet into the game.
• Just prior to the reveal of the Wii, there was a convincing hoax known as the "Nintendo ON". It was a Virtual Reality device you strapped to your head. The video showcasing the supposed console was created by an aspiring game designer named Paul Belmonte, who hoped it would convince Nintendo to hire him.
  • Other rumors about the Wii suggested that it was planned to be a pyramid-shaped console with slots for every past Nintendo console's games, allowing it to play Nintendo's entire catalogue at once. This is believed to have been a misunderstanding based on leaks of the Virtual Console feature, as well as the Wii being backwards-compatible with the Gamecube, giving it access to a huge amount of Nintendo's older games.
• Yeah Yeah Beebiss I was listed as an NES game on a Play It Again mail order form in Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine, and on a Funco mail order form as Yeah Beebiss I. Speculation on the identity of the game ran rampant on sites like the Lost Media Wiki. The most likely candidate is a game in the Family Trainer series for the Famicom, Rai Rai Kyonshis: Baby Kyonshi no Amida Daibouken, where the player directs the movements of a Chinese Vampire with the Power Pad.

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