What are your favourite video game rumours?

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

The only ones I really had were all Pokemon based; Mew under the truck, Pikablu, Mewthree, various different Missingno methods.

[Bobfoc]

This is a bit of a niche one. There was a game called Hover that came with the Windows 95 CD. It involved piloting a hovercraft to find all the blue flags in a level before the AI opponents found all your red flags. Anyway, someone told me you could jump over the walls surrounding the playable area and unlock an entire new zone to explore.

As it turns out, there is a way to do it by exploiting a glitch, but it just results in the player going out of bounds and unable to do anything.

[Hellraiser]

My favorite Pokemon rumor involved the SS Anne. You were supposed to wait an ungodly amount of time and would eventually receive some kind of message that the SS Anne has sunken like in the anime. That is supposed to make the harbor of Vermilion City accessible again. You go there, surf across the water to that strip of land in the top-right corner of the screen where a truck is parked. You use strength to move the truck which triggers Mew to appear.

Edit: Another Pokemon rumor I just remembered is that you were supposed to press up and B, down and B or just mash the B button to when trying to catch a Pokemon to improve your chances of it staying inside the Pokeball.

I also remembered a GTA San Andreas one. There was supposed to be a secret Alcatraz-like prison island north of the main map that you could reach with your plain if you flew north for like an hour or so. I think that rumor stems from the fact that these used to be an Alcatraz island in the Beta version of the game that ended up getting removed.

Edit 2: There was also the whole Lavender Town Syndrome for the first generation of Pokemon games. Allegedly a bunch of Japanese kids committed suicide because they were affected by the original piece of music that plays in Lavender Town in the Japanese versions of the first generation of games and they had to chance that piece of music for the western release.  

Edited February 11, 2023 by Hellraiser

[Chris2K]

14 hours ago, Hellraiser said:

My favorite Pokemon rumor involved the SS Anne. You were supposed to wait an ungodly amount of time and would eventually receive some kind of message that the SS Anne has sunken like in the anime. That is supposed to make the harbor of Vermilion City accessible again. You go there, surf across the water to that strip of land in the top-right corner of the screen where a truck is parked. You use strength to move the truck which triggers Mew to appear.

Edit: Another Pokemon rumor I just remembered is that you were supposed to press up and B, down and B or just mash the B button to when trying to catch a Pokemon to improve your chances of it staying inside the Pokeball.

I also remembered a GTA San Andreas one. There was supposed to be a secret Alcatraz-like prison island north of the main map that you could reach with your plain if you flew north for like an hour or so. I think that rumor stems from the fact that these used to be an Alcatraz island in the Beta version of the game that ended up getting removed.

Edit 2: There was also the whole Lavender Town Syndrome for the first generation of Pokemon games. Allegedly a bunch of Japanese kids committed suicide because they were affected by the original piece of music that plays in Lavender Town in the Japanese versions of the first generation of games and they had to chance that piece of music for the western release.  

I may or may not still do this. It's never shown to work, I just did it back when the rumour was prominent and haven't stopped.

Mortal Kombat's rumours and secrets are always fun, even if it's something they started themselves with the inclusion of Reptile in the first game. My favourite has to be someone seeing "Ermac" in the game code and thinking it was a secret character, when in reality it stood for "error macro". But then they made a character called Ermac for the next game anyway.

[Bobfoc]

That reminds me of the rumour that Street Fighter 2 had a character called Sheng Long. Ryu's victory quote was "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance", which was a mistranslated version of "You must defeat my Shoryuken to stand a chance".

[Trey]

The FF7/Zack one I remember trying was about running so many screens in the prison desert and he would eventually show up.

[Dan B.]

On 10/02/2023 at 08:48, Mick said:

A lot were from Final Fantasy III/VI:

 

That there was a way you could revive General Leo.

That there was a secret dragon you could fight called the CzarDragon and you'd get incredible loot for doing this. This one wasn't so much bullshit though. There were plans in the SNES version for a 'CzarDragon', it existed in the ROM data, but it had been dummied out for reasons. It was later reintroduced in the GBA version as the Kaiser Dragon, an endgame boss of a bonus dungeon. 

That there were other Espers you could get, due to the Esper select screen having two missing spots. This one was bullshit. At one point you could change the Esper Odin into Raiden, and Raiden would have a different slot since it was functionally different than Odin. The last remaining spot was so you could unequip an Esper. 

 

 

This brings back fond memories of perusing the old Nintendo Power Source and Doctor Gamewiz message boards on AOL in high school.  I definitely remember all of these being bandied about.  Also a lot of theories about Gogo's "true identity" (and/or possible ways to reveal it), with frontrunners including Daryl, Emperor Gestahl, General Leo, Banon, Arvis, Wedge, Vicks, and pretty much any other character that had been killed off/disappeared in the first half of the game.  Also rumors that Cecil from FF4 was somehow unlockable, I think because Draco (the male opera singer) had a unique sprite that resembled Cecil's Dark Knight armor.

Turns out, Gogo is just... Gogo.

There were also rumors and theories - of which I don't recall specifics - about how to find and recruit Schala in Chrono Trigger and Luigi in Super Mario RPG.  And, of course, how to get a human Frog in your party in Chrono (of course, you actually can see him as a human in the ending, but only if you make... a certain choice during the game, and you'll never actually get to play as a human Frog/Glenn).

Edited February 12, 2023 by Dan B.

[Lineker]

False, @GoGo Yubari is also known as Scoops!

[Skummy]

On 10/02/2023 at 13:13, Benji said:

I remember changing Cloud's name to Fuji and battling Shinra troops over and over to level 40 to try and unlock Zack in FF7 who would eventually escape from a prison which was on the Midgar train lines for some reason and slice the never ending repeating pair of guards up to join you.

 

On 10/02/2023 at 23:06, damhausen said:

Did you guys know in the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII you could bring Aerith back from the dead?

There was a whole cottage industry of Final Fantasy VII rumours, yet I somehow never across that specific means of unlocking Zack.

The majority were about unlocking Zack or reviving Aerith, but some got really out there. Some I remember were how to breed the different colours of Chocobo - as there are some, like the Red Chocobo, that appear in races but that you can't breed - and even a flying Rainbow Chocobo. At some point somebody making this stuff up presumably realised that a Gold Chocobo could already get you to every point of the map, so invented a whole new flying island location that only the Rainbow Chocobo could reach. At some point, practically every named NPC got a "rumour" as to how they could join your party.

This stuff was pretty much the start of me using the internet unsupervised - at school and at my childhood best friends' house, we'd just spend all of our time on FF7 guestbooks and chat rooms, and we'd read up on this stuff constantly. 

I know a woman who must be at least 40 now who still insists that she unlocked Zack. She doesn't even say it as a brag, so much as just matter of fact, "I can't believe you never did this". I have pointed out that it's not possible, that I've literally gone into the game with Hex Editors and custom-built trainers/editors that allow you to look through every single sprite in the game and, surprise surprise, there's no data nor any battle animations for Zack, and she'd have none of it. 

Her preferred explanation was one I remember reading online, that you have to collect "all 35" of the 1/35 Soldiers, and trade them with a dude in a cave, which somehow leads to Zack being brought back. Aside from the fact that it doesn't make sense, and that even the odder stuff in FF7 tends to follow some kind of logic, there aren't 35 of that item in the game - it's a mistranslation, it means it's 1:35 scale model of a soldier, not that it's 1 of 35. 

[Benji]

Oh the 1/35 soldiers were a never ending source of frustration for young me. I bought the guide and cursed it out for being incomplete for not including that information on where to find them. Then, many years later, FFIX would have an official guide which genuinely missed information to get you into PlayOnline. Still bitter about that one.

[Skummy]

discounting the "rumours" that were clearly invented by bullshit artists, it's interesting how many of these were the result of either mistranslation or wishful thinking, or a combination of the two - Zack has an outsized importance to the plot, but he barely appears in the game, so surely there's more Zack content that we just haven't seen, right? Well then, it must have something to do with these items I don't understand, because every other item in this game has a purpose, so surely these weirdly specifically named "soldiers" (particularly when SOLDIER is what Zack was) can't just be meaningless junk? 

People were prepared to look to anything to "prove" that you could bring Aerith back, or that there's another secret character - if you cheat to have her in your party on Disc 2/3, Aerith has some lines of dialogue, which must mean there's a way to have her there (though in some instances it's generic dialogue for any party member, and there are scenes where the whole game will freeze because it's waiting for a line of dialogue that isn't there), and when every member of your party is arranged in the Northern Crater, there's two groups of three and one of two, so there must be a spot for an extra member; except it's not that there's one missing, it's that there's already two extras in Yuffie and Vincent. 

It's a typically "gamer" thing to look for in-game nonsense "solutions" to Aerith's death, rather than recognise that it's absolutely essential to the plot - one thing I noticed playing Remake was how much Aerith seems aware of her fate from the very beginning, and replaying the original more recently, that reframed a lot of how I understood that scene. It's a willing self-sacrifice, knowing that she needs to return to the Lifestream in order for the White Materia to do its thing.

I wonder how much of this still goes on. Are kids in playgrounds now talking about ways to unlock secret hidden characters in Fortnite or whatever they play now, or is the entire concept of this kind of unlockable secrets alien to them given that they've mostly been replaced by DLC and microtransactions? The first thing I ever used the internet for was to look up cheats for games, and that's just not really a thing any more, so the space where these rumours grow from doesn't exist in the same way.

 

EDIT:
I am amazed that this website still exists. Utterly deranged "rumours" abound:

The Final Fantasy VII Citadel: Rumors (ff7citadel.com)

[Benji]

I was literally about to say that bout Zack. It's genuinely fascinating how a character who you basically only see one time as a pallet swap (ignoring that the Kalm flashback is him), and one extra time as a bonus scene basically nobody would have reason to see became such a point of fascination in fans minds that he got his own game.

21 minutes ago, Skummy said:

when every member of your party is arranged in the Northern Crater, there's two groups of three and one of two, so there must be a spot for an extra member; except it's not that there's one missing, it's that there's already two extras in Yuffie and Vincent. 

It genuinely never occurred to me that the original release would have just 6 party members at the end.

[Skummy]

30 minutes ago, Benji said:

I was literally about to say that bout Zack. It's genuinely fascinating how a character who you basically only see one time as a pallet swap (ignoring that the Kalm flashback is him), and one extra time as a bonus scene basically nobody would have reason to see became such a point of fascination in fans minds that he got his own game.

I spent years really obsessing over the story of FFVII, and never really saw the fascination with Zack, to the point that him seemingly being a major part of Remake moving forward is putting me off - I just don't care about any of the spin-offs. 

Again, I think it comes down to approaching the game as a "gamer" rather than just following the story - this thing is important, therefore there must be more of it, it can't just be a brief, momentary thing. Arguably, the point of the Nibelheim story once you learn of Zack's role in it could be interpreted as showing that Cloud didn't need to be a SOLDIER First-Class, he didn't need the big heroic backstory, because he was capable of standing up for himself (and for Tifa) and of acts of heroism regardless, and he's capable of standing up against the power that Sephiroth/Jenova wields against him. Zack is just there to facilitate Cloud's internal struggle, he's a fairly meaningless character in his own right. Just as reviving Aerith would undo the plot significance of her sacrifice (and its role in the ending), Zack being a playable hero character undermines Cloud's story.

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstood a lot of the plot of FF7, because there's a lot of stuff that's not that apparent when taken at face value. It's a much stranger game than it's given credit for. Though part of the fault in that lies with the translation - things would be a lot clearer if there had been a better translation choice than "Sephiroth clone". 

[Bobfoc]

I find it funny to think that game developers would add to their already crushing workload to add in major unlockable features that required ridiculously labyrinthine methods to access. It's an especially odd mindset to have when you also consider that they were usually having to scrap to fit their games into the limited cartridge or disc space they had available.

[Benji]

Generally these things were included because they were easily cut content they could work around. They were always wanted to be in, but removing them or making them "optional" that they could remove before release was reduced risk, and they could add them in as "bonus" content if they had time. The days before every single game having the crush.

[Skummy]

12 minutes ago, Bobfoc said:

I find it funny to think that game developers would add to their already crushing workload to add in major unlockable features that required ridiculously labyrinthine methods to access. It's an especially odd mindset to have when you also consider that they were usually having to scrap to fit their games into the limited cartridge or disc space they had available.

in the FFVII cases, you can tell immediately that something is bullshit by how much work something would take, or how ludicrously specific it is - there are "rumours" on websites like the one I posted before that rely on things like "you have to be Level 99" or "every member of your party has to have this specific bit of armour equipped", and there's literally nothing in the game that operates on that kind of principle, it simply isn't how those developers chose to hide secrets and easter eggs. But that's not the point, it's about making the method so tedious that whoever made it up can claim that it definitely works, knowing full well that most people would never have the patience to attempt it. It's an attempt at plausible deniability, but it doesn't add up.

Don't get me started on Final Fantasy 8, though, where half the secrets do follow completely bullshit routes that I don't think you could possibly find without a strategy guide - talking to invisible bits of the map that there's not a single hint about, or killing 50 Tonberries to make Tonberry King show up, or having to lose a unique card to a random person to trigger a completely unrelated random person to start playing a different unique card, etc. etc. - you could have told me almost any convoluted series of events would unlock something in that game and I'd probably have believed you.

I think where the people making these rumours up get it wrong, though, is what you say - they're major unlockable features. Developers aren't hiding an entire playable character, or whole other branch of the story (which, you'd have to assume, reviving Aerith or playing as Zack would lead to), behind an intricate series of illogical puzzles that the majority of players will never encounter. If there is anything hidden away to that extent, it's a collectible item, or more likely just a weird inside joke or easter egg, nothing important.

 

It's all "I have an uncle who works at Nintendo" stuff, though - they're playground boasts and brags, so they have to be pretty grand in scope. Nobody cares if the elaborate secret just gives you some different armour, or a few Megalixirs, it needs to be a whole new character, a new level, something worth the effort. I'm just always fascinated by the fact that kids (and it usually is kids, the 40 year old woman who "unlocked Zack" notwithstanding) really thrive on that level of bullshit and rumour; I'm guessing it's usually born of a game of oneupmanship, of having to have played the game better than everyone else, and when they run out of things you actually accomplished, they have to start making things up, and the more plausible versions of that ended up spreading ridiculously widely. It's mad how many people believed the Mew rumours, and I don't think you can place the blame for that too squarely on the internet, because how many kids with Pokémon on the Game Boy were regularly getting online in the first place?

[Chris2K]

On 14/02/2023 at 13:40, Skummy said:

It's all "I have an uncle who works at Nintendo" stuff, though - they're playground boasts and brags, so they have to be pretty grand in scope. Nobody cares if the elaborate secret just gives you some different armour, or a few Megalixirs, it needs to be a whole new character, a new level, something worth the effort. I'm just always fascinated by the fact that kids (and it usually is kids, the 40 year old woman who "unlocked Zack" notwithstanding) really thrive on that level of bullshit and rumour; I'm guessing it's usually born of a game of oneupmanship, of having to have played the game better than everyone else, and when they run out of things you actually accomplished, they have to start making things up, and the more plausible versions of that ended up spreading ridiculously widely. It's mad how many people believed the Mew rumours, and I don't think you can place the blame for that too squarely on the internet, because how many kids with Pokémon on the Game Boy were regularly getting online in the first place?

I think the digital age has taken a lot of the fun out of these kind of secrets, back when there was no YouTube the only way to see these kind of things was to play the game yourself, save for the low definition photos you might get in a games magazine. 

Nowadays you have full game guides telling you exactly how to do everything, including every secret or easter egg, and if you don't want to do it yourself you can just go on YouTube and find thousands of videos of every part of the game. There are no rumours that gain traction any more, because any rumour can be debunked in a few clicks of a mouse.