User:Vaticidalprophet/List of video game hoaxes

Video game hoaxes have been persistent amongst gaming magazines, news websites, and discussion forums since the dawn of video gaming. Many such hoaxes have achieved significant subcultural recognition and been widely believed by players, and a small number have become intentional features of the games they were originally hoaxes for. Some hoaxes originated with intent to deceive, while others were created as works of fiction, such as creepypastas, and only later were mistaken for reality.

Hoaxes have revolved around both entire nonexistent games and around fictional components of real games.

Polybius
Polybius was a supposed arcade game found in a number of arcades in Portland, Oregon in 1981. The game was preternaturally addictive and psychologically damaging, inducing amnesia and migraines in players. It was speculated to be a CIA plot, possibly related to the MKUltra experiments, and tied into men in black sightings. Despite the lack of evidence for the game's existence, it has proven culturally pervasive, lending its name to later games, being referenced in major works such as The Simpsons, and inspiring documentaries and podcasts. The legend may have been inspired by the existence of arcade games that did trigger physical illnesses, such as migraines, seizures, and heart attacks, in obsessive players. The name is also a potential reference to its fictional provenance; "Polybius" is the name of a Hellenistic-era Greek historian known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.

Super Mario Bros. flagpole jump
The original Super Mario Bros. game, released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, was a platformer in which the objective was to reach a flagpole at the end of each level. A long-standing myth claimed that you could jump over the flagpoles, which would have some kind of unspecified special effect. In reality, one of the levels (World 3-3) does allow jumping over the flagpole due to a glitch; however, the only impact this has is to trap the player in a glitched version incapable of winning until the timer runs out. In any other level, such a jump is impossible.

Killswitch
Killswitch was a game supposedly released in 1989. The game was described as a point-and-click adventure-style game where the protagonist is a wounded woman waking up at the bottom of a mine and needing to battle her way back to the surface. The player could also play as an "invisible demon" called Ghast, who was supposedly also invisible to the player, making it impossible to track one's own movements. Only 5,000 copies of Killswitch were claimed to be released, and the last working copy supposedly sold for $733,000 to a Japanese collector in 2005. The rarity of the game was ascribed to its unique ability to self-destruct immediately after being played; as a player reached the top of the mine, the screen would turn white, and the game would permanently uninstall itself from the player's computer. The story of Killswitch originated on a fictional blog called "Invisible Games" in 2007 and was publicized on the Something Awful forums.

Nuclear Gandhi
"Nuclear Gandhi" is the colloquial term for a supposed bug in the game Civilization, where pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi would overreact to an integer overflow error and become obsessed with nuclear weaponry. The legend began in 2012, when it was posted on TV Tropes; it spread to Wikia later that year. The claim proposed that Civilization used a 1 to 12 scale to determine the aggression level of foreign leaders, with 1 as the least aggressive and 12 as the most. Gandhi was supposedly the only leader with an aggression level of 1; switching the system of governance to democracy would reduce this aggression level by 2, but in Gandhi's case this would case the measure to overflow to 255, making him the most aggressive leader in the game.

The myth was so prevalent, it was used as an example of integer overflows in Harvard programming courses. Despite this reach, it was confirmed as a hoax in 2020 by Sid Meier, creation of the Civilization series, in his memoirs. Indeed, the programming language used for the Civilization games was incompatible with the supposed mechanism. Rather than a 1-12 scale, the aggression of Civilization leaders was based on a simple 1-3 scale; though Gandhi had the lowest possible rating, a third of leaders did, and Gandhi was no more or less inclined to make use of nuclear weaponry than the rest. The cultural penetrance of the myth was ascribed to the "inherently funny" idea of Gandhi as a nuclear warlord, juxtaposed with his real-world reputation for nonviolence.

Lavender Town Syndrome
Lavender Town is a location in the Pokémon Red and Blue video games which is home to the "Pokémon Tower", a cemetery filled with the graves of hundreds of Pokémon. The town has a number of ghost sightings and a chilling musical leitmotif occurring nowhere else in the game, as well as confronting content such as a Pokémon who died attempting to prevent her child's kidnapping.

The idea that the musical theme of Lavender Town has damaging effects on its listeners originated in a creepypasta story which made the rounds on the Internet. The narrative claimed that "more than 200" children aged 7 to 12 in Japan committed suicide in the spring of 1996 due to an ultrasound frequency encoded in the theme song, intended as a binaural beats experiment, which existed outside of the adult human range of hearing. Other children experienced headaches, nosebleeds, and violent behaviour. Nintendo supposedly were able to cover up the suicides, and the theme tune was changed in the English-language release to a less "harsh" version to avoid a repeat of the situation. Some versions of the myth claimed that game director Satoshi Tajiri had intentionally requested the tone be placed in the Red release of the game to punish players who picked it over Blue, due to a supposed dislike of or trauma relating to the colour red. Other versions claimed that running the original version of the Lavender Town theme through a spectrograph would generate images of the Lavender Town ghosts, or of the Pokémon Unown (a Pokémon based on the letters of the Latin alphabet) spelling out the words "LEAVE NOW".

The pervasiveness of the Lavender Town Syndrome myth has been ascribed to the moral panic regarding Pokémon and Satanism, and to the "Electric Soldier Porygon" controversy where hundreds of children were hospitalized with seizures after watching an episode of the Pokémon anime. The supposed geographical limitation of the phenomenon to Japan is also a component, as the language and cultural barriers make fact-checking difficult for commentators, especially children, in the English-speaking world.

Tomb Raider nude code
The myth of a cheat code to view Lara Croft, the busty female protagonist of the Tomb Raider series, in the nude originated in the late 1990s in video game magazines and internet message boards. While cheat codes existed elsewhere in the game, the "nude code" did not. The concept was exceptionally popular amongst players; a 1999 fan letter to Game Informer begged the publication to publish the code, claiming "millions of people are just sitting in their homes dreaming about the nude code night and day" and that such a reveal would sell millions of copies of the magazine.

In the absence of an official nude code, "Nude Raider" game mods were developed to fill the same role. Croft was one of the first female protagonists in a major video game, and both her position and her sexuality were the subject of significant analysis during the period of Tomb Raider's peak popularity. The "Nude Raider" mods were controversial for their understanding of Croft as an object of the male gaze; despite the controversy, they were some of the most popular mods of the era, with an early version of the official Tomb Raider site even linking to a download. However, a subset of players strongly opposed the mods, declaring "Nude Raider Free" fansites.

Ocarina of Time Triforce
On 4 February 1999, a poster claimed on the then-popular The Legend of Zelda fan forum "Hyrule: The Legend of Zelda" that she had found the Triforce, a powerful wish-granting artifact in the Legend of Zelda games, in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The poster, going by Ariana Almandoz, claimed acquiring the Triforce required playing a hitherto unknown song known as the Overture of Sages to enter a hidden "Temple of Light". Extensive advice was provided to supposedly unlock these hidden locations, including performing other impossible acts such as beating the Running Man in a race.

Some of the screenshots given by Almandoz of acquiring the Triforce were criticized by skeptics for apparent errors such as Link wearing his sword on the wrong side of his back. In response, Almandoz claimed this was an aspect of the process, then later disappeared when further questions rose. A month later, she returned to announce the claim had been a hoax. The identity of Ariana Almandoz was never discovered; one person claimed to be her on April Fool's Day 2005, though this claim was questioned due to the timing. Data mining has since confirmed that the Triforce does not appear in the game.

L is real 2401
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/its-true-luigi-really-is-in-super-mario-64-and-fans-are-thrilled/ https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/27/21340133/nintendo-gigaleak-luigi-l-is-real-super-mario-64-myth-conspiracy-theory-files