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Rumors about games that turned out to be false


BassGuitari

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The only one I remember from back in the day was the whole 'bring Aeris back' thing. I forget most of the supposed process, I only remember you where supposed to use a crap-ton of tissues at a tombstone in Gongaga. Never really bought that one, since you can't actually use the damn tissues for anything!

 

i was impressed to learn about the glitch that lets you see Aeris for a split second going back into the church on disc 2 & 3 though!

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Is that BassGuitaris law?

 

The Greater Theory Of AtariAge Chameleon Trollery.

 

See also: The Kennedy-Mobius Paradox--whereby real discussion of unreal things about the real turns to unreal discussion of real things about the unreal, and/or vice-versa, ad infinitum.

 

:P

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The "playground" rumors about Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II were the most ridiculous that I can remember. There used to be this kid at school who would sell Mortal Kombat cheats scrawled out on notebook paper to other kids at recess. :lol: Among the codes he would sell were the "Blood Code" (this was real on the Genesis, but he claimed to have it for the SNES too), the "Swear Code" (obviously fake) that would get Scorpion to yell "Get The F*** Over Here!" when he threw the spear, and the "Nudity Code" (also fake) that removed Sonya Blade's clothes and made her fight naked. This kid sold these for about a month for $5 a code, until he got exposed as a fraud. I think he got beat up as a bonus.

 

Then, there was the Street Fighter II rumors. Some of these were rooted in truth, as rom hacks of the game made for some weird stuff in early builds of the game, like air hadokens and stuff like that. The ones I remember being fake were unlocking Sheng Long (a hoax via EGM or another magazine for April Fools) and Guile's handcuffs and gun. The "handcuffs" were sorta real, as early games had a glitch where pulling off a Flash Kick at a certain time would result in the other character sprite getting dragged around in the "dizzy" stance. But the gun... total BS.

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Well, showing my age here but the main playground rumor for me was that there was a tiny Space Invaders game you could buy and take home. I totally believed it and was obsessed with that rumor... and it turned out to be false, but not after asking my mom to look at the stores for one for months.

 

It wasn't until some time later I'd see the first "closest" port in Bandai's Missile Invader... which had the grand total of one single invader :lol:

Edited by NE146
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Who can forget Doom coming out for Atari 2600?

 

vcsad.jpg

 

"Also available for Intellivision, ColeoVision, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari XE, and Lynx" :-D

I forgot how many people fell for that. And the endless discussions on if it COULD be done...

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Remember when Coleco made bad games for the Atari 2600 on purpose so people would be more likely to buy a ColecoVision?

 

forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?80405-Did-Coleco-make-bad-games-on-purpose

 

 

Remember when Atari made an inferior version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 so people would buy an Atari 5200?

 

Remember when Mattel made inferior games for the Atari 2600 so people would buy an Intellivision?

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Remember when Coleco made bad games for the Atari 2600 on purpose so people would be more likely to buy a ColecoVision?

 

forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?80405-Did-Coleco-make-bad-games-on-purpose

 

 

Remember when Atari made an inferior version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 so people would buy an Atari 5200?

 

Remember when Mattel made inferior games for the Atari 2600 so people would buy an Intellivision?

 

It would have made little sense for Coleco to purposefully butcher games for the 2600 because those ports were not going to compete with Colecovision no matter how faithful they were.

 

But damn, how did Donkey Kong on Intellivision turn out so crappy?

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When Atari released Pac Man on the 2600 there is a trick that will allow you to get out of sync with the play field when going through the passage from the top to the bottom (can't remember how to do it), but when it happened Pac Man would be a couple of pixels to the left from where you normally would be and you can go up and down through all of the borders. Once you did this, it was basically game over because you can never get back on the play field. A classmate at the time told me that if you did this trick and a specific sequence on the joystick and pressed the button exactly as you entered the ghost house you can then choose a hundred new mazes. I knew it was BS, but I had to try for a couple of days to just make sure it was BS.

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Sort of off topic, but remember the rumor that Saddam was buying all of the PS2's to outfit his scud missles with some chip?

Yeah. Which is the odd rumor in that it was actually started by the company itself, not just some playground dork or forum troll.

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Really? Do tell!

 

As I recall, all the sources for this story were written exactly like a Sony PR mouthpiece. Even at the time, there was a different tone to the story than there would have been to a similar rumor. The conclusion (which Sony never really denied) was that Sony planted the story to generate buzz.

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how much crap surrounds pokemon? I think the biggest one there was you could scrag the game using a game shark, or get mew legitimately in game.

 

You actually can get Mew in the game:

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch

 

The one I always remembered was this stupid truck in Pokemon Red/Blue:

200px-originaltruck.png

 

You have to do a very specific sequence of events to even be able to get to it. You have to revive the captain on the ship to advance the story, THEN lose a trainer battle before you leave the ship. This way you will black out and be transported back to the Pokemon Center without the ship actually leaving. This is important because you can only access the bridge when the ship is docked. After it leaves there is a guard who will not let you through.

 

Then, much later in the game you will acquire the "surf" move. Then you can come back to the ship and surf off the bridge to the right, which reveals the truck.

 

Kids at school and the internet were all full of rumors about the stupid truck. Some said you could use the "strength" move to physically move it, revealing a staircase underneath. Others said it would warp you to the inaccessible grassy areas surrounding Pallet Town, the place where you start the game, and would allow you to catch Mew or other rare Pokemon. And others I can't recall.

 

And in the end, it's just a truck. It's not there for any reason, it doesn't do anything.

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When I was a kid, I was told the 3rd intermission in Ms. Pacman was here they got married, then there was a 4th where they had a kid. The wedding rumor was false. :lol:

 

That rumor was actually printed in magazines at the time. I vaguely recall Enter used it for a crossword puzzle or some other trivia thing in one of their issues.

 

The "playground" rumors about Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II were the most ridiculous that I can remember. There used to be this kid at school who would sell Mortal Kombat cheats scrawled out on notebook paper to other kids at recess. :lol: Among the codes he would sell were the "Blood Code" (this was real on the Genesis, but he claimed to have it for the SNES too), the "Swear Code" (obviously fake) that would get Scorpion to yell "Get The F*** Over Here!" when he threw the spear, and the "Nudity Code" (also fake) that removed Sonya Blade's clothes and made her fight naked. This kid sold these for about a month for $5 a code, until he got exposed as a fraud. I think he got beat up as a bonus.

 

Mortal Kombat rumors and lies were all over the place, so much so that many of them were made true for later entries in the series. Remember Ermac? That one started when someone discovered one of Mortal Kombat's service-mode stats pages has a counter not only for Reptile appearances but also for "Ermac" appearances. Since Reptile turned out to be an actual Easter egg, people wondered how you could make Ermac appear. The actual reason for the Ermac counter was to log the number of times the game glitched, that is, the number of ERrors in the MAChine. Not everyone believed that, and the rumor persisted for so long that the developers finally turned Ermac into a playable character in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

 

The "blood code" for the SNES version of Mortal Kombat is actually real... sort of. With a Game Genie you can turn the sweat red, which is as close to blood as you'll get in that game. Naturally that wasn't enough to satisfy some people's blood lust, and so rumors persisted not only about codes but also about how the game could be physically hacked to make blood appear. One that made the rounds where I live was that the programmers included an extra chip on the cartridge circuit board with all the blood and fatalities Nintendo made them remove. To activate the chip you supposedly had to microwave your cartridge, which would make solder melt and activate the connections between the chip and the rest of the board. I pray not too many people fell for that one.

 

Rumors swirled around arcade Mortal Kombat II as well, many of which were false, some of which were true... sort of. The Internet was just starting to become a thing when MK2 hit the arcades, and the newsgroups (remember those?) were full of people compiling lists and screaming for "first" credits when they revealed a new move they'd discovered. In the middle of all that this one list for MK2 appeared with all kinds of weird and wacky moves. Supposedly Raiden could morph into a handful of other characters. Supposedly Johnny Cage's red shadow kick was a legitimate move you could trigger and not just an occasional bug. Supposedly there were "Animalities" where the characters would turn into animals before finishing off their opponents. Mixed in with all these fake moves were all the real moves that were known up to that point, which lent more credence to this particular list than it deserved. Eventually the fake was weeded out from the legitimate, but people still liked the idea of Animalities, and so they became an actual thing in Mortal Kombat 3.

 

Another rumor that was true... sort of... was the idea that you could perform a Babality and then kill the baby afterward. As it turned out, Midway had gotten in the habit of letting arcade gamers be their playtesters, and several pre-release versions of MK2 made the rounds before Midway called it "done". In one of these early versions, a bug in the Bability code let you perform one or two extra moves after turning your opponent into a baby. If you played as Kitana, you could use these moves to levitate and then uppercut the baby, at which point it would disappear in a pool of blood. Midway fixed that bug real quick, but the gossip persisted long after.

 

Nothing to do with Mortal Kombat, but one particular rumor that I latched onto for a long time -- way longer than I should have -- was that sometimes the computer allowed you to get away with something you weren't supposed to. Random acts of mercy, in other words. Some recent games actually do have such a thing, and some older games have limitations that can be exploited to look like random acts of mercy (e.g. the ability to move through ghosts in the higher levels of arcade Pac-Man). But I was under the impression it was an intentional thing in all games for all systems, so much so that I assumed most of my seat-of-the-pants escapes in Atari 2600 Ms. Pac-Man were due to the computer taking pity on me. Naturally I know now Atari systems aren't that sympathetic. :)

 

I forgot how many people fell for that. And the endless discussions on if [2600 Doom] COULD be done...

 

Ahh, the memories. But you know... maybe now...

 

Somebody call Spice! :D

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