Video Game Hoaxes/Rumors You Believed?

[Juliyet]

Whether it be on the school playground or the Internet, there's always a couple tidbits regarding video games that get spread around despite being completely false. Where there any that y'all fell for?

Shout-out to a classmate who tried to convince me that Winnie the Pooh was unlockable in Lego Indiana Jones, and for the longest time I believed him. And to make the story even wilder, I asked a random kid in the local park about this, and she gave me completely bs password codes for Pooh and several other characters. In retrospect, it's absolutely hilarious I got fooled into this by two different people

 

[Princess Viola]

Friend of mine back in 5th grade convinced me there was a way to glitch and get past the gate to the north of the city of Falador on free-to-play servers in RuneScape, allowing you access to the member's-only areas of the game world beyond it.

 

[Okido]

Like... all of them? I was very susceptible to believing literally anything that I heard from a friend or saw online.

You can get Mewthree by using an Action Replay? Cool. Tipping the iceberg in Club Penguin gives you infinite membership? Let's try it. Beat Bowser in the Sky 300 times, talk to Yoshi, walk around the Eternal Star statue and jump 2,401 times to unlock Luigi? Hmmm... seems difficult, but I bet it's legit. Surely no one would lie about something like that, especially not if their uncle works at Nintendo.

That said, I must confess that I was also one of those menace kids that was always making up blatantly fake stories and rumors like that myself. Like, one time around fourth grade I somehow ended up convincing several other kids that, allegedly, if you put your face right up against your DS screen and stare at the Poké Ball (without blinking) when catching a wild Pokémon, it guarantees it will catch it 100% of the time (my reasoning being that it intimidated the Pokémon into staying inside...?).

I think it started as a joke but for some reason it always "worked" whenever someone tried to prove it, so I started acting like it was a cool new feature of the game and everyone in my class ended up putting their DS Lites up to their retinas to catch Pokémon. I don't know why I did this. I even started to believe it myself. I regret nothing.

 

[c la fet]

Press down + B when catching a Pokémon will make you successful

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

That the Wii — or rather, the Revolution, as it was famously known back in 2005 when it was first announced — was anything other than an overclocked GameCube with more RAM. I mean, granted, that fact did sound pretty ridiculous back then; like Nintendo's new console really going to be that much weaker than the PS3 and Xbox 360!? It couldn't be true! Do note that was a very long time ago (almost literally twenty years at this point) before Nintendo had established their reputation for dismissing the proverbial "power race" after the likes of the N64 and GameCube in favor of innovations and gimmicks, and that I was, like, ten or twelve or something processing all of this; the ability to accept hard realities is hardly a reliable skill at that age, haha.

 

[mastermind lissi]

Uhh I didn’t believe any so to say but I do remember reading a Mariowiki page about these kinds of things in my free time when I was a bit younger hehe….

 

[EzloSpirit]

I was super gullible back in the day. I remember believing for the longest time that getting all 120/150 Stars in SM64, unlocking the exterior cannon, and flying into the stained-glass portrait of Peach on the castle would send you to a secret final level that forced you to play as Yoshi (even in the original). Imagine my disappointment, after 5+ years unlocking all the Stars, when I just crashed into the portrait and fell to the ground!

Someone in elementary school once told me that, after using Splash a certain number of times in a single battle, it would turn into Water Gun for a turn. 100 times in a battle would cause it to become Hydro Pump. I don't think I ever had the patience to try it out, but wow lol.

Pretty sure I bought into the Mew Truck for a hot second lol. Not that I ever went to it. There was definitely at least one other Mew hoax I bought into, but I can't recall right now.

And of course, the successful launch count in Mossdeep Space Center: at exactly 1, you'd get to board a decommissioned rocket and battle Deoxys, and at exactly 100, you'd get to board a commissioned rocket and fly to the moon to battle Jirachi. I fully believed that for the entirety of Gen. III and probably a couple years into IV lol.

 

[Princess Viola]

That the Wii — or rather, the Revolution, as it was famously known back in 2005 when it was first announced — was anything other than an overclocked GameCube with more RAM. I mean, granted, that fact did sound pretty ridiculous back then; like Nintendo's new console really going to be that much weaker than the PS3 and Xbox 360!? It couldn't be true! Do note that was a very long time ago (almost literally twenty years at this point) before Nintendo had established their reputation for dismissing the proverbial "power race" after the likes of the N64 and GameCube in favor of innovations and gimmicks, and that I was, like, ten or twelve or something processing all of this; the ability to accept hard realities is hardly a reliable skill at that age, haha.

This just reminds me of how there was a rumor throughout 2011 and 2012 that Sony and Microsoft's next gen consoles wouldn't be that much more powerful than the PS3 and 360 in order to be cost affordable for consumers.

And honestly thinking back on that rumor, I think it was just cope from Nintendo fans over the Wii U's lack of power. Like 'Well it doesn't matter that Nintendo's new system is pretty close the PS3 and 360 in specs!!! That's what Sony and Microsoft are gonna do too!!'

 

[helperman]

the closest i have to this was asking chat gpt for endings for stanley parable, and getting bogus endings you can;t get, but i tried getting them any ways.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

This just reminds me of how there was a rumor throughout 2011 and 2012 that Sony and Microsoft's next gen consoles wouldn't be that much more powerful than the PS3 and 360 in order to be cost affordable for consumers.

And honestly thinking back on that rumor, I think it was just cope from Nintendo fans over the Wii U's lack of power. Like 'Well it doesn't matter that Nintendo's new system is pretty close the PS3 and 360 in specs!!! That's what Sony and Microsoft are gonna do too!!'

Speaking of the Wii U, I remember a particularly egregious rumor spreading around in the early days of its announcement that it was supposedly going to basically have a server-class CPU in there... somehow, in a form factor not that much bigger than the Wii when the PS3 and Xbox 360 could barely even handle the Cell and PPE cores, apparently. Specifically, they zeroed in the "POWER" part of the ultra-vague specs that Nintendo released, assuming that meant it was literally going to have the latest and greatest IBM CPU with the word "POWER" in it (which, at the time, was POWER7, again literally a server-class CPU that probably cost more to make than the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One combined) instead of it being just a reference to the generic overarching "POWER Architecture" that could've easily just been the same ancient 750 cores from 2000 that were in the Wii (and indeed, that ended up being exactly what the Wii U had in reality). I didn't really believe any of it, although a part of me wanted to, haha. Learning from the Wii probably tempered my wishes a bit, though...

 

[Princess Viola]

Speaking of the Wii U, I remember a particularly egregious rumor spreading around in the early days of its announcement that it was supposedly going to basically have a server-class CPU in there... somehow, in a form factor not that much bigger than the Wii when the PS3 and Xbox 360 could barely even handle the Cell and PPE cores, apparently. Specifically, they zeroed in the "POWER" part of the ultra-vague specs that Nintendo released, assuming that meant it was literally going to have the latest and greatest IBM CPU with the word "POWER" in it (which, at the time, was POWER7, again literally a server-class CPU that probably cost more to make than the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One combined) instead of it being just a reference to the generic overarching "POWER Architecture" that could've easily just been the same ancient 750 cores from 2000 that were in the Wii (and indeed, that ended up being exactly what the Wii U had in reality). I didn't really believe any of it, although a part of me wanted to, haha. Learning from the Wii probably tempered my wishes a bit, though...

Oh God I remember that one and how people kept talking about how the POWER7 was the same processor used in the Watson supercomputer (and I remember making jokes about how that meant that the Wii U was gonna be an absolute beast when it came to Jeopardy games lol)

 

[Viridian Beedrill]

Waaaay back when I started Heartgold, my slightly-older cousin who had already played some Pokémon told me that Water-Type moves were good against Flying-Types due to waterlogging their feathers. So for a long time I thought Water-Type moves were super effective against Flying-Types. (I'm 99.9% sure she'd just seen Water-Type moves do some substantial damage to a Flying-Type and assumed it was super effective. And then I saw my Totodile's Water Gun put a big dent in a Pidgey's HP bar, so by the same logic I assumed she was right )

Pre-Black and White release, I believed Ghetsis was going to have some kind of superpowers, or more likely, a convincing imitation of superpowers. This was because a preview of Black and White in Nintendo Power described Ghetsis as having "what appear to be supernatural powers." Of course, once I played the game, no such powers ever came up in the plot. Looking back on it now, I think whoever wrote the preview saw the scene in the Dreamyard where a dream-illusion Ghetsis is conjured by the local Munna and Musharna to scare off a couple Plasma Grunts. Possibly the writer saw the scene and misinterpreted it as the real Ghetsis using apparent teleportation powers.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

Pre-Black and White release, I believed Ghetsis was going to have some kind of superpowers, or more likely, a convincing imitation of superpowers. This was because a preview of Black and White in Nintendo Power described Ghetsis as having "what appear to be supernatural powers." Of course, once I played the game, no such powers ever came up in the plot. Looking back on it now, I think whoever wrote the preview saw the scene in the Dreamyard where a dream-illusion Ghetsis is conjured by the local Munna and Musharna to scare off a couple Plasma Grunts. Possibly the writer saw the scene and misinterpreted it as the real Ghetsis using apparent teleportation powers.

Ah, that reminds me of when the English versions of Black 2 and White 2 came out and there was this one scene near the end of the main story that would become kind of infamous: the one where Ghetsis supposedly tries to kill the player character after making an explicit, pointed death threat towards them. Or rather, so it was claimed that was happening in the original Japanese version, and that the English versions censored that with a lighter "never say die" version of the relevant lines. Given that was, well, freaking Ghetsis that they were talking about there, that was actually pretty believable to me (if rather edgy in hindsight in the way that such rumors tend to go). It turned out, however, that both versions of that scene actually used more or less the same lines or at least a similar sentiment; oops. Which was confirmed by those in the West who actually knew Japanese and took the effort to publicly compare the two. How the internet was able to run away so easily with some assumptions from obviously non-Japanese speakers and allowed them to become rumors that then morphed into "fact" that remained so for quite a long while is a mystery to me. With that said, I do suspect — as with many rumors regarding Pokémon especially — that wish fulfillment was a large part of that; wanting to see Pokémon be "darker" and "edgier" and all of that.
Even though threatening to freeze someone solid isn't exactly too far off from a death threat on its own when you think about it, right...?

 

[Juliko]

When I was young, for some reason a classmate convinced me that it was possible to travel to other regions in Ruby and Sapphire, and convinced me to let him borrow my Sapphire game. Being a dumb, gullible autistic kid who believed everything she heard regardless of whether it was true or not and never so much as questioned what I was told, I made the mistake of lending him my game. I get it back later...only to find that he traded out three of my best Pokemon into his own game. Yeah...I was pretty mortified, and I learned to never lend my games to people ever again, no matter how many times people called me selfish for not sharing. I never did get those Pokemon back, and I got over it via Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire anyway.

 

[Greninjaman]

I did believe the "mash b to improve catch rate of Pokémon" thing. I don't anymore, and I know now that mashing buttons does nothing to improve the catch rate.

 

[Princess Viola]

How the internet was able to run away so easily with some assumptions from obviously non-Japanese speakers and allowed them to become rumors that then morphed into "fact" that remained so for quite a long while is a mystery to me.

Because people just love to automatically believe that English localizations always censor/edit content from the original Japanese version of things.

You see it so often with anime and manga, people screaming about how the English version was censored and yet 99% of the time - it wasn't. Hell in some instances the English is literally a direct translation of the Japanese (but, of course, none of the people who complain about this stuff even speak a word of Japanese so they can't go and compare the two versions)

 

[Strawberry Cupcake]

Because people just love to automatically believe that English localizations always censor/edit content from the original Japanese version of things.

You see it so often with anime and manga, people screaming about how the English version was censored and yet 99% of the time - it wasn't. Hell in some instances the English is literally a direct translation of the Japanese (but, of course, none of the people who complain about this stuff even speak a word of Japanese so they can't go and compare the two versions)

except there was a lot of censoring back in the 90s-early/mid 2000s, I don't know about video games perse but for sure in anime. Sailor Moon is the best example of it.

The only video game hoax that I believed was that one about getting Mew or Mewtwo in blue and red the original if you go behind a truck on an island or something. It was a crazy time, and the internet was still kind of new back then so there were a lot of rumors online too but it was harder to disprove at the time.

 

[Princess Viola]

except there was a lot of censoring back in the 90s-early/mid 2000s, I don't know about video games perse but for sure in anime. Sailor Moon is the best example of it.

oh yes, censorship and editing of japanese media has been a thing

but nowadays whenever people bring it up, they usually mean something like 'omg this character is said to be gay in the english version, this has to be the translators inserting their agenda because japan doesnt have lgbt in it' (see also: idiots still throwing hissy fits to this day and insisting that bridget from guilty gear isn't transgender despite her literal creator saying she is in response to a fake post claiming to be from arc system works saying that bridget is still male)

 

[Queen Of Space]

I genuinely believed the pokemon stars rumor and got really upset when it didn’t happen

 

[JollyYoshi]

I thought that Waluigi’s Taco Stand was an actual game. I read in the comments that a bunch of copies of were found in the Gulf of Mexico so I just thought that was true. It goes to show how little I knew and how little I researched back then.

The “Every Copy of Super Mario 64 is Personalized” theory is one I am not sure if I ever believed. It definitely may have swayed me as when I play Super Mario 64, just traveling in the castle halls is kind of scary. Even though it’s probably not true, it’s all fun to read.