Urban Legend Of Zelda / Wide-Open Sandbox

Wide-Open Sandbox games, by their very nature, go hand-in-hand with rumors about secret content, since they tend to have plenty of real secrets, and few players are going to have the time to explore every corner of the game to disprove the false ones.

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• The Grand Theft Auto series has enough of these that there exists an entire wiki devoted just to the myths, rumors, and urban legends that the games have spawned. Among the more famous ones:
  • In Vice City, there were claims that there are ways to make the military submarine submerged off the north coast of the east island surface, up to and including talk of a secret ending where you can nuke the city.
  • San Andreas was the first game in the series to be hit with rumors on a large scale. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the first game in the series to feature a widespread countryside to explore.
    • One of the big ones was that there exists a Sasquatch (Bigfoot) character somewhere on the map, which was "proven" by some people with Photoshopped images. There's no Bigfoot in the game code. However, a Sasquatch not only does appear in Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC, but that game lets you kill and skin him. And the achievement you get for doing so? "Six Years In The Making". Undead Nightmare was released six years after San Andreas, to the day. The final bonus mission in GTA V also has Franklin being enlisted by a man who'd been looking for Sasquatch for nine years (the amount of time between the releases of San Andreas and V) to help him hunt one. It turns out to be a guy in a Sasquatch suit, though.
    • Another was that there are "ghost cars" that spawn in some precise locations and drive around without a driver. These "ghost cars" are just abandoned, wrecked cars that the game spawns in hilly areas. Since new cars don't spawn with their parking brakes on, they'll sometimes just roll down the hills.
    • There were also rumors about zombies being in the game, fueled by a rather mysterious corporate building in San Fierro.
    • Another common rumor that there are aliens, UFOs, and other extraterrestrials in the game, which are partly true, sort of. Two of the Truth's missions have some interesting content that may or may not be caused by aliens One of them has you stealing some green goo from a heavily armored train, and another on a plane the enemies call you "carbon based life form". A glitch in the game can cause the lights of planes to spawn, but not the plane itself, creating what technically is an unidentifiable flying object in the sky.
    • San Andreas also has a single mission where you fly to Liberty City and have a shootout in the Italian restaurant which features prominently in 3. There are an enormous number of rumors suggesting that there is a way to unlock all of Liberty City. Hackers figured out how to get there, either getting outside the mission area or returning later; a surprisingly large part of the city is actually present (about 70% of Portland), hovering in the air miles above northeast Los Santos, but is useless because there is no collision detection except in the area used in the establishing shot.
    • Many similar rumors abound, such as the existence of Jaws^note Sharks DO exist, but are extremely rare, and behave like dolphins, thus don't attack the player., the Loch Ness Monster, Leatherface, etc. Most of these have been officially refuted.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has a whole bunch as well:
    • Lola the prostitute is featured on the PS3 box art and has a page on the police archives (accessible if you use the computer in the police vehicles), so there are rumors that she's in the game.
    • One piece of fan rumor turned out to be correct. In IV, you receive an achievement called "Impossible Trinity" after completing a mission in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After it was revealed that Johnny Klebitz (who appears in that mission) is the playable character for the first Expansion Pack, The Lost & Damned, players seized upon the achievement name and predicted that Luis Lopez (who also appears) would star in his own DLC. Sure enough, he's the protagonist of the second expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony.
    • There is also the "Ratman", which is similar to the San Andreas rumors about Bigfoot. Supposedly, there is a humanoid monster that lives in the subways and attacks other NPCs and the player. It's faster than other NPCs and attacks by swiping at Niko, chewing on his corpse when it kills him. Extensive searches in-game and through the game's code have dismissed this claim, and any "proof" of the Ratman has been proven to be hoaxed.
    • The abandoned Sprunk factory in Alderney is widely rumored to be haunted, thanks to a scream that some people claim to have heard when wandering through the factory (usually after firing off a round). More likely, it's just one of the bums that spawns inside.
  • Grand Theft Auto V
    • This game is home of the possibly biggest mystery of the franchise, nicknamed simply as the Mount Chiliad Mystery. It all begins with a simple mural on a wall of a shed having its place on Mount Chiliad, containing a crude drawing of supposedly a mountain, a flying saucer, a cracked egg, what looks like a person flying a jetpack, five red X's, weird lines inside that mountain, thunderbolts, and more. More so, after reaching 100% completion of the game, the player is able to trigger a total of three (four if counting a broken one underwater) actual flying saucers, all in different places hovering in the air with no real purpose. After uncovering the existence of these things, the Internet has since then gone crazy about this. What is the purpose of this mural, or of the saucers? Can the player unlock a flyable saucer, a jetpack, or something different? Is there actually a mystery, considering Rockstar never really confirmed it? Incredible theories and even valid finds have been popping up since then, like an actual alien egg inside the game files, weird green lights on bunkers, theories about a hidden karma meter inside the game, even more unreadable murals inside the game, and much, much more, even years after the game's release, stating clearly that there isn't just a mystery inside the game, it is more like a game around the mystery. While it isn't clear if this mystery is solveable, Rockstar has been taunting players cryptically to "continue the search for the truth", and have even released alien-themed DLC in the form of Survival missions where players take the role of alien invaders fighting off human counterattacks. The hunt is ongoing to this day, with many hunters trying out new and continuously more unusual theories to maybe solve this giant thing one day.
    • It was often believed that you can manipulate the stock market outside of specific missions by blowing up property belonging to one company, causing their stocks to fall and their competitor's to rise. This is not true, and was likely started by the assassination missions having a similar system.
    • Another widespread rumor popping up for V is that the police will racially profile Franklin for arrest in situations where Michael or even Trevor would get a pass - even going so far as to open fire on sight in rich, white neighborhoods. This was Jossed by Rockstar after complaints that the game was perhaps a little too realistic for its own good.
    • There are consistent rumors of there being an entire "triangle" of paranormal and unexplained activity in the game in the Tongva Hills region, appropriately named the "Tongva Triangle". Roughly twenty individual myths can be found there alone.
• Speaking of Rockstar, Red Dead Redemption has its share of supposed secrets.
  • One of the most prominent after the game's release was the rumor that you can find a ruined DeLorean hidden in the mountains in a reference to Back to the Future Part III. No one's ever discovered it.
  • Another persistent rumor states that the town of Tumbleweed is haunted. There are certainly strange things that go on in that area (and that area only), but nothing has ever been officially confirmed.
  • The DLC Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare has spawned the ever resilient myth that there is a werewolf somewhere in the game, with most sites claiming it to be somewhere in Tall Trees and only coming out during the full moon. Extensive searches have turned up nothing, and reported screen shots of it have been proven to be fake. Other sightings have been dismissed as just a wild horse, usually the American Standardbred, ^note  the black horse, which is found in this part of the game rearing up and giving the illusion of a bipedal werewolf.
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 has a few as well, although players are slowly starting to believe that most of the mysteries were either intentionally Cut Short to keep people searching or just the result of cut content.
    • The game has 2 meteorite fragments that the player can find, but their description always says "x out of 3", which has caused all kinds of speculation. This number stays at 3 even if the satchel is upgraded so it's not the default item count cap either. Supposedly finding all three would increase the player's tolerance to cold weather. If a glitch is used to obtain a 3rd meteorite from the same spawn points as the first 2^note Entering the epilogue respawns some items into the world, nothing happens.
    • Some believe that Arthur Morgan's tuberculosis can be cured by performing an extremely specific series of actions that often have no real connection to each other. That said, most agree that if there is a way to keep Arthur alive, he still needs to catch the disease because of how much of the plot depends on it.
    • The Missing Secret Princess Isabeau sidequest does have some remaining code and script in the files, but it's generally agreed to have been cut short either intentionally or unintentionally. Hasn't stopped players from coming up with various, sometimes outlandish theories of where she is. The PC version includes an unused model for her which stopped some theories - mostly those that claim she's *Insert any female NPC here* but those still pop up randomly.
    • An NPC named Nigel can be found looking for someone named Gavin, another NPC which appears nowhere in the game. While it's likely a reference to Achievement Hunter (Gavin was intended to lend his voice to the game but never showed up), PC players digging through the game's files discovered that Gavin does in fact have a character model. It's the exact same as Nigel's. This has lead credence to the popular theory that Gavin is, in fact, Nigel's Split Personality and that due to Gavin from Achievement Hunter never showing up to record his lines, the revelation that Nigel and Gavin were the same person had to be scrapped at the last minute, thus leaving the entire side story unfinished. Despite this, the Running Gag of claiming that "X is Gavin!" is still popular in the fandom as of 2020.
    • The Legendary Channel Catfish is The Ghost in the game and game files revealed later its model is unfinished (When spawned in air it's huge and low-res, and when spawned on land it breaks apart), but before the PC release players kept coming up with ways to catch it, including human bait, very specific time/weather circumstances and more.
• Minecraft:
  • Herobrine, the supposed dead brother of the game's creator, known for creating strange structures and being elusive. Several ways have been rumored of to "summon" him, and many bogus symptoms of his appearance in your world (trees spawning with no leaves, long 2x1 pregenerated passages through stone, an abundance of redstone torches, glowstone towers, weird messages left on signs, etc.) have been spread through various forums and communities. Seeing as none of these things actually occur ingame, these seem less like cases of ingame behavior/bugs being attributed to the urban legend, and more like they were intended to spook children and teenagers in horror stories or falsified YouTube videos.
    • Rendering spasms can give the impression that Herobrine's face appeared on the screen. It is awfully uncomfortable to witness this happen.
    • Word of God has jossed the rumor, but the creators like to poke fun at it:
    • Almost every update has a line that says "removed Herobrine" or something similar.
    • Herobrine is often featured in promotional art for the game, often whenever it features an ensemble cast of characters and monsters from the game.
    • The message that displays the cause of death if a player is killed by a snowball or an egg is said to be from Herobrine. This is because both projectiles are harmless and thus cannot kill the player, meaning the only way to see this message for yourself is to mod the game.
    • One of the Christmas Skin Packs includes a "Holiday Herobrine". Basically, Herobrine with a Christmas Sweater.
  • On 9 March 2012 at the GDC, Notch mentioned that "there is one [recipe] people haven't found yet", this happening about a week after two unused textures for hieroglyphic-covered blocks mysteriously appeared in the texture file. This sparked a huge number of rumours and speculation.
  • It's long been believed that if you empty out a deposit of dirt or gravel underground, you'll always find an ore vein. While a typical player could go a long time without having this disproven, it's because both of those things are abundant enough and large enough that, by sheer probability, they're going to intersect most of the time. There's nothing in the code forcing them to generate adjacently.
  • An oft-mentioned "fact" is that sugarcane grows faster on sand than on dirt, farmland, or mud. Since growth rates are somewhat randomized, and other facts about crop growth (like planting in rows speeding up growth rates) are actually true, simple confirmation bias has made many people believe this one as well. In actuality, sugarcane grows at the same rate no matter what you plant it on.
• Blockland
  • "The Golden Brick" which supposedly exists in the Slate map, and, upon clicking it, you apparently unlock Blockland Adventure Mode. It's untrue, but it's still thought to be such a cool idea that many players pretend that it's real just for fun.
  • The Renderman, an apparition not unlike Herobrine from Minecraft. It's supposed to appear when you take a screenshot on a dark map, and in DOF screenshots (basically screenshots taken while your character shakes violently, to produce a very blurry image) he appears very close to the player. Many pictures have been provided of him to 'prove' his existence. He was revived in the Halloween Update, where a 'new form' of Renderman appeared: Preppers, flashing red ASCII Terror Faces ("°Д°") which were claimed to randomly appear on dark maps. Combined with the usual presence of Nothing Is Scarier in dark maps, many didn't want to load these maps for fear of encountering HIM.
• [PROTOTYPE]: Even before the game's release, the developers touted information that you can unlock a new character and secret mission if you have met certain criteria and found a hidden severed leg. A few weeks after the game's release, a member of the GameFAQs community found the leg, and was disappointed to find that nothing happens. The developers even acknowledged that people had found the severed leg, but they refused to give further information. Rumors now focus on things such as all the crazy things you have to do to get the leg to work, and some believe that there's another leg out there and that this leg is just a red herring.
• In Just Cause 2, it has been rumored that there is some sort of UFO that can appear and blow you out of the sky in a simple blast. This is actually the electrical tower that becomes a focus for a side mission.
• Some Spider-Man games have a few.
  • The first movie tie-in game allowed playing as the Green Goblin, so people claimed that you could play the sequels as their respective villains.
  • Spider-Man 2:
    • According to some, reaching 100% would add a "Change" icon to play as Doc Ock somewhere on the game. There's absolutely no footage of this.
    • Humorously, one persistent rumor on a few gaming sites said that jumping off of the Statue of Liberty 30 times will let you play as Kermit the Frog. Sadly, this does not happen.
    • There's apparently also a few ways to unlock the Dummied Out Governor's Island. Again, no footage. Additionally, there's supposedly a costume store hidden in the city, opening its doors at X time of day.
    • As Lizard was originally planned to appear, several people claim that he is still in the game. Usually, the theories say that he's in the sewers, accessible through a certain manhole after a certain requirement has been met.
  • There was a rumor that you could play as Venom in the PS2, PSP, and Wii versions of the Spider-Man 3 tie-in game (The not-so-good version). As collecting 50 Spider-emblems after the final mission unlocks the black suit for unlimited usage, people latched on the idea that collecting 100 meteorite fragments would unlock Venom as a playable character. Turns out that it doesn't. All footage about it is just very blurry footage of the black suit.
• Subnautica has a persistent rumor about Reefbacks (giant alien whales with whole ecosystems growing on their backs) being one possible species that you could find eggs for and hatch in the Alien Containment Unit. While this was possible in the pre-release versions with implemented assets and data that let players breed their own captive Reefbacks and they are still obtainable via console commands, it was ultimately Dummied Out for release and the assets re-used for another much smaller species. This doesn't stop the occasional odd rumor though, since people swear up and down that random eggs occasionally 'glitch' during the world-gen process and still allow baby Reefbacks to hatch from them. You can still find a version of the original Reefback egg in the Primary Containment Facility at the end of the game, which is a GIANT version of the eggs you've been finding out in the wild. Far too big for the species of fish that currently hatches from them, but just right for the baby Reefbacks. Unfortunately, it's just a prop and cannot be scanned or interacted with in any meaningful way.

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