God Never Said That / Video Games

• Baldur's Gate II: It is often said that Imoen was originally supposed to die at Spellhold by the hands of Irenicus, possibly in order to trigger rage in the main character and harvest his/her untapped power. While it is possible that this was actually planned and informally leaked at some point, there is no interview nor comment by the developers stating such a thing. The only available statement is by David Gaider, who doesn't remember any plan to kill Imoen at Spellhold. Interestingly though, in that same answer he says that the reason for the lack of Imoen's banters is that "by that time the player already had a solidified party", while many years earlier he admitted that Imoen was indeed planned to die - but at Suldanesselar, after turning into the Ravager.
• Castlevania: A commonly-cited quote from Koji Igarashi (IGA) is something to the effect of "No woman could ever be a Belmont", in regards to the decision to remove Castlevania Legends from continuity. This is used as evidence that IGA is a misogynist. Funnily enough, though, nobody can ever provide the source of that quote, just saying it's from "an interview". Considering that IGA has had numerous playable female characters - including in the first game he did after leaving Konami - it's ridiculous to think he'd say something like that. This is to say nothing of how you can, in fact, find his actual reasoning for removing the game from the timeline — it was removed from canon because it "conflicted with the timeline" and "wasn't innovative enough to be worth keeping".

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert was originally envisioned as a prequel to the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, but then Red Alert 2 came along and made it much more difficult to envision a concrete link between Red Alert and the Tiberium games. Then someone got the idea that both of Red Alert's endings were canon in alternate continuities, where an Allied victory lead to Red Alert 2, and a Soviet one led to Tiberian Dawn. This doesn't really make any sort of sense for a variety of reasons - just to start, the first game's Global Defense Initiative is explicitly a United Nations-backed organization, and there's not a whole lot of room for the United Nations to even exist if the Soviets under Stalin conquered the world - but thanks at least in part to the Soviet ending of Red Alert explicitly referring to the Brotherhood of Nod and Stalin's oddly-familiar advisor revealing himself to be Nod's leader Kane (not to mention his apparent lack of aging in the fifty or so years between the two games, which actually did become something of a plot point later), this theory became popular enough that a lot of people started believing it was canon, even after the developers actually made a statement saying that the two series were now completely separate.
• Cut the Rope: Om Nom was allegedly confirmed to be bisexual by Semyon Voinov, co-founder of developer ZeptoLab, but the website hosting the "interview" in question states in its sidebar that it is a satire website. However, that hasn't stopped several fans from believing the quote to be genuine.
• Dark Souls: Series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has been misquoted in more than one way:
  • Miyazaki has cited the manga Berserk as an influence on the Dark Souls video game series in several interviews. In this interview, he acknowledged he is a Berserk fan and that it has greatly influenced the series since the first game. In another interview◊ he gives a Shout-Out, noting that when Art Designer Masanori Waragai showed him his Catarina armor design, he felt reminded of Bazuso from Berserk and thought that old design was appropriate for Siegmeyer's character concept. He also said that the greatsword arts and playstyle in Dark Souls III were inspired by Guts. However, fanon sometimes exaggerates it, with some fans of both Berserk and the Souls games suggesting that Berserk was the primary inspiration of Souls. Miyazaki didn't cite it as the primary inspiration, but mentioned it among other sources of inspiration, including other manga such as Saint Seiya, Devilman, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, as well as as his collection of Tabletop RPGs and Fantasy Literature, the earlier FromSoftware game series King's Field, and the Fighting Fantasy game books.
  • After Dark Souls 1 came out, That One Boss The Bed of Chaos was so poorly-received that it was said that Miyazaki had publicly apologised for it being so bad. He actually made no such apology. The closest thing to such a statement is FROM Software saying that they felt that the Lost Izalith area (which contains the Bed of Chaos) was not what it should have been and that they wanted to do more with it, but they'd run out of time.
  • Likewise, Miyazaki wasn't the one who said poise was "working as intended" in Dark Souls III. That was an unnamed Bandai Namco spokesperson.

• Misquoted and falsified information prior to a game's launch can easily persuade people. For example, a rumor was started in the months leading up to the launch of Deus Ex: Human Revolution that it would only be five hours long. The game is actually said to be over twenty five hours long.

• DmC: Devil May Cry's director Tameem Antoniades became infamous among the Devil May Cry fandom for disparaging the classic series and its fans while talking up his studio's Continuity Reboot, which led many to assume that any inflammatory or pretentious quote from someone working on the game must have come straight from his mouth. The two examples most frequently misattributed to him are claiming the reboot was "almost Shakespearian" in its thematic depth, and derisively writing off the original Dante by calling him a "gay cowboy". The former came from an interview with Lilith's actress Robin Riker that was included in a promotional video, while the latter is paraphrased from a now-deleted GDC talk from the game's art director Alessandro Taini where he quipped that classic Dante looked like he belonged in Brokeback Mountain, among other things.

• For the Donkey Kong Country series:
  • For a long time, it was widely believed that Shigeru Miyamoto didn't like Donkey Kong Country, especially its visuals, and that the painterly style of Yoshi's Island was done as a direct Take That! to the game's pre-rendered graphics. The citation for this came from a book entitled The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steve Kent, who was himself allegedly citing a 1995 interview with Miyamoto in a British magazine called Electronic Games.^note Not to be confused with the American Electronic Games Monthly. This was widely passed around as fact, until some researchers did some digging and discovered that the quote in question did not exist in the issue it allegedly came from, and may have been a pure fabrication by the author. The rumor was so persistent that Miyamoto had to come forward in a 2010 interview and reassure that he has no problems with the DKC series—he was heavily involved in their creation, after all, and signed off on all of it.
  • In a Japanese interview prior to the launch of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, the game's co-director Yoshiaki Koizumi answered a question about the game's characters, which a Nintendo fansite contracted by IGN translated as "All the characters outside of Donkey Kong and the banana are completely original. We don't really feel the past look of Donkey Kong was fresh enough for today. We really gave our new development team the chance to really create something unique and stylish.". Needless to say, the negative implications of the statement were not well-received by Donkey Kong Country fans, especially as this was after Rare's sale to Microsoft and admist concerns Nintendo would roll back the studio's contributions to the Donkey Kong franchise. However, fans would revisit the interview in 2019 and find this was a major mistranslation: the original statement was more tame, simply stating the developers of Jungle Beat focused on a new cast because the game's tone was very different from previous games and they hoped it would reflect the style of the newly-formed EAD Tokyo team.

• It's often claimed that creator ToadyOne clarified that the Beak Dogs from Dwarf Fortress are velociraptors, something that can't easily be verified based on the fact the game uses an ASCII graphical interface. On the contrary, he stated that Beak Dogs are not velociraptors, and that he only made a comment about them being like velociraptors for lack of a better comparison. They were actualy inspired by creatures from Tremors 2, and their game data clarifies that they lack features such as teeth and arms that velociraptors would have.

• Far Cry:
  • There was a brief period where it was believed that the protagonist of Far Cry 4, Ajay Ghale, was a former member of the US Army or Marines, presumably to explain why he's as good with guns as previous Far Cry protagonists, which include a retired special forces operator, a dozen mercenaries of varying backgrounds, and even another everyman who is called a "natural" with guns in a vocal flashback. It's never said anywhere in any official materials what, if any, employment Ajay ever had before his trip to Kyrat - at best, an official bio stated that he ran with a bad crowd and ended up taking part in a robbery where a cashier was killed, turned himself in and gave up the one who pulled the trigger in return for no prison time for himself, and was in the process of "turning his life around" before his mother's death set off the plot of the game, with no specific details given for what that entailed.
  • The question of when precisely the first game even takes place saw another instance of this, thanks to an edit on the series wiki claiming an "action time on the license disk" stated it's set in 2025, which would have made every other game in the series after it except Far Cry: New Dawn a prequel. Questions were eventually asked - including what, precisely, "action time on the license disk" even means - and no actual proof was ever produced, but it's still relatively common to see videos claiming the game is set in 2025.

• Within the Broken Base of Fire Emblem Fates, there have been several instances of either mistaken or straight-up invented sources:
  • It was "reported" that head writer Shin Kibayashi hated working on the game's story and disowned it on Twitter, but in reality he had just said that he didn't like taking all the credit for the plot when there was actually a whole writing team behind it and he didn't want them to be overshadowed.
  • Rena Strober (Azura's English VA) never claimed she was completely blind during the recording process. She didn't know much about Azura when she auditioned, but she was given proper information as it became relevant and she interjected when stories began falsely accusing Nintendo of withholding information from her.
  • Thanks to a line by Leo in the beginning of the game, players believe that Elise was aged up for the Western release. His exact words were "... act like the adult you technically are..." which only means that Elise meets the age requirement for an adult by the standards of the game's universe. These standards are never actually revealed in the game itself, and if anything, only serve to highlight that she is indeed quite young compared to the rest of the cast, even if she is of marriageable age.^note (In Roman and later Medieval/Renaissance times, a noblewoman was usually considered "marriageable" when she hit puberty and therefore was able to have children, so Elise is at her youngest 12-13 years old.)
  • Also no, the character designer Yusuke Kozaki never compared Camilla to a cow because of her Buxom Beauty Standard figure. That was Toshiyuki Kusakihara, the art director and Kozaki's boss, and it was during a group interview for the newest FE artbook. Cue the fans still claiming it was Kozaki and showing a lot of ignorance about work ethics in Japan ^note (a boss' authority is almost absolute and the people working under him/her would be far more liable to lose their job if they don't go along with what they say) and game design in general^note (a character designer MUST work with what he or she is given by the art director and can't really stray a lot from it, lest he or she will have their sketches rejected)

• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • The fanbase is infamous for believing fan videos or theories to be factual. The whole "Purple Guy is named Vincent because a Tumblr user used that name in their artwork" incident is the most well known example.
  • In a case of "God did say that, but not at that time", there were many who considered "William Afton" to be the Murderer's canon name long before Scott confirmed it to be the case; in Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, he's simply Mr. Afton. He was previously called William Afton in the novel Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes, which is not canon to the games.

• Girls' Frontline in 2018 had a brief controversy regarding something called the "T-Doll Maintenance Manual", which purported itself to be an official collection of side-material, but turned out to primarily be a collection of fanfiction plagiarized from Chinese fans, placing itself in a unique limbo where it can't be entirely ignored either because it also included several statements and pieces of art from the game's official artists, much of which has since been canonized.

• Hideki Kamiya gets these regarding a few of his games, and opinions on other subjects.
  • To those who wanted Dante and Bayonetta to fight, no, he did not say Bayonetta would win. It was a joke about how women usually have the final say over men in a relationship.
  • Nor does he hate Super Smash Bros.; there were multiple requests from people over and over to put Bayonetta in the game, causing him to tell them to "fuck off". She did, in fact, become a playable character in later installments of the series.
  • People often cite the fact that Kamiya has never directed a sequel to any of his games^note Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and Bayonetta have all had sequels, but Kamiya was not in the director's chair for any of them. as evidence that he hates sequels. In actuality, he has nothing against sequels at all, and actively wants to make sequels to many of his games. He just never gets the chance to direct them himself due to business/availability reasons.^note PlatinumGames do not own the IPs they develop, nor do they own the franchises they made as Clover Studio. So it's at the publisher's discretion to make a sequel and bring him back. The times when they have done so are often while Kamiya is knee-deep in other projects.

• For a while, fans liked to report that the creator of Kingdom Hearts wanted to put Vincent Valentine in the game, but Executive Meddling made him put Cloud in instead, so he gave Cloud Vincent's design to compensate. It turns out this was a misunderstanding - all he said was that he would have liked to put Vincent in the game, not that he originally planned to do so. His plan was always to include Cloud, and the reason for Cloud using Vincent's design was that Cloud was on the side of darkness in this game, so they wanted to make him look a bit demonic - and since Vincent already kind of looked like that, they just went ahead and used his design.
  • The interview accompanying the Toy Story reveal trailer for Kingdom Hearts III didn't say that Kingdom Hearts is canon to Toy Story. What Nomura actually said was that he's interwoven the films' timeline into the game rather than create an alternate version of the events.
  • It has often been repeated that Marluxia was originally conceptualized as a female character in development, but was changed to male to avoid the Unfortunate Implications of the only two women in Organization XIII rebelling against the male-dominated group and being killed for it. This is only half-correct; Nomura indeed said that Marluxia was originally envisioned as female, but the only reason he gave for making him male was that it made Marluxia more of a "contrast" with Larxene.invoked

• Some detractors of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords claim that Chris Avellone "admitted" he hates Star Wars and wrote the game as a massive Take That! against the whole franchise. What Avellone really said was that after consuming the entire Expanded Universe, he used Kreia's character to question things he hated about the Force (mainly that it's used as an Omniscient Morality License and the fact it has "a will" being used as an explanation for the EU's perpetual Happy Ending Override). He's on record as praising the first game and credits it for "making me love Star Wars again."

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Considering the headaches spent trying to figure out the timeline of The Legend of Zelda, it was almost inevitable that one timeline or another would emerge in popular consensus as "official" and "verified". It was rarely stated who did the supposed verification, and flew in the face of several creators. A general chronology was still believed to exist in the midst of this, believed to be flexible enough to put any new game they want anywhere in the timeline without screwing it up. In 2011, an actual official timeline came out that (mostly) settled all debates regarding the games released up to that point. As for some of the games released after the fact...
  • As the Zelda team started revealing bits of information about the DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they consistently said that "The Champions' Ballad", the second, story-focused DLC pack, would be a "new story" focusing more on the Champions. Many gaming news publications interpreted this to mean that the DLC pack would be an epilogue story taking place after the Final Boss of the base game. Turns out "The Champions' Ballad" meshed chronologically with the base game instead, with the ending of the base game unaltered.

• Thanks to the rather vehement Broken Base surrounding Metroid: Other M, it has been persistently reported ever since that Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto hates the Metroid Prime Trilogy due to his minimal involvement in their creation and views them as Canon Discontinuity. In reality, he considers them to be great games and fully canonical, but regularly stresses that they are self-contained interquels taking place early in the series' chronology (which allows both his team and Retro Studios to tell whatever stories they want without worrying about ruining each other's plotlines). The belief that he hates the Prime games stems from an interview where he explains he didn't specifically factor them into the story of Other M, which fans then proceeded to blow out of proportion. But even then, Other M and subsequent Metroid games still feature continuity nods to some of Prime's worldbuilding. Metroid: Samus Returns, a remake of the second game in the series, would even explicitly canonize the Prime titles by adding new story content in the form of Ridley transitioning from his cyborg-form Meta Ridley to his organic body from Super Metroid, better linking the two halves of the franchise together.

• Mighty No. 9, after many delays, was met with a disastrous launch. During a livestream event to help hype the release of the game, Keiji Inafune and Ben Judd of Dangen Entertainment were answering questions from fans while playing through the game. When confronted about the problems the game had, Judd said "It's better than nothing" which, as he was acting as Inafune's translator for the stream, led many people to believe that Inafune himself said that to spite fans. However, it was clarified later on that this was Judd giving his personal thoughts on the issue.

• Overwatch:
  • A surprisingly large number of fans think Mercy is evil/doesn't age/is a vampire, despite no indication that this is true. Even official confirmation from the head writer, Michael Chu, and the introduction of Moira, an actual evil healer, hasn't done much to stem it. This likely stems from Mercy being surprisingly youthful, in full body armor (minus her face), and the reveal that she turned Genji into a cyborg.
  • Weirdly inverted with Symmetra's prosthetic arm. Despite multiple confirmations that it is, in fact, a prosthesis, the idea that it's just a sleeve or glove persists.

• Persona
  • Persona 3: Fans have wondered why the Evokers - devices used to summon one's Persona in this game, and purely for symbolic effect in Persona 4: Arena - are shaped like guns, which one "shoots" into one's head. Based on a scene in the game's Playable Epilogue "The Answer," an explanation began making the rounds among fans that they were designed that way by Mitsuru in order to convince Akihiko to become her first official recruit into the fight against the Shadows, either by appealing to his self-destructive tendencies or just purely on the basis of Rule of Cool. This is false: as stated in an interview with Producer & Director Katsura Hashino in Persona 3 Official Design Works, the Evokers were shaped like guns because the act of putting a gun to one's head and pulling the trigger creates a visceral response similar to playing Russian Roulette, testing the Persona user's resolve every single time they use the Evoker. The cutscene in The Answer states only that Mitsuru chose her approach to catch Akihiko's attention; this statement is not in any way related to the subject of the design of the Evokers, which had already been determined long beforehand.
  • Persona 4:
    • Troy Baker, the voice actor of Kanji Tatsumi, revealed during a con that he was instructed by his voice acting director to act as if Kanji was actually gay. When he shared this info, he also offered his own interpretation that he felt Kanji was gay as well. This is often used as proof of Kanji's orientation despite the actual Word of God stating that Kanji's orientation is up to the interpretation of the player.
    • There's the persistent rumor that Naoto Shirogane was canonically transgender in the Japanese Version, which couldn't be further from the truth; in fact, many Japanese exclusive materials regarding Persona 4 (Drama CDs, Art Books and Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, to name a few) make it increasingly explicit that Naoto's gender was never the actual issue of her character arc and she has no actual issues with her sex itself whatsoever, only with its implications in her society.
    • Despite it being commonly quoted, Word of God has not said that Dojima was originally planned to be the killer. The only Word of God on the original planned killer was that it wasn't Adachi. Story elements make Dojima a very likely candidate, but it's never been confirmed.
  • Persona 5: Goro Akechi's status as a Phantom Thief is often debated within the fandom, given that he is only playable for one Palace and is absent from a fair amount of promotional materials and crossover content, especially regarding tie-ins for the original game. While Atlus officially considers him to be one, listing him as a Phantom Thief on the official website for Persona 5 Royal as well as promotional material for the game, and listing him as a Phantom Thief in character popularity polls and surveys, there are fans (mostly detractors and those that are familiar with the Persona series through Super Smash Bros. Ultimate but also those who aren't fond of his true nature which includes some of the Phantom Thieves themselves ) that refuse to include him amongst them.
    • The widespread misconception that Hifumi Togo was supposed to be one of the Phantom Thieves persists to this day. What the development team actually said is that they originally had planned to have another, more radical-minded strategist to act as a Foil to the strait-laced Makoto, but in the end decided to incorporate both ideas into Makoto herself. Eventually, when coming up with Confidants, the team had the idea to recycle and adapt the scrapped design sketch for a completely different character, who would be Hifumi Togo.

• Pikmin: It is widely stated that Pikmin began as an offshoot of the Mario 128 demo for the Nintendo GameCube, due to Shigeru Miyamoto saying in a 2007 Game Developers Conference keynote speech that the demo became Pikmin. However, he only meant this figuratively, in that Pikmin showcases many of the hardware features seen in the demo, namely the ability to handle so many characters at once. The actual game had not only already been in development for years, having started planning in the early days of the Nintendo 64, but the main creative team was unaware of the tech demo.

• Pokémon:
  • Marill is very frequently treated as a "Pikaclone" by the fandom. While the parallels are there, Game Freak has never officially promoted Marill's line in that capacity, and the association is a leftover from the old "Pikablu" rumors that emerged during the lead-up to Pokémon Gold and Silver's release.
  • When covering Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Chuggaaconroy stated in one episode that the Big Bad was originally meant to be Wes, the Player Character from Pokémon Colosseum, and that this was changed because the developers felt such a thing would be too dark and devalue the plot of Colosseum. There is absolutely no evidence in-game, within the game's code, or via Word of God to back this up, but fans still cling to it because Chugga's penchant to do heavy research on every game he covers means he is an otherwise trusted expert in Pokémon knowledge. Chugga would confirm much later that he fell victim to misinformation, the source turning out to be a Did You Know Gaming parody account.
  • Pokémon Black and White: The variety show Pokémon Sunday once reported that "No old characters like Oak will appear", which mutated into no old characters being slated to appear at all and really got confusing when some Gen IV characters showed up in the games.
  • Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!:
    • The whole situation surrounding online play. During the initial reveal, conflicting reports from journalists caused many to believe that online battling and trading, a staple of the series since Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, would not be in the game at all. The following day then had it reported by Western gaming media that the lack of online only referred to the games not requiring a subscription to Nintendo's paid online service... only for an interview with Famitsu a few days later to state that the games would require a subscription to the service, and that they were specifically referring to the games not utilizing the Nintendo Switch Online phone app.
    • A quick translation of a Japanese interview with Masuda that appeared on a Spanish-language website had many believe that he stated the old catching mechanics were too difficult for some players, causing quite possibly the biggest backlash in the community since the anime's Kalos league arc, with many feeling insulted and believing the director/producer to be out of touch with the audience. When the interview was properly translated a day later, it was shown that what he actually said was that some people aren't fans of the old "weaken, then capture" method, with no mention at all to supposed difficulty besides acknowledging the Go method as being simpler.
  • It's commonly stated that Pokémon Legends: Arceus started life as a proper Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remake until Game Freak realized they had strayed away too far from the original games, so they decided to farm Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl out to ILCA while continuing to work on Legends: Arecus as an original title. Though PLA did enter development in late 2018, while BDSP only began development in early 2020, this reasoning has never been confirmed by official sources.
  • Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! and Pokémon Legends: Arceus are commonly referred to as being spin-off games. However, Game Freak and The Pokémon Company have regularly stated that while they aren't "core" titles, they are still considered mainline entries in the franchise.

• The late Satoru Iwata had multiple cases of this:
  • When he said in early 2013 that reaching a certain operating income target for Nintendo's profits in that fiscal year was a commitment of his, it somehow got broadly reported that he was promising to resign if the goal was not reached (which it wasn't). He had to directly refute the resignation rumor during a shareholder's meeting later that June.
  • In early 2014, there were a lot of rumors that Nintendo would go under, cancel support for the Wii U home console and then go mobile. Iwata addressed all these points in a shareholder meeting at the end of February: specifically stating that they would NOT happen. When they did decide to start pursuing mobile gaming the following year, he went so far as to prematurely announce the codename for their next home console ("NX") at the same time, in order to make it clear that they weren't quitting hardware.
  • When the Nintendo Switch was announced under the codename "NX", but before any meaningful detail was revealed about the system, some message board posters convinced themselves Satoru Iwata had ruled out the possibility of the NX being an portable/home console hybrid and used the supposed claim to "debunk" growing speculation and rumors it would be one. When the Switch was properly unveiled and did end up being an hybrid device, fans went back to the investor meeting transcript where this was supposedly said and found out Iwata's statement was actually far more vague and less definitive than claimed, being the usual PR messaging of "We will talk more about this when we have more to share about the system."

• For a while, many fans assumed that Shantae was 16 years old due to someone on the official Twitter account for WayForward Technologies referring to her as such, which made many uncomfortable due to how fanservice-laden the series is. When confronted about it, level designer James Montagna had clarified that the statement was made by a PR intern who assumed she was 16 and didn't double-check with the developers; while the character doesn't have an exact age, she is indeed an adult.

• In a 2009 interview with Wired, Shigeru Miyamoto states that the reason why he caused the team to get rid of the story elements in Super Mario Galaxy 2 was because he disliked Mario games having deep storylines. Many fans and critics often misinterpret this interview as meaning he dislikes stories in video games in general, which is not entirely true. Beyond being one of the first developers to insert a narrative into a video game with Donkey Kong, in a later interview, he states that while he does prefer to prioritize the gameplay over the story, he is fine with having stories in games. Even in the aforementioned Wired interview, his "dislike" of stories in games is more on a case-by-case basis than an all-encompassing rule, as although he dislikes Mario games having deep storylines, he is okay with The Legend of Zelda having them.

• Sonic the Hedgehog tends to suffer from this a bit, due to language barriers between Japan and America, and people misattributing comments from Sega and other licensors to Sonic Team and/or current producer Takashi Iizuka.
  • There are a lot of fans who adamantly believe that Sonic is "the fastest thing alive" and that nothing else can possibly outrun him. That line came from the opening theme of the Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) cartoon, which is a separate canon from any of the video games (except possibly Sonic Spinball). While Sonic did ultimately prove unmatched in speed in that TV show and its comic adaptation, plenty of things can match or exceed his speed in the video games.^note To name a few, this includes Dr. Eggman himself, Metal Sonic, the G.U.N. truck, most of the bosses in Sonic Advance 2, Shadow the Hedgehog, Silver the Hedgehog as of Sonic Generations, Infinite, the Avatar, all of the daytime bosses in Sonic Unleashed, the Cyan Wisps, the Extreme Gears, the orca by Emerald Coast, the Kaos wheels in Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace, the malicious Ferris wheel in Tropical Resort, and Omochao., which invariably causes these fans to get upset whenever they play a Sonic game and see something or someone achieve a speed Sonic cannot reach. Sonic has however been described in the games as the world's fastest hedgehog, at the very least.
  • One thing that has spread since the release of Sonic Mania is that the Super Emeralds from Sonic 3 & Knuckles are no longer around because somehow they were completely drained of their power during the events of & Knuckles. All that was shown in the former game was that seven gray cracked emeralds were around the Master Emerald. The belief was spread so fast that Word of God had to clarify that the emeralds shown were just stone replicas but you still see this belief in certain areas.
  • Takashi Iizuka never said that Sonic's World and Earth are two entirely separate continuities, nor did he say that they were separate "worlds". This is the result of confusion caused by the meaning of the word Sekai in the Japanese language; what Iizuka meant was they were different societies as opposed to planets or dimensions— which was eventually clarified as the truth through TailsTube in 2022, with the "human world" being comprised of societies on the larger continents, and the smaller islands dotted across Sonic's planet being the respective "non-human world". This wasn't helped by various higher ups (most notably, Aaron Webber) misinterpreting his words and stating the two worlds really were separate planets, which lead to further confusion from fans.
  • Iizuka also never said money didn't exist in the Sonic universe, he merely mandated that nobody be shown using it onscreen.
  • Blaze the Cat from Sonic Rush is often stated to be Sonic's alternate universe counterpart (with Marine often being extended to being Tails' counterpart thanks to her filling in a similar sidekick role during Sonic Rush Adventure). This is also partly why her appearance in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was so controversial with the fanbase, as it was seen as contradicting her true nature. In reality, this has never been confirmed by Sega, Sonic Team, or the games themselves. While the Chaos Emeralds and the Sol Emeralds are explicitly stated to be counterparts; Blaze is only ever stated to be an inhabitant of the Sol Emeralds' dimension, and any deeper connection she has with Sonic is purely speculatory.^note Indeed, Sonic and Blaze actually have different ages, hinting that they aren't actually alternate universe counterparts even if one ignores Sonic 06
  • Naoto Ohshima never intended Sonic to be called "Mr. Needlemouse". His original name for the character was actually "Mr. Harinezumi" (Hedgehog) which became the former thanks to some dodgy (and literal) translations of his concept art.

• Amongst Splatoon 2 fans, it's frequently stated that Pearl's short height comes from her being electrocuted as a kid. The rumor stemmed from Western fans misunderstanding the character's Sunken Scroll entry, believing that the "no one was injured" line was a case of localization or the news report obfuscating what actually happened (as the writer seems unaware that Pearl was the cause of the shockwave), with people later claiming that this is confirmed in the Japanese version of the art book. In reality, no mention of this exists in canon; Pearl's short stature is the result of her design being based on a naturally small species of squid.

• A rather common one in the Star Fox series is that the members of Team Star Fox are amputees. Supposedly the metal boots they all wear are actually prosthetic legs that help them withstand G forces normal pilots couldn't survive. This actually started as a fan theory sent in to Nintendo Power, which later got referenced by a popular gaming theory web series Did You Know Gaming. During an interview with Miyamoto, Matthew Patrick of Game Theory asked about it, to which Miyamoto responded he is aware of the theory, but none of the team was aware of the science behind G forces and pilots while developing the game. It was purely a design choice to aid with making the characters more anthropomorphic.

• A Memetic Mutation within Star Trek Online is "Delta Rising is the best expansion EVER and the players LOVE it", claiming that someone within Cryptic proclaimed the game's second expansion was an out-and-out success, particularly amongst fans who did not, in fact, like Delta Rising. In actuality, they were saying that the expansion was a financial success. The players just took the quote, applied a heaping dose of Sarcasm Mode and we're off to the races.

• Street Fighter canon has several examples:
  • The live-action film and cartoon, aside from combining Blanka and Charlie into Carlos "Charlie" Blanka, assigned first and last names and titles to characters who didn't have them normally (i.e. Ryu Hoshi, Chun-Li Zang/Xiang, William F. Guile, Dhalsim being a last name, Victor Sagat, etc.), which are sometimes attributed to the characters in other canon. Chun-Li's father's name has never been revealed, but is given as Dorai/Dourai in Street Fighter II V (the same anime also gave Vega/Balrog/Claw a surname, Fabio la Cerda) as well as the UDON comics.
  • Cammy is often claimed to have been Bison's lover before her Laser-Guided Amnesia. However, this was due to a mistranslation of her Super Street Fighter II ending. In the original canon and properly-translated games, she was his Opposite-Sex Clone. Nowadays, fans like to run with BOTH versions.
  • Akuma's ultimate attack, the Raging Demon (Shun Goku Satsu or "Instant Hell Murder" in original Japanese) is often touted as an attack in which Akuma grabs his opponent and sends them to Hell where demons do all sorts of unspeakable things to them while the screen briefly cuts to black and the sounds of dozens of heavy blows are heard. This is often claimed to have been stated in a "Japanese sourcebook" or stated by "Capcom executives", but no copies of said book have been found and no one can pinpoint exactly where this information came from. Street Fighter V revealed that Akuma brutally beats you to death by striking your vital areas from all angles at the speed of light.

• Super Mario Bros..
  • Nintendo never retconned anything about Mario being a plumber in 2017. In fact, they never made any meaningful statement about his current job at all. An official Nintendo Japanese Twitter account linked to a profile that happened to refer to him being a plumber in the past tense, but this was the context of talking about all the jobs the character has had; specifically referencing the original Mario Bros. game, which was one of the few times he's actually done a plumbing job in any of the games. Several Western articles reporting on this warped it into "Mario is no longer a plumber!" In response to the misunderstanding, the profile was updated again in 2018 to clearly state that, yes, Mario is a plumber, but he's not limited to just that and can do whatever job a specific game needs him to be doing, but this would also go on to be seen as Nintendo "changing their minds" about the retconning they supposedly did. The Nintendo-produced The Super Mario Bros. Movie that came out six years later also makes the brothers' plumbing career a plot point.
  • The 2017 interview about Super Mario World with Takashi Tezuka and Shigefumi Hino never confirmed that Mario is punching Yoshi in the head, which is a common misinterpretation of the sprite animation. What they did do was reveal that this was the original intention, but that it was changed during development so that Mario is pointing instead, something that is even clearly communicated in the game's instruction manual. Unfortunately, misleading headlines reporting this interview resulted in Common Knowledge that Mario punching Yoshi was indeed always the case.
  • On November 17, 2014, GameSpot posted an article about an interview with Koichi Hayashida on Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. He discusses the Toads' gender, where he claims that they never went out of their way to decide the sex on them. This led to the conclusion that the Toads are literally genderless. However, that's not the case. In an interview, Shigeru Miyamoto clarifies that when the Toads were first designed, they didn't focus on their genders, though their Japanese name Kinopio was chosen as a portmanteau of kinoko (mushroom) and Pinocchio, Pinocchio being a boy, of course. Once Toadette came into the picture, they clearly designed her to be female. Because she was the most feminine out of the others and because the character Toad was clearly referred to as he, it led the conclusion that the rest were male with the RPG games being exceptions. In other words, it's likely that Hayashida's comment was implying that the Toads just have Ambiguous Genders and not entirely genderless, a point that is further made with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with the Move Lists for both Peach and Daisy. In Peach's, it clearly states that Toad is male, while Daisy's refers to the Blue Toad as an it as the other Toad colors aren't as significant.
  • Fans and some official sources often refer to Rosalina by the term "princess" because of her crown and similar appearance to Princess Peach. None of her official appearances have ever referred to her as a princess, and in her debut game, Super Mario Galaxy, she's implied to be a near godlike entity in the present, while her backstory suggests she's just an ordinary girl without any sort of noble background.
  • The Mario cast have never been officially stated to be actors. Miyamoto simply compared them to actors in regards to their versatility; like the plumber example above, it was merely to highlight how like classic cartoon characters, Mario and friends can have any job that they need for a specific game to work.

• The most infuriating aspect of Selena Recital from Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 was how little of a back-story she had compared to the other Alpha 3 protagonists. This has led to such Wild Mass Guessing regarding her origins that the popular "Shadow-Mirror theory" of her being one of their agents being sent across The Multiverse is also one of the most implausible.

• The creator of Super Smash Bros., Masahiro Sakurai, tends to receive this a lot, often thanks to Western fans relying on inaccurate translations:
  • Some people insisted that Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U would have less characters than Brawl because Sakurai said so. What he actually said was that if adding characters was the only thing he did, the game wouldn't be any better. Even when the pre-launch revealed roster for Smash 4 exceeded 30, with many veterans still unannounced, and months to go before the 3DS version's release, such people still insisted the cast was going to be smaller than Brawl's 39. The final pre-DLC roster, not counting Mii Fighters, totaled in at 48.
  • In reference to a third party's "origins", he specifically said "no manga/anime characters". A later claim was that he wouldn't consider characters unless they debuted on a Nintendo system, which is obvious nonsense when looking at the pre-Ultimate third-parties, of which only Mega Man debuted on Nintendo. Related to that claim is the "rule" that a character can't be in Smash unless that character has previously appeared on a Nintendo system in some form. While a counter-example has yet to exist as of Ultimate's DLC, Sakurai never called that a rule either (he has stated to consider it a "courtesy" at most).
    • Conversely, many people believe that James Bond nearly got into Melee, often brought up as an attempt to refute the video-game-origin rule. This is due to an online article based on a Q&A session with Sakurai, where he was asked if James Bond could be in the game, and he said it would not be possible for a number of reasons. As the article was in Japanese, some people attempted a translation that lost a lot of context, leading people to believe Sakurai brought up James Bond unprompted, or even that he had said he wanted Bond in. In actuality, Sakurai would continue to assert that non-video-game characters were "impossible" whenever he was asked for years to come
  • When Sakurai lamented about The Subspace Emissary cutscenes being uploaded onto the internet and said he wasn't going to have cutscenes like that in Smash 4 because of it, many people took it to mean that Sakurai abhorred spoilers and would thus not try to keep any content secret in Smash 4. What Sakurai actually lamented, though, was since the cutscenes were something that could only really be enjoyed on a first viewing, that a player would not need to actually buy and play the game to enjoy them if they could just watch them on YouTube, i.e. the massive amount of development and space that was put into the cutscenes went to waste as people who didn't own and play the game could just watch them on YouTube. Thus it was simply more feasible for Sakurai to put all that development and space into the actual game.
  • Before Mewtwo was announced as the first DLC character, many were insisting that U/3DS would not have any DLC because Sakurai said that he didn't want any DLC. What he really said was that he wants to make the game as complete as possible, and that he wasn't opposed to the idea and would consider it once he felt satisfied with the released product.
  • Using the example of a fighting game character, Sakurai commented once that the nature of a character's home game is not enough to inherently grant them a spot in the roster over anyone else, and more than anything his criteria is they must bring something interesting and unique to the table. The fanbase warped this into "no fighting game characters, ever". Try saying that again now that Little Mac, Ryu, Ken, Terry, Min Min and Kazuya are playable in the series.
  • Near the end of the E3 2018 presentation of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, he stated that because the focus was on bringing back every previous fighter in the series, he hoped that people wouldn't expect too many newcomers this time around. Many news outlets took this to mean that the entire roster had already been revealed at E3, with Inkling, Daisy, and Ridley as the only newcomers. It later turned out that there would be 8 more newcomers for the game; while 11 total for the base game was the smallest number of newcomers for a Smash Bros. up to that point, it was still more than people initially thought there would be after E3.
  • Sakurai has claimed before that he always develops the latest Smash Bros. entry like it's going to be the last one in the series, as well as declaring that he isn't sure if he will be working on the next installment. This tends to get twisted a lot into "Sakurai said this is the last Smash Bros. game".
  • Some of the Smash fanbase (especially disgruntled fans who didn't want Minecraft content in the game) twisted Sakurai's words in the message following the reveal trailer for Steve/Alex about adding them to Ultimate being "a challenge" and that he was "asked" to add them into claims that he was forced to include Steve against his will and never wanted Steve in the first place. However, in the trailer Sakurai makes it clear that he was perfectly happy to add Steve/Alex to the game (being an active Minecraft player himself), and the only challenge was that he was originally unsure that he could create a moveset that was true to the character and the gameplay of Minecraft, but after being encouraged again, he did so anyway.
  • Misinformation was so prevalent during the lead up to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's release that Source Gamings's YouTube channel made a series of videos entitled "Sakurai Didn't Say That" that addressed several of these misconceptions.

• There's plenty of this in the Tekken series, mainly thanks to two fan story guides written during the Tekken 3/4 era. Unfortunately, both writers heavily dipped into the non-canon Tekken OVA, as well as some "creative writing", in order to fill in some of the gaps in the story (most of the official profiles weren't available online at the time). Perhaps the most perduring "fact" that still today is believed canon is Kazuya's Deal with the Devil after he got thrown the ravine by Heihachi, something taken from the OVA and contradicted in Tekken 2 (Devil's bio states Kazuya was not aware of his presence).

• It's been said that the reason Timesplitters 4 was cancelled was because they couldn't figure out what character to put on the box art. This is very untrue. The real reason for what happened to the game was Free Radical Design being sold to Crytek and becoming Crytek UK, who put the game on hiatus to work on the Crysis series instead, then Crytek going down due to financial issues.

• Touhou relies almost entirely on the Direct Line to the Author and Unreliable Narrators for storytelling (the various mutually-contradictory routes in the games are all canon simultaneously and the Universe Compendiums are in-verse documents) and the Shrug of God is rampant, so when ZUN does deem it necessary to deliver something definitive it is given enormous weight, and inevitably this trope tends to occur:
  • Probably the most wide-spread and believed example is ZUN outright forbidding any Anime of the Game from being made; what he actually said was if any anime was made (say, Musou Kakyou: A Summer Day's Dream) that the creators make it obvious that it is a fan-made endeavor and is not at all official.
  • Similarly, it is generally accepted that the reason ZUN won't give permission for an official Touhou anime is because he doesn't want Adaptation Displacement to occur, which would almost certainly happen given that the actual games, despite the popularity of Touhou as a phenomenon, is still an obscure shmup series. ZUN hasn't yet explained this refusal.
  • Many fans (including this wiki) think that ZUN confirmed the names of Daiyousei and Koakuma, two background characters for whom fans invented names and personalities. What he said was that "Daiyousei" and "Koakuma" are the names of specific types of youkai, of which those two are members, and said nothing about the names of the individuals.

• Undertale:
  • Some fans dislike the term "Genocide Route" being used to refer to the "Everybody Dies" Ending, even going as far as to say that the creator Toby Fox himself has asked fans not to use that term. However, Toby Fox has never said such a thing on the matter, and has even used the term "Genocide ending" himself.
  • A wiki once reported that Toby Fox said that he based Papyrus's personality on Octopimp. Toby's response to this on Twitter was "uhhhhhhhh........ no LOL? deconfirmed?"
  • A case of "God Said That, but He Wasn't Serious" - Toby once made a joke/troll post on a friend's forum stating that Undertale began as an EarthBound ROM hack. Despite the post being backed up by screenshots with above-SNES-level resolution and music that was beyond the capabilities of the SNES, fans took it seriously, causing Toby to once again have to deny it on Twitter. Him using actual early assets for Undertale in it likely added to the confusion.^note This is not to be confused with the EarthBound Halloween Hack, which Toby Fox did make and some elements of which were used in Undertale.
  • There are also a lot of times you may hear from various people that Toby Fox said to name the Fallen Child your name, because they're supposed to represent you. This is a case of "God Said That, But That's Not the Full Sentence", however, as Toby's words when asked what the name of the Fallen Child was actually "Name them your own name... If you can't think of anything else lol".
    • Fans also often extend this to claim that the protagonist's gender is meant to up to the player's interpretation (as a way of justifying depicting them as either strictly male or strictly female), with various fake screenshots of Toby "confirming" this. No actual sources for these quotes have ever been found, and it appears Toby has never commented on the issue; all characters in Undertale refer to them with they/them pronouns.

• A large number of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 fans believe Dickson's last name is Soss. This odd name came from a vandal edit to his article on the Xenoblade Fandom Wiki which painted Dickson as a Depraved Homosexual, with "Soss" supposedly being a slang term for "Dirty". While the rest of the vandalized content was quickly removed, the surname stuck around for several years without any source; it wouldn't be until much later that fans combed through the game's art book and realized there was no mention of Dickson's last name anywhere.

• Contrary to what Viz Media and various online "game blogs" claim, no one involved in the production of Yo-kai Watch ever made public claims about the series being a "Pokémon killer"; this was simply the result of overzealous fans highlighting the game's surprise success in Japan.

• Zero Escape:
  • Creator Kotaro Uchikoshi is often stated to have said after the first game that "Junpei would spend the rest of his life searching for Akane, but would never find her", which is different from what happened in later games. This is based on "answers" section on the first game's homepage specifically, question 25. However said answer only mentions the first part, the second was merely a fan's interpretation. Uchikoshi never said whether Junpei will actually find Akane or not after the game's events, so what happened in later games was possibility from the start.
  • There is a fandom-wide insistence that Clover and Light's surname is Field, based on Uchikoshi saying so in a Q&A. However, his phrasing of this statement was "I didn't think about it. How about 'Field'?", which suggests that it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. So in a sense, it's "God Said That, But Might Not Have Been Serious".

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