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Urban Legend of Zelda

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A hidden clue! I think the inscription says, "L is real 2401." Or maybe "Paul is dead."note 

Q: What's all this about the 'ghost' characters who attack enemies in the distance? Is it true that they were programmed in to keep the number of active enemies down to a certain level?
A: We're not convinced that this exists. We certainly didn't program it in. Take your cart to a priest if you are at all worried.

Every popular game has a rumor around it that is capable of turning it into a urban legend, and due to an oversight or hanging plot thread, it just seems plausible. It's not hard to believe them, since the games often have real secrets and glitches that are so bizarre that they sound made-up. But the rumor persists in spite of all the evidence against it.

A common source of these is April Fools' issues of popular gaming magazines. After all, if it's in print, it must be true! Other sources include mistranslated lines, aspects of the game being Dummied Out, and Missing Secrets. The Internet doesn't help either; while it's quick to debunk rumors, it's also very good at generating them.

Many of these rumors feature fake secrets, which can supposedly be unlocked only by pulling off some ridiculously difficult feat (or doing something very time-consuming). This, of course, makes the rumor harder to verify and contributes to its longevity.

These days, this has been becoming more and more a thing of the past, thanks to advancements in cracking physical copies of games to dump their ROMs online and allowing people to look through the game's code becoming easier and quicker with each generation. Even if no one bothers to do that, the mere existence of the internet, and the pervasiveness of fact checking it provides quickly vaporizes most rumors before they take off anyway. Even still, before internet connectivity became common and the mobile internet took off, they could sometimes gain at least some steam before the facts came out. As such, a lot of these old rumors tend to come from the sixth generation, and tend to be increasingly more common the further back one goes.

Sometimes, the game's creators will include a character or a feature in a sequel because of these rumors. See Ascended Meme and Ascended Fanon.

Some games have so many rumors that they can result in the creation of a "FWAK" ("False Wisdom and Knowledge"), a parody/troll walkthrough containing intentionally fake "secrets". The most infamous of these is undoubtedly Eggnog's hidden character FWAK for Final Fantasy VI. And as a side note, that isn't his only FWAK guide either (there was also a Final Fantasy IV version, which is widely agreed to be where a widespread rumor regarding Palom and Porom originated), and just to garner the reader's trust, also contained just enough legit info for completing the games. And helping propagate things was that the guides were often mistaken for ones by a very prolific writer from the same era named Mynock.

Compare Wild Mass Guessing, Viewer Name Confusion, and Fandom-Enraging Misconception. If the rumor is about something a creator allegedly said in an interview or fluff, see God Never Said That. If a rumor is video game related but not gameplay related, see Pop Culture Urban Legends. For more information, check out Pop Fiction, an excellent MythBusters-type show on this very subject, or Did You Know Gaming?, which features gaming urban legends and Easter Eggs.

Please do not confuse this for an Urban Fantasy edition of The Legend of Zelda. Even if it's an urban legend itself.


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    Action-Adventure/Action/Adventure 
  • Older Than the NES: Numerous rumors surrounded the works of Ultimate Play the Game, later known as Rare. Most famously, the cover of Lunar Jetman features a moon buggy towing a trailer. The game features the buggy, but not the trailer. Or does it? Rumours abounded about what the player has to do to unlock access to the trailer. Crash magazine published a screenshot sent in by a reader showing that he had achieved this feat, but the screenshot was a fake — the trailer doesn't exist.
  • Due to a number of odd "clues" in the game, a number of people are searching Shadow of the Colossus for hidden secrets and a "17th colossus" that keeps coming up in discussion despite absolutely no evidence or reason for it. Via emulation, glitches, hacks, and probably caffeine, a few members of the official forums have discovered some interesting Dummied Out sections of the map, but no 17th colossus.
  • Buck Bumble had a cheat actually published as legitimate cryptically called "Dark Stinger", which has you input a long button combination before the opening logos appear.
  • Rock Raiders has an annoying rumor of three cheat codes. Extensive searching and hacks have shown that they do not exist (though you can mod in what they are supposed to do), yet the rumor persists.
  • An interesting example is in The Art of Theft, by Ben Croshaw. As a Self-Imposed Challenge, the player can put on a special outfit that makes them more visible to guards, thus making the game more difficult. There is a rumor that if you complete the bonus mission (all seven of the previous levels in a row) using this outfit, it unlocks a minigame. What you actually get is a message that assumes you heard the rumor already and encourages you to continue telling people that the minigame exists.
  • Beating Shift 3 unlocks Fancy Pants Man as a playable character; reviewers are encouraged by the game's ending message to identify the unlockable character as Mel Gibson instead.
  • Players initially believed that the dormant volcano in the first area of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst can be entered somehow, allowing access to the D'ni civilization. This isn't true in the original game; the volcano isn't fully solid, and the attempting to climb it will dump you out of the level. A fan mod not only made the volcano climbable, but also imported data from Myst V to explore.
  • The Commodore 64 graphic adventure game named Castle of Terror gained a reputation for being Nintendo Hard because it seemed to be impossible to kill Count Dracula at the end of the game. A gaming magazine published an account from a gamer who claimed to have been able to do it, but the gamer himself proved mysteriously uncontactable when attempts were made to verify his claims. Many years later, the designer confessed the game was in fact UnwinnableByDesign and it was impossible to kill Dracula.
  • Castlevania 64 has the Vampire status ailment, where when bitten you lose access to your primary weapon, are unable to replenish health with food, and will get a Non-Standard Game Over if you haven't cured it by the next stroke of midnight. You often hear that a "perk" of this is immortality, that you can not die until it's cured, which is simply not true. The belief rose from a quirk in the game's programming where the death state is coded like a status ailment along with the others and running out of health would set your status to "dead", triggering a Game Over: people would hear the rumor, start up the game in an emulator, use the built-in cheat code that comes with the rom to set their status to "vamp" (as vampires don't appear until much later in the game), and find they were indeed unable to die because the cheat code was overriding the game's attempt to set their status to "dead".
  • More from the Tomb Raider series:
    • There was a rumour going round that you can find the Dagger Of Xian hidden away in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Apparently, one had to find a secret room hidden in the Aquatic Research Area to acquire it. Needless to say, neither the room nor the dagger exists.
    • In Tomb Raider 3, the only way to get Lara's butler Winston off her case (seeing as he follows her everywhere when she's at home, even when she tries to shower) is to lure him into the walk-in refrigerator and lock him in side. This has led to a few rumors that if you do that and leave him in there long enough, he'll be dead (or possibly frozen solid) when you do open it. Won't happen.
    • For years, there were rumors of a cheat code in the early games that would let you play as Lara without any clothes. While the PC version did have a fan made patch that made it possible (which was taken down after a cease and desist order), there weren't any actual codes to achieve that effect. The rumor still had massive pop-cultural influence, enough to receive several references and parodies:
      • As Game Players Magazine put it: "Nude Raider. We know it doesn't exist. Thanks to this, you can spend hours futilely trying to get a woman to take her clothes off. Talk about realism!"
      • Of course, it was only a matter of time before the PC Game Mod community made the dream reality.
      • IGN 64 played a similar April Fool's prank in its early years with IGN64.com claiming the secret for a Vanna White nude code in Wheel of Fortune 64.
      • An ad in an American game magazine around the release of Tomb Raider 3 for the game said something to the effect of "We've improved on everything you asked about... but sorry, still no nude code."
      • Parodied by This Is Otakudom, where they find a working nude code for Space Channel 5, ("Dude, they have screen shots") but later realized that it's actually codes for Mario.
        Mario: It'sa me! Mario!
  • Mega Man Legends was rumored to have a nude code. This was entirely spun out of misunderstanding a scene where Mega Man accidentally walks in on Roll in the shower; the only thing you see is Mega Man's embarrassed expression. People who hadn't seen the scene assumed this means the player can see Roll naked.
  • Mega Man 9 had one started by an actual developer on Capcom's official forums. Re-enforced when the company itself continually backed up the claim. The rumor was basically that an Easter Egg of some sort existed that would happen if you played through over 14,000 screens in Endless Attack. Not only would this take several days, if not weeks (not to mention that due to its damage scaling mechanicsnote , more than half of a run that long would have Mega Man be a One-Hit-Point Wonder), but when people used cheats and poured through the game's code, nothing was found. Many now believe this was just a ruse to get people to play Endless Attack a lot.
  • NiGHTS into Dreams…: The first game had a cut boss character named Selph. Very little is known about this character aside from the mere fact that there was going to be a boss named Selph. One common rumor involves an icon from the game's Japanese website, depicting what looks like a twisted and evil-looking version of NiGHTS' head. Many fans believe that this character is Selph, but nothing has been confirmed or denied. This video by DiGi Valentine explores the history of the Selph rumors, and it showcases some Dummied Out icons from the game that are also speculated to be potential designs for Selph.

    Beat 'em Up/Fighting 
Fighting games are especially susceptible to this sort of thing, because many have large casts to make up their fighting roster, and people like to speculate who might be a Secret Character.
  • An early Electronic Gaming Monthly April Fool's joke insisted that Simon Belmont of the Castlevania games is a secret character in the NES port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. After they got called on it, they "promised" never to do something like that again — while showing a picture of the Battletoads in the first NES Double Dragon (which predated it by years). They couldn't know that later Rare really would make a game called Battletoads and Double Dragon.
  • Street Fighter:
    • Sheng Long, a supposed True Final Boss, is perhaps the most famous "fake" secret character. He's got a long history, which goes from him being Lady Mondegreen to becoming Ascended Fanon:
      • He was first mentioned in Ryu's win quote in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior: "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance." This is a mistranslation; "Sheng Long" is not a character, but rather the Chinese name for Ryu's Dragon Punch (or Shoryuken). The quote should be more like: "You must overcome my Shoryuken to stand a chance against me."
      • Capcom's American division, not knowing what to make of this, used the name "Sheng Long" for Ryu and Ken's master. He was even given this name in the manual for the SNES Street Fighter II, under Ryu and Ken's profiles. Then in Japan, Capcom called the character "Gouken", and all subsequent mentions of the character in the U.S. were changed.
      • In 1992, Electronic Gaming Monthly (of course) published this rumor as true as an April Fools' Day joke. In their version, you have to play as Ryu and get a perfect victory in every fight without continues. Then you have to go ten rounds against M. Bison without either player landing a hit. At that point, Sheng Long will step in and challenge you; if you beat him, you unlock Sheng Long. It's Nintendo Hard, and EGM knew it. (EGM would repeat the joke five years later for Street Fighter III: New Generation, complete with more doctored screenshots and even character artwork.)
      • Not long after, the character Akuma made his first appearance in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. His appearance, unlocking method (Get to M. Bison without using any continues and get three perfect victories) and abilities are very similar to those of Sheng Long, but Capcom would never confirm or deny that he was supposed to be Sheng Long. It was then revealed that Akuma is Gouken's brother.
      • Capcom considered adding him to the arcade version of Street Fighter: The Movie; they even had a mo-cap actor picked out and established some backstory, but he was scrapped. The game's lead designer Alan Noon discussed it here.
      • Finally, for April Fools' Day 2008, the official Japanese development blog for Street Fighter IV teased Sheng Long as a playable character. By this point, most players cynically dismissed it as a joke. But a couple of weeks later, Capcom revealed that Gouken would become a character in the game (playable on the console version) — and in some form or another, he has every move EGM described back in 1992. As for Sheng Long himself, the blog had this to say:
        Sheng-Long is still now, and always will be, truly a character of legend.
    • Street Fighter II had a persistent rumor that the SNES port has a "Boss Code" that lets you play as the four boss characters. People extrapolated this from the ability to play as characters in their Champion Edition colors, which can't be done in the arcade, and the bosses have those colors too. The only way to play as the bosses is to hack the game, as in this South American bootleg version.
    • Ryu and Ken's "Red Hadoken" in Street Fighter II was variously considered a glitch or an Easter Egg; no one could really figure out how to perform it, though. (Akira Nishitani later revealed that it is indeed an Easter egg.) It's possible to do this deliberately in Super Street Fighter II onwards.
    • A common schoolyard rumor was of Mortal Kombat-style fatalities in Street Fighter II; there is no such thing. The most popular was a move that shoots blood at the opponent, which will One-Hit Kill them if they have a different blood type.
    • Street Fighter Alpha 3 had a rumor that it is possible for a fighter to purposely throw the fight in a unique way, particularly Balrog the boxer (Mike Bison in Japan). Through various arcane controller inputs, you can have Balrog bite his opponent (as Mike Tyson had recently done in Real Life) until the fight is called. Street Fighter IV uses one of those inputs (full joystick rotation and all three punch buttons simultaneously) for Balrog's new Ultra Combo, which doesn't involve biting but does involve other things not allowed in boxing (stomping the opponent's foot, headbutting, and elbowing them in the face).
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • The series has an incessant rumor mill regarding the character roster with each new release. This was especially true after Brawl introduced Solid Snake, the series' first non-Nintendo character. This is enough that after Brawl, communities sprang up just for hacking new characters into the game. Some of the rumored characters:
      • Veritable Urban Legend of Zelda factory Electronic Gaming Monthly pulled yet another April Fools' Day joke claiming that Melee features Sonic and Tails as unlockable characters (and gave a very nearly impossible method to unlock them). None of this is true, but it was so hard to pull this off that few gamers found out the hard way before EGM came clean. The rumors carried over to Brawl; Sonic made it, but we're still waiting on Tails.
      • Another Melee hoax had made the rounds suggesting that you can get Toad by shooting every single name during the Mini-Game Credits, an incredibly difficult feat that almost no one has gone on record as having done. Needless to say this isn't true, and the only screenshots offered were (rather obvious) photoshops, but it did gain some traction in certain circles.
      • It was rumored that it is possible to unlock the opponent-only characters in the original Smash (Giant DK, Metal Mario, Master Hand, or the Fighting Polygons). You can use a Gameshark to play as them, but the game will freeze at the end of the match because none of them have an animation for the post-match "applause" screen. The same thing happens in Melee if you use Debug Mode to play as any of its normally unplayable enemy characters (Giga Bowser, the Wire Frames, Master Hand, and Crazy Hand).
      • Mega Man was rumored to be in Brawl alongside fellow third-party characters Snake and Sonic. When he didn't make it, scuttlebutt was that there was some sort of falling-out between Nintendo and Capcom that prevented it. Keiji Inafune claims Nintendo never asked for permission and that if they had, he would have allowed it in a heartbeat. Mega Man (and fellow Capcom character Ryu from Street Fighter) would make it to Smash 4.
      • Bomberman was rumored to be in Brawl; it was so pervasive that The Other Wiki removed a legitimate screenshot (at least in terms of roster) of the select screen because Bomberman wasn't on it. Bomberman did not appear in Brawl or Smash 4 at all, though he would later appear as an Assist Trophy in Ultimate.
      • Soon after Brawl was announced, there was a rumor that the head developer, Masahiro Sakurai, had stated on a radio show that Mr. Game & Watch, the Ice Climbers, and Young Link were going to be removed in favor of "Baby Bowser", Ridley, and "Wind Waker Link". Though this was false, Young Link was replaced by Toon Link in Brawl, and the Ice Climbers did end up being cut as playable characters in Smash 4, while Bowser Jr. was among the cast of newcomers. It's highly unlikely there's any sort of connection, though. note  Ridley is in Ultimate as well, but not only was it not at Mr. Game & Watch's expense, all characters (including Young Link and the Ice Climbers) returned.
      • Speaking of Ridley, he was a long-rumored character even aside from the previous rumor, possibly helped by his appearance in the intro for Melee, but for a long time he did not make it in as a playable character; he was otherwise only a trophy in Melee, and nothing more than a boss in Brawl and Smash 4. Again, he's playable in Ultimate.
      • Rayman was initially purported to be joining Smash 4 as DLC alongside Mewtwo thanks to a painstakingly faked leak, before the leak's creator stepped forward and detailed the process.
      • Before the reveal of the last characters in Ultimate's base roster, an edited version of the group picture sprang up that appeared to depict characters such as Shadow, Isaac, and Skull Kid. Due to the image with the "full" group shot also including art of The Grinch, this has been called the "Grinch Leak" and rumors were about that it was legitimate until the final pre-release Direct happened, with Ken and Incineroar's confirmation debunking the leak.
    • IGN joked that an Expansion Pack for Brawl would be offered as part of a fake service called "Wii Expand". The supposed expansion in question is called Super Smash Bros. Brawl X: Extreme, and it was said to be geared towards an adult audience, with gore and decapitations abound. Here is the footage of the supposed expansion pack in action, as well as an offscreen version.
    • There are persistent rumours that the otherwise useless Goldeen will use Horn Drill under certain conditions.
    • While Celebi appearing in Melee was a rare Cosmetic Reward that netted you a Celebi trophy and the "Celebi Catcher" bonus for 8,000 points, it was widely rumored that on rare occasions, it would do something powerful like deliver a one-hit KO to everyone on screen or drop pokéballs all containing Legendary Pokémon.
    • Brawl was rumored to have Assist Trophies for Rosalina, Duster, and Sothe. Either it was a hoax similar to an even more infamous one that would later pop up in Smash 4 involving Chunky Kong (detailed below), or the people who reported their sightings may have mistaken other Assist Trophies for them (likely mistaking Gardevoir for Rosalina, and either Saki Amamiya or Isaac for Sothe).
    • Smash 4 has a fake screencap going around which shows Palutena saying that Pit in his debut looked like "a one-night stand between Missingno. and a garden gnome." This kind of dialogue wouldn't appear in an E10+-rated game, and it's also in the wrong location. But enough people thought it was real that it got well over 10k notes on Tumblr.
    • In the run-up to Smash 4, it was rumored that Chunky Kong from Donkey Kong 64 would appear as an Assist Trophy, with his ability involving bananas raining on the stage (referencing the "this Kong's one hell of a guy!" scene in the DK Rap intro).
    • After the discovery of the "landfallspecial" animation in Melee (used for characters landing at the end of the "helpless" animation), it was claimed that there are other animations in the code for the advanced technique dubbed wavedashing by the community, such as "superdashtechnique", "superdashattack", etc. This is false; wavedashing is entirely an exploit of the game physics, and there are no animations in the game code for it.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Goro, Shang Tsung, and Reptile were the subject of many, many rumors to make them playable in the first game. None of them work in the original. Goro, though, can be unlocked in the Game Boy version, he's barely controllable through a glitch in the SNES version, and he's playable in practically every other game he appears in.note 
    • The first game also gives us the "ERMAC" character, in which Scorpion would wear a red costume while the words "ERMAC" appear over the lifebar by getting two flawless victories without blocking in the Warrior Shrine stage and using a fatality in the circle at the center of the stage. People thought "Ermac" was a secret character of some sort. It's actually short for "Error Macros", and it's part of the game's stats in the audits menu. Nevertheless, Ermac would make his debut in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. The red Kitana character is more obscure, but she spun off into the rumored character "Skarlet", who would appear for real in DLC in Mortal Kombat 9.
    • The SNES version of Mortal Kombat is infamous for removing the blood, so naturally there were several rumors regarding how to get it back. Most of them involve some nearly impossible sequence of button presses. NMS magazine printed a hilarious and widely believed article suggesting you can do this by, among other arcane steps, taping a penny on top of the cartridge to weigh it down just right. The SNES version's ROM doesn't have the animations for the original fatalities, but you can hack it to Palette Swap the "sweat" back into blood.
    • Another rumor sprang from the console versions of Mortal Kombat (1992): If you fulfill the conditions to fight Reptile in an endurance match and then defeat him, you can fight a green-tinted version of one of the other fighters. It's just a glitch, but numerous magazines hinted that these are secret fighters.
    • Mortal Kombat II gave us the following rumors:
      • That Sub-Zero can turn into a polar bear. It was so pervasive that the developers added "Animality" transformations to the third installment — and yes, Sub-Zero turns into a polar bear.
      • That Shang Tsung can transform into Kano, who was absent from the game for plot reasons. It arose from a counter in the arcade version's test mode reporting the number of "Kano morphs". It also led to Nightwolf's "I HAVE NEVER SEEN A KANO TRANSFORMATION" Friendship in Mortal Kombat 3.
      • That the trees in the Living Forest stage can eat the opponent as part of a secret stage fatality. This one isn't true in any of the versions or remakes of this stage until Mortal Kombat 9.
      • That you can knock people onto the hooks in the Dead Pool stage. You can't- though this is how you do the Stage Fatality for it in Mortal Kombat 11.
      • That there's a green palette swap Liu Kang named "Hornbuckle", a reference to Jade's occasional line "Hornbuckle who?" Fans gave the name to the unnamed warrior fighting the fiery warrior (who later appeared as Blaze in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance) in the background of The Pit 2 (Ed Boon claims that was supposed to be a palette swap of Liu Kang). Jade's comment is, in fact, a reference to one Leanne Hornbuckle, whose name appears in the Super Nintendo version's end credits.
      • That the female characters have "nude-alities". It actually sounded somewhat plausible at the time. Mortal Kombat had already pissed off plenty of parents, why not take it to the next level?
    • Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 had one implanted by the developers themselves! During the attract mode, a purple ninja named Rain (Named after the Prince album Purple Rain) can occasionally be seen fighting Shao Kahn. Additionally, punching in a certain Kombat Kode would state "Rain Can Be Found In The Graveyard". Of course, there is no Rain in the arcade version of the game. Rain eventually showed up for real in the 16 bit versions of the game and in Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
    • This is invoked in Mortal Kombat X during one of Cassie Cage's fatalities, in which she uploads a selfie of her with her defeated opponent, complete with a live feed of comments, reminiscent of Twitter. One of them is from Ed Boon, who asks if anyone has unlocked Fujin — a character who makes a cameo, but is not playable in the game. Fujin would return in a DLC expansion to the next game, however.
    • Another hoax character in the original game was Nimbus Terrafaux, introduced by EGM in a March issue of their magazine, a black kickboxer who had a backflip decapitation fatality in the screen shots.
    • There were also rumors of a Goro relative named Spider with six sets of arms, with the explanations for unlocking often referring to particular button combinations when certain shadows crossed the moon on the Bridge stage.
  • The MK clone Tattoo Assassins actually implemented "nude-alities" in reference to the above MK2 rumors. However, it was Played for Laughs rather than titillation: nude-alities make the opponent's clothes poof away, leaving them humiliated and trying to cover up.
  • In Killer Instinct, one of Orchid's finishing moves is flashing her opponent — the player, of course, can't see anything. Rumors abounded on how to "fix" that; one suggest that you can see her breasts by positioning her in front of a mirror in a particular stage. There's no mirror in that stage.
  • There is a cheatnote  that was in some early online guides for the first Guilty Gear on the PlayStation that unlocks Justice, Testament, and Baiken without having to beat the game all the way through. It turns out that it really just increases the game's difficulty in Normal Mode. In a subversion, however, the cheat code does unlock the three aforementioned characters - but only in the Japanese version. Western releases get the "harder story mode" version of the code.
  • There was a rumor in Japan that if the player completes the Famicom version of Kung-Fu 24 times (the number equivalent to the letter "X", a reference to the Japanese title Spartan X), the player will be forced to fight Sylvia (the hero's girlfriend) as an Optional Boss. It turns out the rumor was a started by a gag in a video game manga titled Famicom Rocky, where the protagonist uncovers this secret after completing the game too many times. This is what inspired the Natraps X series of parody videos.
  • There were persistent rumors that if you beat Dragon Ball Z: Budokai on the hardest difficulty, you will be able to play through the Buu Saga in the Story Mode, especially after people found Great Saiyaman as a playable character. However, no matter how hard you try, there is no such thing coded in the game.
  • Rumor had it that the X Men arcade game has a secret, more satisfying ending that will only be unlocked if you beat the game multiple times in a row on the same playthrough (since normally, a victory loops you back to start to continue your credit). Proving or disproving it required more time and more quarters than most kids could manage. The re-release makes it clear that it's not true.
  • There are many (joking) rumors on how to unlock secret characters for Touhou Project's spinoff fighting game Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, the most prevalent ones allowing you to unlock Flandre Scarlet and Cirno. This was not helped by fans making their sprites for M.U.G.E.N based on the SWR spriting style; many of them emulate the look incredibly well, going so far as to modify SFX from the game to fit the fanmade sprites. The Cirno rumors were officially squashed with her inclusion in its expansion pack Hisoutensoku, though Flandre fans are still left waiting. A slight bone was tossed to Flandre's fans — one of Remilia's alternate color schemes is essentially Flandre. It would take until 2021 with the release of Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ~ Sunken Fossil World that Flandre finally had a stint as a playable character — although not as a fighting game character.
  • The original Tekken was rumored to have a nearly unbeatable Superboss named "Dragon Fighting Jack" or "Dragonclaw", based on a screenshot depicting "Dragon vs. Jack", the former of which was really Law (Dragon being his placeholder name), and a blue robotic character at the bottom of the front cover, which was the alternate costume for the boss Prototype Jack.
  • One of the True Final Bosses of Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium is God/Ultimate Rugal, the result of Rugal killing Akuma and absorbing the Satsui no Hadou. If you beat him, Akuma deems that Rugal isn't worthy of his power before seizing control of his body, becoming more Akuma-like in appearance before leaving. This led to some people believing that you could fight this Akuma/Rugal hybrid, but he only exists for this cutscene. It doesn't help that in an alternate version of the character select screen there's an empty square in the center of the screen that looks like a secret character could go there.
  • It was rumored that the Guest Fighter for Soulcalibur III was planned to be Dante, who ultimately didn't make the cut. As explained here by Stumblebee, Word of God would confirm that this rumor was false, with producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama not only stating there would be no guests prior to the game's release but specifically singling out Dante's exclusion in Electronic Gaming Monthly #195 (September 2005). The interview featured in EGM even asked Yotoriyama about the origin of this rumor, to which he responded "the internet" while laughing.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game:
    • At one point in time, there were many different rumors on actions that a player could take to force Mr Chau to appear on the level select screen. The most popular one being to (re)play the third stage and defeat Todd Ingram. In actuality, Mr Chau has a small chance to appear on the map whenever you're taken back to it after any stage is beaten.note 
    • People still, to this day, over a decade after release, are trying to figure out how to get to the Mario-style Green Pipes scattered throughout the overhead screen.
  • M.U.G.E.N has the infamous Mathrus, a character widely rumored to be a "Dragon-Tier cheapie" (essentially a computer virus in the form of a character) and the most powerful character. It not only crashes M.U.G.E.N., but also renders your OS inoperable and shorts your computer. The good news is that Mathrus' existence is extremely questionable at best and is very likely a creepypasta/hoax, the bad news is that Dragon-Tier cheapies do exist and they can indeed render a computer inoperable, but not to the point of shorting it.

    Collectible Card Games 
  • Supposedly, Konami and Upper Deck Entertainment have created several Yu-Gi-Oh! cards that have never been released to the public, only allowing them to be played by R&D employees at Upper Deck in specialized "Duel the Master" matches at tournaments. These include the Seal of Orichalcos, Power Balance, and alternate versions of the Egyptian God Cards. Since the only "proof" of these cards existing are proxies, there's no way of knowing if this is actually true.
    • The anime gives this a nod very early on, establishing that Pegasus' Toon monsters are one-of-a-kind cards that were never released to the public due to them being "too powerful." During the last parts of the KC Grand Prix arc, it's revealed that Pegasus' company routinely gives away copies of unsanctioned cards as prizes (a habit that the actual card game took up).
    • This has been proven to be true, at least for the Seal of Orichalcos. As for the Egyptian God cards, alternate, tournament-legal "effect" versions have been released for Obelisk the Tormentor, the Winged Dragon of Ra, and Slifer the Sky Dragon. The latter addition has prompted the creation of the long time anime-only The Creator God of Light, Horakhty as an actual card. It even has its own type, "Creator God". The Seal of Orichalcos too has been released legally, though obviously with a very different effect to that of the anime or the Duel the Master version. No word on Power Balance, though.
    • Prior to the official release of Primal Origin, there were sources depicting "Starduston" as a fake "Duston" version of "Stardust Dragon". It also was claimed to have an effect highly reminiscent of "Stardust Dragon": During either player's turn, when a card or effect is activated that would destroy a card(s) on the field: You can Tribute this card; negate the activation, and if you do, destroy it. You can only control 1 face-up "Starduston".
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • In the early days, when cardlists were not available and the first big expansion set (Legends) was coming out, a rumor was started among the then-nascent Internet about the card "Throat Wolf", a creature which supposedly has "firstest strike". It also was rumored to have the ability to attack on your opponent's turn. Usually guides on how to get the super rare card mention other non-existent cards, like the Clockwork Doppelganger.
    • Of course, spoofed in the parody set Unhinged, which actually has a secret card that only exists in foil and is not listed in most spoilers. It's "Super Secret Tech," and its collector number is 141 out of 140.
    • Unstable, the third parody set, made the long-fabled "Last Strike," (a creature that deals combat damage after both First Strike and normal damage), along with Triple Strike (a creature that deals First, Normal, and Last Strike damage).
    • Unstable also kicked out a few Urban Legends of Zelda of its own by breaking the long-held rule that each card must have a unique name. The set features a number of cards with the same name and cards type but different stats, rules text, and/or art. This led to some very interesting discoveries in the time between the official "complete" spoiler of the set (which listed one version of each card) and the product's wide release a few weeks later.

    Driving Game 
  • Mario Kart:
    • In Mario Kart 64, a Thwomp can be found behind bars in Bowser's Castle. Fans affectionately call him "Marty" and started rumors that there is a way to free him. The rumors resurfaced when the stage reappeared in Mario Kart Wii. He's stuck there in both games.
    • Waluigi was rumored to be playable in Mario Kart: Super Circuit.
    • Mario Kart DS was rumored to have an unlockable Rainbow Cup, consisting of four retro Rainbow Roads in a row.
    • Mario Kart: Double Dash!! was rumored to have Retro Cups; this was mostly an April Fools' Day hoax.
    • Mario Kart Wii was rumored to have a third Mii Outfit; this is based solely on there being an extra space in the character roster. There are some Dummied Out icons and a character model related to it (it's a Toad costume), but it doesn't work properly if hacked into the game.
  • In Crash Team Racing, it was rumored that Nitros Oxide is a secret playable character if you meet certain requirements. Every single other boss is unlockable, and another super-secret character, Penta Penguin, can be unlocked through cheats. It was long assumed that since you get N. Tropy for beating all of his easier staff ghosts, you can get Oxide for being all of his extremely difficult ghosts, but doing that just gets you a shortcut to the scrapbook on the main menu. 20 years later, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled would make Oxide legitimately unlockable by beating Adventure Mode, or available off the bat to owners of the game's premium edition. Interestingly, he actually was intended to be playable and unlocked via beating the Purple Gem Cup, and is even mostly playable complete with unique voice clips not heard anywhere else in the game, but had to be Dummied Out since the devs didn't have time to fix the visual issues and memory overflow glitch caused by his unique kart.
    • Another rumor fixated on a supposed cut character by the name of Fasty, whose name could be found by datamining the Japanese version of the game. Adding to the rumor was a picture done by Crash series concept artist Bob Rafei of a blue hippo wearing pilot gear, which he had listed under the Crash Team Racing section of his website. However, the name Fasty was not connected to any cut content, and the hippo Bob Rafei drew was put in the Crash Team Racing section of his website entirely by mistake. His name was actually Trippo, and he was a proposed mascot for an airfare website of the same name. However, like with the Oxide example above, Nitro-Fueled took this rumor and ran with it, creating a brand new character based on it; Hasty the Moose, a moose in pilot gear whose design is basically a Captain Ersatz of the original Trippo drawing, just as a different animal.
  • One of the worlds in Diddy Kong Racing, Future Fun Land, has one track fewer than the rest (because it lacks a T.T. Amulet challenge). However, since the track selection screen is arranged on a grid, there always seems to be an unavailable track that you can never select. Some fans drove themselves bananas for years trying to unlock the "forbidden track."
    • The original Nintendo 64 version had persistent rumors that there was a way to unlock the rest of the Kong Family (DK, Cranky, Funky, Candy, etc) by clearing various challenges such as a "Hidden Taj Race" or the Mirror Mode, but the truth of the matter is that Diddy is the only Kong available in the original version of the game. A lot of this potential stemmed from the unusual way one unlocked Drumstick, and young fans pre-internet spun tales of a location where you could obtain other possible characters. The DS remake would add some of the Kongs and even Wizpig as playable years later.
  • The Gran Turismo series is full of this:
    • Gran Turismo 2 was rumored to have a hidden McLaren F1 car as a reward for collecting 100 cars in black. This myth was spurred by the case of the U.S. release having an image of a McLaren F1 interior. It's not possible to do this because you can only have a maximum of 100 cars period, and the end credits also do not mention McLaren as legally required if the car was in the game. The extent of the car's presence is a tentative text string in the game files, before all the cars were licensed and modeled. The F1 car would make its debut in GT4 as the race model version and the road car in GT5.
    • 100% Completion cannot be achieved in GT2 because so much has been Dummied Out. The most prominent example is the Palm Strip (or the "Plam Strip", based on a description typo), a supposed drag strip. It was discovered that by executing a glitch on Laguna Seca, you can drive out-of-bounds and find a floating piece of land; although the game usually crashes before you can get close enough to make sure, it's often thought to be the original Palm Strip. (It's more likely remnants of the track loading up or the generic course that appears in the arcade modes' loading screens).
      • The name "Palm Strip" itself was later revealed that it was actually the early name for the Apricot Hill Raceway. Evidences pointing to such including an early press kit by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe having a photo an wireframe of Apricot Hill with the name "Plum Strip" on the corner below and the European release having certain license tests taking place in Apricot Hill with their descriptions using the "Palm Strip" to refer to the track they were taking place instead of the name that would become used in the final release and future installments.
    • Developers surprised everyone with the Formula 1 cars in Gran Turismo 3, which quickly sparked rumors of other unmentioned, wacky vehicles that would show up under ridiculous circumstances. The two biggest offenders are motorcycles and a 1,000 MPH Bloodhound SSC styled land speed record car. There are no rocket cars, but there is evidence of basic models of bikes from very early in development, a precursor to the bike-focused spin-off Tourist Trophy
    • Gran Turismo 4 was rumored to have a paint shop that you can unlock with more than 2000 A-spec points. It doesn't exist, but GT5 added the ability to repaint cars and add aftermarket rims from the GT Auto menu.
  • For a while, N64 Magazine ran a joke section featuring reviews of games from an Alternate Universe such as The Duke of Nukem and Bill Oddie Harvest. A number of shops reported customers coming in and asking for Beatles Adventure Racing (a parody of Beetle Adventure Racing starring The Beatles).
  • LEGO Racers has a supposed cheat where if you named a character "TRUCK DRIVER" and beat Rocket Racer with it, you would get some sort of super-secret car. Modding has shown that this was never a consideration during development.
  • In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, the player can earn "dress-up" parts through winning Ghost Battles to change the visual appearance of their car (spoilers, decals, tires, neon lights, etc.). As stated on official pages and in operator manuals, these changes are purely cosmetic. Despite this, there are players who, after 10 years of the dress-up system being in existence, still insist that dress-up parts influence vehicle performance in some way.

    Endless Running Games 
With Endless Running Games, you can always expect some rumors about the games not actually being endless and having an end. Here's some notable examples.
  • Flappy Bird: Many people believed that when you hit pipe 900, the pipes would start moving in almost impossible-to-get-through positions, with the later pipes having piranha plants coming out of them, and if you wanted to get through the thousandth pipe, you had to defeat Mario. Most were tricked because of this video that literally shows someone watching a video of a mod called "Skip to 999". What makes it more obvious is that the person isn't actually tapping the screen.
  • Jetpack Joyride was believed to have an unavoidable wall of zappers at 30 000 meters, that could only be bypassed with S.A.M. vehicle. This was mainly because the leaderboards used to be glitched and showed many top players having 30,285 meters as their best. There was no real proof of such obstacle's existence, but the rumor was widespread enough for sites like Jetpack Joyride Wiki and even This Very Wiki to treat it as a truth for a long time. After many updates it became far easier to reach thrice as much distance and surpass the presumed 30K limit: Power-ups were added, including the shield that could let you take up to five hits and the number of Quick Revives players can use per run was increased from one (two if you were lucky to win one from the Final Spin) to nine.

    First-Person/Third-Person Shooter 
  • Marathon:
    • The original game was rumored to have hidden levels with wall-climbing invincible red Drinniols. It was started by the Marathon Secrets Guide, and everyone was inclined to believe them. They were eventually defictionalized when the game was ported to the Aleph One engine.
    • There were false rumors of a true 3D Marathon game called Dr'At'Er, and one website claimed to have screenshots of it (which were actually Quake screenshots with various enemies, still obviously 2D sprites, edited in). The giveaway is that its title is a backwards slur.
    • In 1998, an alleged Bungie newsletter briefly mentioned Marathon Gold, a collection of the canon trilogy and a few well-known fan scenarios from the time. It was swiftly debunked.
  • Atari's Battlezone and its revolutionary vector graphic system, in 1980, has the distinction of being the first example of this trope. It was rumored that you can drive to the edge of the "zone" and climb the mountains to the peak of the volcano, where there is allegedly a castle. Sadly, such exploration is not possible; it's far beyond the capabilities of the era. But it didn't stop people from looking for it in the game, to the point that arcade owners complained that people were hogging the Battlezone machines to look for it and not actually play the game. Atari responded by adding code in later versions that would make an instant-kill missile hit the player if they fail to kill anything in a reasonable amount of time.
  • GoldenEye:
    • A big source of rumors is an extra line at the end of the cheat menu, which implies that something was Dummied Out. It was meant to be for "Line Mode", a cut cheat that can only be accessed by a button-press sequence, which also implies the existence of an entire cut level that would have unlocked the cheat properly. Many of the other cheats were rumored to have been meant to fill this spot as well.
    • Yet another Electronic Gaming Monthly April Fools' Day prank described the "All Bonds" cheat, claiming that it is possible to unlock all the other actors from the James Bond series. The game does have the data for most of the other actors, but Rare couldn't secure the actors' likenesses in time and had them Dummied Out. Rare actively lied about there being anything like that in the game. ROM hacking has allowed the fandom to add them back in, albeit a tad messily.
    • Rare also lied about a secret level known as the "Citadel". Like "All Bonds", it also exists but was Dummied Out; it's an engine test level. It can be accessed with some serious hacking.
    • An inaccessible island in the very first level fueled a lot of rumors, which range from it being the result of leftover testing artifacts to housing secret items of unimaginable power. It was later revealed that it was meant to be an integral part of the first mission; it was abandoned to make room for local multiplayer and for being uninteresting. What had been developed at that point was simply left in.
    • There is a rumored third secret level, based on Goldfinger and/or A View to a Kill, as the characters Oddjob and Mayday are in the multiplayer character list. Oddjob is in the game simply because Rare mistook him for Scaramanga's assistant Nick-Nack from The Man with the Golden Gun (the real Oddjob was not in any way short), though it's not clear what Mayday is doing in the list.
    • Ourumov's briefcase and key were the subject of some speculation, often held to be part of some method to access the above and/or the island on Dam. They're actually part of an abandoned level idea that would have taken place between Silo and Frigate.
    • Some rumours talked about a secret weapon called the Skorpion or Spyder, believing it to be the weapon shown on the back of the box. In fact, the box image is the beta KF7 Soviet, while "Skorpion" and "Spyder" are both beta names for the Klobb - the former is its real world name, while the latter is what it had been going by until Rare learned there was another real gun by that name. Part of the confusion is that the manual refers to the Klobb as the Spyder, as the second name change came very late during development.
    • The Ur-Example of the Nude Code is the classic Australian magazine N64 Gamer. Then-deputy editor Narayan Pattison superimposed a topless picture of Elle MacPherson into a screenshot of GoldenEye, with the caption "Write in and we may give you the nude code." The magazine received over 2000 responses from people asking for the nude code, and people were still asking for it over six months after the rumour was bluntly dispelled.
  • Halo:
    • Each game has rumors of a secret vehicle, like drivable Scarabs and the "Golden Warthog". The "Yellow Banshee" was rumored to be in the original Halo: Combat Evolved, and it may have influenced the heretic Banshee's design in Halo 2.
    • Halo 3: ODST's not-quite-Metroidvania style gameplay is ripe for this kind of rumormongering. Stories of hidden energy swords are pretty popular. Rumors of living Elites hiding somewhere in the city crop up from time to time as well. And those strange markings that pop up in VISR mode could be anything.
    • A rumor says that if you look carefully through the Library level in Halo: Combat Evolved you'll find the mangled corpse of Marvin Mobuto, said in the novelization Halo: The Flood to have made his way through a decent part of the Flood-infested Library before getting overwhelmed by the monsters.
  • Quake was itself considered an urban legend, as it was first announced in April and people couldn't grasp the concept of a fully-3D First-Person Shooter. During its development, though, it was rumored that another 3D shooter, Hexen, contains a hidden demo of Quake that can be unlocked by performing a very complicated sequence of actions in the first level.
  • Team Fortress 2:
  • Left 4 Dead 2:
    • In The Passing campaign, you can find the body of Bill, a survivor from the first game. It was said that you can use the defibrillator on Bill's body to bring him back to life, but this rumor was extremely short-lived, as it was proven that the body is just a prop and not a dead bot; there is no red outline on the body when you hold out the defibrillator. Valve eventually acknowledged this one by adding a special line for attempting it, stating "Bill doesn't need to be revived".
    • People insist that healing each other instead of oneself makes the AI Director "reward" this teamwork action with more first aid kits in the maps. There hasn't been any hard proof that supports this theory, but enough people believe it that it's stated on the L4D Wiki.
    • It's believed that in The Passing, giving the other group of survivors pills or shots will make them aim better and give the players better items. The bots' aim cannot improve, since it is possible for the team to get wiped, even if you gave the other bots items beforehand. As for the items, they give you certain items based only on how well you're doing.
    • Some believed Church Guy can become a Tank or a Witch instead of the other Specials available. Valve didn't intend it, but as demonstrated here, it isn't hard to make him one.
    • For years, people circulated a rumor that the sequel was made purely because Valve wanted to prove they can release something on time rather than whenever they felt like it. Valve never clarified or bothered to make a statement about it, thus everyone took the rumor at face value. Fifteen years after the game came out, former Valve employee Chet Faliszek stated in an interview that the sequel was made due to the first ''Left 4 Dead'' having so many bugs and technical debt that it was easier to start over fresh and make a sequel rather than trying to update the game over time to fix the many bugs.
  • Carnivores:
    • Several websites state that the original game features two secret dinosaurs, the Brachiosaurus and the Seismosaurus, with the former said to be killed only by a shot in the rear while the latter is hostile and can only be taken down by aiming for the eye much like with the T. rex. The game's data files shows no trace of the two dinosaurs, though it should be noted Brachiosaurus does appear in the second game as an invincible ambient.
    • Many previews for the second game said it would feature a secret, unlockable rocket launcher. Subsequent examination of the game's data files, and later its source code, have shown that there is no trace in the game of a rocket launcher, though one may have been planned early in development.
  • One persistent rumor among the Modern Warfare community is a program called "snfg.exe" and nicknamed "Sniper Frog". It supposesdly runs in the background and doles out "luck", like headshots and better kill-streak crates. There has never been a source for this beyond unnamed "hackers", and no one who believes it can agree on whom the program is supposed to benefit — some say it favors low-level players by encouraging them, others say it favors high-level players to keep them interested (and buying map packs).
  • Another rumor concerning a popular Call of Duty game, World at War. On the zombies map "Der Riese", there is a wall by the furnace that says "Help" (or "Hell", depending on your point of view). People assumed for months, if not years, that there was some way to get past the wall, like some kind of a door. This led to much conjecture on what steps it takes to do so, with the most prevalent being to earn 50,000 to 100,000 points in total, and that the player would be able to buy the wall. While a popular rumor, it is unfortunately untrue. There's nothing on the other side of the wall. With that in mind, "Shi no Numa" had its own rumor mill with Peter's hanging body. Many players would say that if you touch the body or manage to knock it down, it will severely affect the game with such things as one player or all players going down with game over, or one player dying and only being able to bleed out. There hasn't been any proof of such. There are various other rumors concerning the zombies gamemode, with the player being able to destroy the Moon on "Der Riese" if they shoot it with Ray Gun, or that there is a secret easter egg on "Kino der Toten", since knocking can be heard when standing next to the windows on the stage. On "Call of the Dead", of course, considering the easter egg, players assumed the Original Characters are indeed behind the locked door, which is not true. It's only their voices. With "Ascension", there were massive rumors concerning a hidden room only accessible through jumping off the lunar lander at a certain point. "TranZit" had the prominent rumor of having a second bus route, considering when the bus goes through the tunnel to the Diner, there appears to be a closed off lane to the right which is never accessible. "Nuketown" on Zombies had a popular rumor with the players having to do some convoluted easter egg in order to unlock the bunker, and find either a member of the new zombie crew, or a route to TranZit. Not only was it illogical, but noclipping proves there's nothing inside the bunker.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising has an interesting legend that involves donating Hearts, the currency you gain from monsters. The game outright tells you that you get no item rewards for doing so — it just brings the Goddess Palutena (or Viridi) closer to the screen. However, some players nevertheless believe it leads to a higher chance for weapon discounts in the shop. There is an actual reward if you donate enough hearts, but it turns out to be few extra lines of dialogue from these characters.
  • Splatoon: Playable Octolings getting added in a later update for the first game were a common source of rumors, due to a playable model for Octolings existing in the game's code, with dataminers finding that the model even got regular patch updates and worked with every facet of the game except headgear customization. This would never come to be, but ironically, the most popular version of the rumor was that their inclusion would be tied to an Octoling-focused DLC campaign; something that would actually be the case when they were added in the sequel a few years later.
  • CarnEvil: Long after the game's release, there was a fairly popular rumor that the character Umlaut, the skull that appears and recites a rhyme before each level as well as serves as the penultimate boss, was voiced by Frank Welker, however, there was no evidence to support this. The game's credits do list the voice cast, but it does not list the characters that each person voiced, and Welker is not on the list. Jack E. Haeger, who created the concept for the game and was one of the listed actors, later confirmed in a YouTube comment that it was him who voiced Umlaut, finally clearing up the confusion. Considering that they credited all their actors and that Welker is a big name in the world of voice acting, it's very unlikely that they would have left Welker out of the credits if he had actually worked on the game.
  • Doom: That you can get past the room at the end of episode 1 in the original game. (At the end of the episode, you have to enter a portal that teleports you to a pitch black room that's full of demons and has a damaging floor; once you are reduced to under 20 HP, the game cuts to the ending expository crawl.) While you can survive by using God Mode and killing all the demons, there is nowhere to go as the room has no way out (other than no-clipping) so you'll just be stuck in a room full of corpses with nothing to do (other than turn off God Mode and let the floor kill you to end the episode).
  • Borderlands has the Mad Moxxi Underdome Riot DLC which consists of three challenges, each lasting five rounds and each having five waves per round. For each round, a different modifier is chosen for the player and enemies, some more beneficial or detrimental. Because you cannot level up in the Underdome, gain weapon proficiency, and all enemies automatically level to the player, it is seen more as a challenge than anything else. Despite that, upon clearing the three challenges, you unlock new versions of the same challenges, but twenty rounds each. Clearing one gets an achievement, clearing all three gets you nothing new, so you only ever have to beat one. Still, many people tried in the hopes of extra-rare weapon drops or equipment for completion of them all. There were rumors that one could obtain melee weapons to help boost one's character's melee attacks, however nobody could ever tell where they were going to be found or prove they were real at all. No such thing exists in the game's code.
  • Borderlands 3:
    • The door in Ascension Bluff looks Eridian in design but could not be opened by any means prior to April 2021 (though the other side could be reached via glitch). This became a short-lived conversation online as the way to open the door was believed to be some form of ARG being secretly held by Gearbox's dev team. In reality, they hadn't finished the raid boss intended to be used there, and wouldn't for almost two years.
    • The door underneath the command room on Sanctuary III could not be opened until the second season of DLC. There was plenty of speculation as to what was inside of it or methods to get it open, and in the end it was used for the Diamond Key rewards.

    Hack and Slash 
  • Diablo:
    • The original game was rumored to have a "secret cow level" that the player can access by clicking on a certain cow in the town of Tristram. Although this rumor proved false, in Diablo II the developers put in an actual cow level in homage to the rumor; similarly, a secret Cow quest was added to the third-party expansion Hellfire, although it isn't a genuine "cow level". The phrase "There is no cow level" is also a Classic Cheat Code in Starcraft and a loading screen tutorial tip in World of Warcraft. (Although the standing joke is that the cow level there consists of Thunder Bluff and the tauren, 8-foot anthropomorphic cows.)
    • In the Battle.net chat interface in Diablo II, there is a gem that can be clicked on to toggle lit and unlit states. It appears to do nothing else, although it will occasionally give a message, such as "Perfect gem activated." Hundreds of rumors about the gem's actual, secret function have spawned. All Blizzard would say about it is that it is "Working as intended."
      • The official site for Diablo III, specifically the home page, has its own chat gem. A troll on the Battle.net forums started a rumor that if you click on it a certain number of times, it unlocks the playable version of the gameplay demo seen at release. The matter was laid to rest when someone looked in the source code of the site, decompiled the flash that operated the chat gem, and determined that its only purpose is to change colors, changing the gem from "on" to "off".
      • This is also directly referenced in the Warcraft III world editor, where there is a gem that says "gem activated/deactivated". When clicked multiple times, one of the characters will taunt you. It is functional, however: It makes it so that the units you spawn will say their "Ready" quote, and will do their death animation when you delete them.
      • They eventually revealed that all it does is turn off and on. It's not connected to anything.
    • A long-enduring Diablo II legend is Reziarfg, a monster created by Blizzard's Battle.net staff at the Arreat Summit as an April Fools joke, with stats and some official-sounding lore to back it up. Many Hardcore characters have lost their lives trying to find the elusive beast.
  • Legacy of Kain has tons of rumors about ways to unlock Dummied Out powers, particularly in Soul Reaver, where there are only two forms of the eponymous sword in the final product, but there are another two in the game engine (shown in the final dungeon's visions of the future). The series' well-documented design history reveals that it was very common for content planned in one game to be left out due to time constraints, and usually, a future game would feature it somehow. This in turn means most speculation these days is about how the powers would have been included, rather than how to unlock them on the presumption that they're still accessible without hacks.

    Magazines 
  • Game Informer does an annual April Fools' Day prank called Game Infarcer. Its first edition in 2006 featured fake articles on such new game tools as the Wii Balls, world events such as "Game Designers Inciting World War III", interviews with the CEO of Sony (who also happens to be a cyborg), and a review of downloadable content for Madden 2008, where players would have to purchase such elementary things as air for the ball. People who didn't notice the word "PARODY" at the bottom of the page sent angry letters after they realized they were tricked — or in one notable case, went to the local Gamestop to preorder the Wii Balls in either the flesh colored sack or the blue one.

    MMORPGs 
MMORPGs tend to develop a ton of rumors due to their fluid and ever-changing nature.
  • One of the earliest MMO urban legends, there are still people who will insist that eating food will improve your skill gain in Ultima Online.
  • In early beta versions of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, there was a bug where using your "diplomacy" skill on a treasure chest caused it to give better loot. Although this bug was fixed well before the game went live, the rumor that using diplomacy on a chest gives better loot still remains, despite repeated debunkings by the game's developers on the official forums.
  • Final Fantasy XI is a magnet for this:
    • The game has a ton of dead-end caves, background details, and sealed off portions of the world, which were placed to give possible expansion areas. The latter, in particular, draw a lot of rumors. Sealed-off portions (presumably abandoned due to most of them being in the "old world") include the Mithra-only part of Kazham, the ship port in Norg, the Galka-only part of Bastok Mines, and the roped-off stairway in Tenshodo headquarters.
    • The Beastmaster job was rumored to take XP from other party members when in a party, leading to their exclusion from parties. This persistent rumor comes from a description in a Prima strategy guide.
    • Some classic ultimate weapons from other Final Fantasy games were rumored to be in FFXI. One big example is the Ultima Weapon, the Infinity +1 Sword of the series. Others include the infamous Vulcan's and Jupiter's Ring, complete with "screenshots". Many claim that the weapons exist in the game's database but just haven't yet appeared in the game proper.
    • Countless crafters believe - for no other reason than because they heard it from another crafter - that crafting success can be influenced by facing in a certain direction depending on what kind of crystal is being used. Crafters who have a background in statistics, have logged hundreds of crafting attempts, and performed the appropriate analysis have mathematically determined that this theory is complete bullshit; they generally go ignored. But this is a huge source of controversy in FFXI, leading to many arguments (and even a nuclear clock). The developers at Square Enix were asked about it at Vana Fest, but their answer was convoluted, and it seems nobody can even remember what they said. The only real reason to follow the directions is because crafting is so goddamn hard in the first place, people are willing to do nearly anything to sink just a little less time and money into it.
    • Absolute Virtue is That One Boss. Its difficulty, as well as the dev team's habit of changing the fight if someone beats him, has spawned numerous strange theories about how to bring him down.
    • Many players were convinced that certain items (e.g. 4-Leaf Mandragora Bud, Millionaire's Bed) passively had an effect on the "Treasure Hunter" buff (or a supposedly hidden Luck stat) if kept in your inventory. The fact that for years the mechanics of "Treasure Hunter" were kept secret and the fact that many items did have invisible passive effects only added fuel to the fire. Later patches which made the effects of "Treasure Hunter" more explicit largely killed these rumours off.
    • There were often rumours of rare enemies which have near-impossible spawn conditions existing in the game, usually just to screw with people or to hide how to get certain sellable items. Famous examples being a weapon NM which spawns under the invisible status and a Taisai that dropped the newly added "Refresh" spell. Both of them were later added by the devs as a result of the rumours. (Though the Taisai one only spawns if you don't kill any Taisai, most likely as a gag by the devs.)
      • Averted with certain rare enemies such as Voluptuous Vilma and Almighty Apkallu, which were considered by many to only be rumours but have been found to in fact exist and their spawn conditions really are that insane.
  • Final Fantasy XIV spawned many rumors and theories over how to quickly obtain the Atmas, items needed to power up your Infinity +1 Sword. Some believe that you have to complete a FATE during specific times (in the Japanese time zone), while others believe doing the events in a specific order boosts the drop rate. Despite the fact that Word of God stated that the Atma drop rate is pure RNG, many people refuse to listen and cling to the hope that any theory will reduce the time needed to farm.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • The Ashbringer is the game's biggest rumor fountain. The developers left just enough in the game to make people believe they could actually get (or cleanse) the legendary sword. It was supposed to appear in the original game, but was pushed back to The Burning Crusade and then to Wrath of the Lich King. The hints in the game are meaningless, and the backstory given in Blizzard's four-issue comic miniseries doesn't address those hints. There's enough evidence to suggest that it had something to do with the legendary Warcraft fisherman Nat Pagle; rumor is that he hid a secret message regarding Ashbringer's location in his fishing guides.
      • Part of the problem is that the Corrupted Ashbringer, when carried around, did some very strange things (at least before Burning Crusade). It sometimes even talked to you, giving you cryptic messages. It was only added to begin with as an attempt to unify the previous scattered references to the sword; the overwhelming response to this version caused Blizzard to retcon most of its lore and make it more plot-important.
      • Players finally got to wield the Ashbringer as the Retribution Paladin artifact weapon in the Legion expansion. In a bit of Ascended Fanon, there's a questline to unlock a skin for the Ashbringer that makes it looks like the Corrupted Ashbringer that incorporates several of the old Ashbringer-related Urban Legends of Zelda in itself.
    • Secrets quests rumored to only be attainable while in ghost form. While some easily-found quests do require you to be a ghost, and a GM has given a cryptic response suggesting that those are not the only quests of that type, no such hidden quest has yet been found. This is related to a rumor that you can stay in ghost form and revive at any graveyard with a Spirit Healer; this mechanic existed very early in the game's history but was removed shortly after launch. Now you resurrect at the same graveyard at which your ghost spawned.
    • There used to be a place called GM Island, far off the coast of Kalimdor, made for the use of Game Masters. A weird rumor suggested that if you found a way there, you would be crowned an in-game GM. The truth is that if you were to get to GM Island, you'd most likely just be suspended for violating the terms of service.
    • It was said that all kinds of inaccessible areas could be reached and something special awaited there. In particular, it was rumored that you could find a secret merchant if you went all the way out into the ocean in Seal Form as a druid, not far from Duskwood. Several incomplete areas could be accessed by exploits (such as the peak of Hyjal) but nothing was there other than some empty unfinished landscapes. This has died down since Cataclysm as most of the world is open to flying, and few hard-to-find nooks remain.
    • The Sword of a Thousand Truths, initially made up for a South Park episode, was rumored to be an in-game item almost as soon as the episode aired. Due to fan demand, they planned to put it in Burning Crusade, but it was changed to become the Gladiator's Slicer. They did put it in Wrath of the Lich King, and although it's now called "Slayer of the Lifeless", it does reference the episode in several ways (such as the description reading "Foretold by Salzman" and the name being a reference to the Sword of a Thousand Truths defeating a player with "no life").
    • The unmarked grave in Stormwind Cemetery. It has no statue or plaque, but does have a Lordaeron symbol. Who's buried there? Fans have some theories. Some think the remains of Arthas Menethil (as in, the Lich King) are buried there, which would explain the symbol. (When this was asked at BlizzCon 2011, Chris Metzen said he's not sure if that's true or not, but it is an interesting idea.) It was also theorized that it was an empty plot intended for Varian himself when he died, given its proximity to the grave of his wife, but this was dashed following his death in Legion that left no body to bury.
  • Gaia Online:
    • For April Fools' Day 2009, a quest involving an airship was implemented in zOMG! Of course, the airship never went anywhere, instead crashing the game if one tried to fly in it. And being the first of April, it was natural that users would come up with their own pranks. So it was only a matter of time before someone decided to come up with some insane method to get the airship to fly. When someone finally did, people ran with it, with dozens of people contributing "information" about the new area. Though very few, if any, players fell for it, the prank was popular enough to turn the Airshark into a minor meme.
    • The Airshark (which in itself is a parody of the infamous "Landshark" boss) was so popular with the staff that they actually added it into the game as a Random Event.
  • The Matrix Online has a long-running example of this trope in the form of "Hack the Ground Smash". The rumor states that using a fake ability called "Hack the Ground Smash" at a certain location will cause the ground to break away, and you'll fall into "Morpheus' secret hideout" where Neo and/or Morpheus are waiting for you. The fake ability apparently has its roots in a very, very old video of the game during its pre-beta days which shows a player using a Hacker ability that involves smashing an energy-charged fist into the ground. This ability never made it into the live game.
  • MapleStory
    • The introduction of several boss characters was accompanied by rumors on how to get them to appear and/or weaken them. The best example would be several versions of the same "method" to get pushover boss Mano to appear, which involve either killing certain enemies, letting certain enemies spawn, or both at once. In truth, the boss spawns every hour from when it is killed.
    • One popular schoolyard legend about the game in South-east Asia (area run by Nexon) was that to become a GM, all you need to do is to create a clean account for 6 months, after which if you're lucky a GM will send you a PM to fill in a form at a hidden URL. Sketchiness aside, it is said that if you succeed they will send you one heckuva high end workstation PC with three monitors.
    • A malicious example: some players will claim that placing an item into the trade dialogue and rapidly inputting the cheat code "tab, tab, space, enter" will do something great, like duplicating the item or boosting its stats. All this really does is highlight the "confirm trade" button, press it, and then answer "yes" when the game asks you if you're sure you want to accept the current trade. If the other player in the trade didn't put anything up and you don't pay attention to the game window, you've just given them your stuff for free.
  • Kingdom of Loathing:
    • Killing the hermit (a certain shopkeeper), with a multitude of ways (supposedly) abounding to defeat him. At the time the rumors began there was no way to even fight a shopkeeper, let alone kill them. A much, much later item, the Deck of Every Card, makes it possible to fight the Hermit (as a nod to the rumor), but not kill him. This is lampshaded in multiple items these days, and amongst the veteran players, "killing the hermit" has come to refer to a different kind of Fan Wank...
    • Rumors can turn up due to certain players having access to certain NPC "character accounts" and using them in mail and chat rooms to create plot which may not match what the game developers have in mind at all.
  • Tibia: Thanks to the developers tendency to be very quiet about what they include in updates, a lot of these have been generated over the years.
    • The probably most famous are the so called Sword of fury of the Rookgaard starting island. A spike swordnote  found on an inaccessible island with a sign that says Only the worthy may touch the sword of fury. Through a very specific order of events, you can actually make it disappear from the island, but how (if it's even possible) you can get it remains unknown to this day.
    • A related myth is the Labyrinth Of Fury, a blocked of hole found in the Premium only goblin cave also on Rookgaard, with a sign that gives it its name. Whether it has anything to do with the sword is also unknown.
    • The Serpentine Tower "quest". If you go deeper into the magic guild of Ankrahmun you will find three cages containing a fire elemental, a vampire, a behemoth as well as a basement containing a green djinn blocked by energy walls. By trying to turn on a lamp in the tower you can set the fire elemental free, which allows you to free the djinn by pushing a lever in its now empty cage and then.... nothing. So far, no player has ever been able to free the vampire or the behemoth and move further in the "quest". Rumor has it that if one does manage to ever complete it, they will be able to fight an additional pharaoh boss and possible even be able to get the mysterious "soul ruby" required to make the helmet of the ancients upgrade permanent.
    • The Excalibug A legendary sword whose origins harken back to the early days of the game, when a player accidentally found an extremely powerful sword (simply called ''sword'') supposedly hidden by a map editor, presumably for personal use. While he immediately reported the find to the developers. The strange events surrounding the story has made a lot of players wonder in hindsight if it really was an accident, and the "Excalibug" still is somewhere in the game, waiting to be found again. (A rumor that the developers has somewhat encouraged by giving many NPCs unique dialogue if you ask about it.)
    • A myth that has actually been solved is the 999 door. A gate of experience found in deeper Banuta requiring the insane level of 999 to pass. Since it was introduced though, several players have actually hit 999 and revealed that it leads to the so called Schrödingers Island, essentially just a place where players who reached this achievement can hang out.
    • It was also rumored for years that there was a way to open up the Pits of Inferno and fight the Ruthless Seven. The Pits were eventually opened as part of a quest.
  • RuneScape
    • A player swore Bob the Cat had spoken to him about some recipe or something that no one else ever heard him say. Jagex was coy about it and implied it was a hint at a later event in game.
    • There is a rumor about Jagex hiding a secret item in the free version of the game and leaving an incredibly cryptic trail of clues in random junk items. Supposedly, anyone who finds it will get a free lifetime membership.
    • There is another pervasive myth, dating back to 2001, about an underground farm that can be accessed by using a sapphire on a particular tree. Later versions of the myth swap the sapphire for a herring. The farm is generally rumored to contain fantastic new armor; the herring era whispered of a place where the then-rare rune armor can be found scattered on the ground. One early resurgence of the story can be found here. It's been said that this was the inspiration for the city of Zanaris. Using a herring on a tree does have a unique effect... Monty Python references.
    • For a time, the clothing store in Varrock listed a Red Party Hat among its stock. It was always out of stock, which led players to wait in the shop for hours on end hoping that it would restock. It ended up spawning all kinds of rumors about when/if the shop would ever restock. Ultimately, Jagex removed the item from the stock listing.
    • There was (and still is to some degree) a persistent rumor that if you deliberately kept the water level in the boat during the Fishing Trawler minigame high, you would get more fish when you completed it. Jagex employers has denied this multiple times though.
    • No, you do not need two buckets of sand to defeat Yakamaru. This one was so pervasive there were J Mods who believed it.
    • The Mysterious perk's main effect. There has been many theories on what it does, and it still remains unknown. The original developer even intended to change what it does whenever someone finds out.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online has an infamous item called "Erebrandir's Horseshoe". It's granted as an optional quest reward in Volume III of the Epic quest. The horseshoe is a "pocket item" which can be equipped but gives no stats. However, it displays a buff on the player with a horseshoe icon and tooltip text that reads "Some people believe that horseshoes bring good fortune." Rumours as to the horseshoe's function have proliferated over the years, mostly revolving around the ability to affect loot chances or other randomness-based effects. In an interesting twist, the Horseshoe definitely does do something, according to Word of God. Only two of the Horseshoe's functions have been explicitly revealed, with hints that more undiscovered functions still exist. However, most of the loot-based theories thrown out by the community have been explicitly Jossed, so those still qualify for the trope.
  • Club Penguin had an iceberg as a location, and there was a rumor that if enough people drilled on it something would happen. Became true when the game was about to shut down and drilling on it would cause the iceberg to flip over, revealing a dance floor and a message from the game's creators.
  • EverQuest generated a lot of these due to the heavy secrecy that Verant maintained regarding the mechanics of the game behind the scenes. Verant was adamant to ensure that the actual number of XP points gained and the formulas used in combat calculations were completely hidden from players, leading to numerous guesses and false rumors about the system's functionality:
    • It was long believed that the game only checked your dual-wield skill when your mainhand weapon swung. This led to the practice of always keeping the faster weapon in the main hand thinking that it would give the offhand weapon more opportunities to swing. In reality, the dual-wield chance is checked every time the weapon should be swinging, and both hands work independently of one another.
    • Due to the game's tick-based timing system that processes all effects in blocks of six-second intervals (to reduce bandwidth in a time where most people still used dial-up), it was believed for a long time that the Harmony spell cast by druids and rangers increased mana regeneration. This was because casting the spell on a player would force their client to update their current mana level, sometimes ahead of a meditation "tick," giving the illusion that the Harmony spell itself had increased the target's mana.
    • The game's experience-sharing system and classes with XP penalties were the source of a ton of theory-crafting leading to mountains of false assumptions. In reality, no class or race had a penalty imposed on gained XP. Instead, certain classes and races required more XP per level than others. Furthermore, the way that XP was split amongst the party was based on total current XP, not level, so while it was true that certain class/race combinations received a larger chunk of the share, the actual percentages were usually grossly overstated. However, because Verant so vehemently hid the mechanics from the players, this led to many players falsely believing that those classes were imposing an experience penalty on the entire party, which in turn made those classes and races less likely to be invited into groups.
    • Many players for years believed that performing certain actions in Castle Mistmoore, such as killing specific NPCs at specific times of day, using stealth to turn in certain rare quest items to specific hostile NPCs, or even peforming quest actions in completely different zones would cause Mayong Mistmoore, a dark elven vampire that's mired in EQ's lore, to spawn in the throne room of Castle Mistmoore. In reality, Mayong Mistmoore only appeared as part of GM events run by Verant's event staff, and is not an NPC that can normally spawn in-game.
      • He actually was put in game as a killable Big Bad much later (specfically in the Depths Of Darkhollow expansion
    • There's been a long standing rumor/myth that in beta the zone Lake Rathetear had a megalodon/kraken/sea serpent/ some other underwater monster in beta that was removed for whatever reason (the most common ones cited are it was too high level for the zone or it kept getting bugged and getting stuck on terrain features because it was so big.) However it supposedly still spawned occasionally and/or you could do something to make it show up. One rumor was that if you swam all the way to the end of this really long underwater tunnel in the lake you could flip a lever down there to make it show up. Alas, there was no such lever. There is an NPC (Axe Broadsmith) in Qeynos Hills who mentions he's heard of a "giant water beast" in Lake Rathetear, although its unknown if this is an Orphaned Reference, or just something the designers added to trick people. Perhaps as a result of such rumors the Veil of Alaris expansion has a water based zone with both a kraken and a megalodon as rare monsters.
  • Asheron's Call: At the end of the beta they had an event involving tremendous monougas, which were 50 foot tall monougas (these three-eyed ogre like creatures). Due to early game magazine ads depicting them, along with the strategy guide providing stats and talking about them as if they were still in game people though for a long time they still existed. They weren't actually re-added to the game until 2003, 4 years after the game came out.
  • In Animal Jam, the bridge in Coral Canyon and the frozen lake in Mt. Shiveer can be damaged if players jump on them, and become more damaged the more players join in and jump; parts of the bridge will break off, and the ice covering the lake will break into pieces. If players stop jumping in these places, the bridge and lake will then revert to their usual intact state. There have been many claims about things that will supposedly happen if enough people jump in these locations at once, generally involving the players who jumped receiving some sort of reward. Rumors regarding the icy lake sometimes go as far as claiming that jumping on it enough can cause players to fall into the water and be transported to a secret underwater adventure. However, all of these claims are false and jumping in these locations does nothing aside from temporarily altering the area's appearance. Claims that the bridge can break completely and the ice can disappear are similarly false - even if the room is full and everyone jumps, this still does not occur.

    Platform Game 
  • Aladdin (Virgin Games): Readers sent in letters to Game Players magazine in the 1990s, claiming that Sebastian the Crab could be freed from the dungeon by getting the key from a dog by bribing it with a leg of meat, both visible in that dungeon level. This was officially debunked by the programmers, saying that Sebastian, the dog and the meat were all just window dressing.
  • Jet Set Willy was plagued by rumors that it is possible to sail the ship ("The Bow" and "The Yacht") away to an island and continue exploring over there; the persistence of these rumors resulted in the feature's inclusion in Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier.
  • Banjo-Kazooie
    • "Stop 'n' Swop" is an unlockable feature that displays special items you collect. The plan was for these items to be used in the sequel Banjo-Tooie (as hinted at by Mumbo Jumbo in the ending cutscene, even). The problem is that many of them, including a critical Ice Key, were Dummied Out or are in otherwise totally inaccessible areas, so there were a ton of strange rumors about how to get them. A fansite eventually had to release codes that allowed you to collect them; many of these codes are incredibly obtuse and as ridiculous as any rumor. Rare's original plan was for the items to be transferred between cartridges by swapping them out while the game was running (hence the name "Stop 'n' Swop"), but this proved to be beyond the Nintendo 64's capabilitiesnote . Banjo-Tooie had to add in those features into the game itself (through items that resemble Banjo-Kazooie cartridges). Further rumors suggested that there are totally "legit" ways to get these items without using passwords (which suggests the only reason you don't get rewards for these items is because you used passwords to get them).
    • For the Xbox Live re-release, Rare gave Banjo-Tooie its own "Stop 'n' Swop II" feature, which spawned its own rumors. Like the original, they claim that the reward items will be useful in another game, but as far as anyone knows, they're just Bragging Rights Rewards.
  • In 2005, Paul Brown claimed a series of NES-style screenshots, showing a monster made of butter saying "Ja I am made of dur butter und you are worth 2K monies" and "Eat Communism!!!" came from a Bio Force Ape prototype. In 2010, the real prototype was found, disproving that the screenshots were ever in the game.
  • It is alleged that the Amiga 500 version of Dennis the Menace is unfinished and the rest of the game is blocked off by an impossible jump in the sewer level. This is true, in an internal demo that was made prior to development being finished, but not for the released game which does indeed have the final level and final boss.
  • The Mega Man Zero series gave us a number of rumors, including:
    • That you can play as X in Zero 2 and that the X series recurring villain Vile is an optional boss in Zero 4, both of which turned out to be Photoshop hoaxes.
    • A supposed hidden boss called "Ghost Sigma", which was claimed to resurface upon the release of Mega Man ZX. It doesn't help that in Zero 3 you can find a rematch with Hidden Phantom, who dies in the first game. Additionally, Phoenix Magnion in Zero 2 has an attack that summons four images based on Mega Man X antagonists, two of which are shaped like Vile from the first game and Colonel from Mega Man X4, who could be mistaken for Sigma's first phase from X1 due to them both using Laser Blades.
  • The Metroid series:
    • Metroid:
      • The game has a Password Save system that accepts certain interesting combinations. "NARPAS SWORD" (followed by blanks or zeroes) is one of the most famous of them, and it was put into the game intentionally. However, fans took this to mean that there was a "Narpas Sword" of some kind in the game; there isn't. It's really "NAR PASSWORD", with "NAR" either standing for North American Release, or a reference to Tohru Narihito, who created the password system when converting the game from the Famicom Disk System to the Nintendo Entertainment System.note 
      • The game lets you see Samus in a bikini if you finished the game in less than an hour, and since you can play as a suitless Samus wearing the leotard from another ending (either through passwords or New Game Plus), rumors abound that you can not only play as bikini Samus, but also play as a naked Samus if you beat it in an inhumanly possible time. Neither of these are the case.
      • One of the "suitless Samus" passwords that works is "JUSTIN BAILEY", which people thought was a Meaningful Name (but really just coincidentally looks like someone's name); the strangest is the idea that "bailey" is Australian Slang for a swimsuit (which it isn't).
      • One site discussed a myth that you could play as boss Kraid if you beat Metroid fast enough.
      • Many gaming magazines referred to the statue room as a secret shortcut to Tourian, akin to the Warp Zone of Super Mario Bros.. It's far from a secret; in fact, it's the only way to get to Tourian, but this resulted in rumors that there is a longer, "legitimate" way to get there which doesn't exist.
    • The suitless Samus rumors continued with later games like Super Metroid and Metroid Prime; all of them let you see her without the suit if you beat them fast enough, but none of them actually let you play without the suit (or in any state of undress, really). The desire to play suitless in Super Metroid has led to various fan-made hacks that let you do so.
    • Super Metroid is a veritable urban legend factory, at least partly because of the insane things you can do in this game. Two of the most popular myths were about a hidden green Chozo statue and a secret area called "Warfair"; both of these and some others are discussed here.
  • Drawn to Life: After paying 10,000 coins in the Wishing Well, one is given access to the Developer's Room. One character found there asks if you found the secret flower in the Villain's Lair which brings the mayor back to life. He's lying.
  • Due to the predictable structure of Chuckie Egg (a new gameplay twist every eighth level), combined with its extreme difficulty, it's not really surprising that there are rumours about twists that don't actually appear in the game, most notably a series of levels with two Mother Ducks. This was indeed planned, but never implemented.
  • Spyro the Dragon:
    • Spyro the Dragon (1998), the original PlayStation game, came with an instruction booklet that has, in the last few pages, an illustration of what is presumably an older Spyro. There were quite a few rumors about ways to obtain this form of Spyro in the actual game. They're all false, of course. The dragon is one of the first rescuable dragons in the game.
    • Spyro: Year of the Dragon has an unreachable island in the background of the Midnight Mountain home level. No matter what, it is impossible to glide or otherwise get to it, and you will lose lives in the process. Of course, rumors spread about what is on this island, such as another egg or a secret level. Eventually, it was discovered through hacking that the island contains three life butterflies, and that's it. The game artist claimed that it was originally supposed to be where the Super Bonus Round stage was located, but it was moved to a different location, and the original island was never removed. Somebody did manage to recreate the whirlwind that was initially supposed to take the player there.
      • As of the Reignited Trilogy, the island becomes accessible via such a whirlwind after defeating The Sorceress.
  • Up until 2009 with the release of A Crack in Time, an easy way for a troll to bait Ratchet & Clank fans was to say that they found an Insomniac Museum, a place with cut content and behind the scenes info, in a game that didn't have one. At that time, only two games had them, and they usually got the benefit of the doubt, since accessing them was based more on luck (using an otherwise inoperable teleporter late at night in a specific level). Typical instructions were usually to do something challenging like reaching the end of a bridge that gets destroyed in the first level you can never go back to. With A Crack in Time, the museum is unlocked more predictably (beating an extra boss, or a pre-order bonus), and the claims mostly died out.
  • Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc has the 2D Nightmare, a Dummied Out minigame in the Nintendo GameCube version (among a bunch of other unlockable minigames). First, people argued over whether or not it even exists (emulator hacks and cheats were eventually developed that prove it does). Then people argued over how to access it legitimately (still unknown).
  • The Sponge Bob Movie Game had a rumor where you would unlock a weapon for Patrick called the "Sonic Gun" upon collecting 30 treasure chests, and it was capable of killing everything in the game in one hit when it was upgraded, including bosses. There is a weapon called the "Sonic Wave" that Spongebob receives, but no such weapon exists for Patrick, and Spongebob's Sonic Wave isn't capable of instantly killing bosses regardless. Not only that, treasure chests are entirely optional to collect and only provide extras such as concept art and costumes, and nothing happens if you collect them all.
  • Toy Story, naturally, had a rumor that you can play as Buzz via cheat code. No such code was ever discovered, and the only known cheats are level skipping and invincibility.
  • Toy Story 2:
    • Cheat websites will tell of "Woody's Workshop" which can supposedly be accessed if you collect 100 coins on the first level "Andy's House" and then go and see Hamm. Supposedly, if this was done, he would take you to "Woody's Workshop", a secret area which gave you cheat-codes to the game, special power-ups (such as an infinite green laser), and level shortcuts. However, there are only 97 coins on the first level, making it totally impossible. Despite this, you can still find "Woody's Workshop" listed on every possible cheat website that Toy Story 2 is listed on.
    • Another rumour was that if you beat the final level without giving Mr. Potato Head back any of his missing body parts after collecting them, you'll unlock a secret level named "Potato Head Island" wherein you have to fight a giant Mr. Potato Head seeking revenge on Buzz for stealing his body parts. Once again, this level does not exist. The final level can be beat without giving back Mr. Potato Head's parts, but in order to complete the entire game, the parts need to be collected in order to obtain every single Pizza Planet Token.
    • There was another claim on some websites that beating the game would let you unlock a two-player mode, with the second player being Woody, Jessie, Bullseye, and in some claims, even Zurg himself. This, much like "Woody's Workshop", is totally untrue. Beating the game only unlocks an extra movie clip or two.
  • Cuphead is one of a few examples of indie games being said to have anti-piracy measures without actually having any. It is claimed that pirated copies play an alternate version of the music played in the bad ending: a slow, reversed remix of the title screen with the laughs of the Devil and King Dice interspersed within. The track even contains spectogram images of the Devil and includes "666" in its title. In reality, the game has no anti-piracy features of any kind and the song is part of a strange Easter Egg found by inputting the Konami Code on the main menu after choosing to join the Devil, and it only plays on the file select.
  • An often-cited "fact" about Bubsy 3D is that the "Gold X Award" it claimed to have won was either a non-existent award or Quote Mined in order to Polish the Turd. It actually did, in fact, somehow get that along with a 93% overall score from PS Extreme magazine in 1996 and actually scored on par with Tekken and Twisted Metal. Its claimed review quotes were also actually taken fully in context, albeit from the only glowing review for the game from PS Extreme magazine.
  • The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pack was not required for Donkey Kong 64 solely to fix a last-minute Game-Breaking Bug. Mark Stevenson, one of the chief designers of the game, would state in an interview celebrating the game's 20th anniversary that he believes the myth was possibly two actual facts about the development being conflated. The Expansion Pack was necessary, but purely because it was an executive mandate given early in production (they used it to improve the lighting). And there was a game-breaking bug discovered late in development, but they managed to fix it in time.

    Puzzle Game 
  • In Antichamber, some cheat code sites say pressing ESC before capturing the black cube entity will allow you to retain the black gun. This is a cheap trick to get you sent back to the starting chamber when you're about to win. You can turn your gun black this way, but it gives you no special abilities aside from leaving black cubes; when you restart the game, your gun will be red again.
  • Catherine:
    • Due to the nature of the game, rampant rumours around the time of the game's initial release focused on alleged ways of seeing both Catherine and Katherine naked in-game.
    • With the release of Full Body, a new rumour regarding one of the game's new endings ended up causing controversy. The ending in question has Catherine travelling back in time to Vincent's high school days so she could date him in place of Katherine. During this ending a pre-transitioned Erica can be seen, this led to a rumour that the ending retconned Erica's character so that she never transitioned in the new timeline Catherine had created. After people who had played the game pointed out that Erica's dialogue in this ending mentions that she still intends to transition, this rumour died down.
  • Chip's Challenge: One of the most enduring and talked-about rumors regarding the first game was the "Quest for the 6 Million", as many competitive fans tried to reach the 6,000,000 million point mark by speedrunning through all levels (not counting those with unlimited time, as the only way to improve the score in them is by beating them in the first try). Some time after the release of Fan Sequel Chip's Challenge Level Pack 2, it was proven impossible due to the maximum possible score (known as the Melinda Score) being 5,977,740 points. It is possible, but very difficult, to score over 6 million in all four fan sequels (Level Packs 1-4). The official sequel, Chip's Challenge 2, makes it easier for having 200 levels (the first game and the fan sequels all have only 149 each).
  • Maniac Mansion:
    • In the library there's an out-of-order staircase, as well as Chuck the Plant — a completely ordinary potted plant who inexplicably has a name. There is no way to access the second floor of the library — it was never programmed in. However, there were persistant rumors back in the day about a way to make Chuck the Plant grow and then climb him to reach the second floor.
    • A popular rumor for the NES port is that there are multiple versions of the US release, and only the earlier version of the game allows you to microwave the hamster. In reality, only Razor and Sid will do that, and the rest of the characters will remark "HOW SICK!" and refuse to do it — this led to people trying it on their copy, not using the right character, and concluding "they have the censored version" which helped spread the rumor. In reality, all versions of the US release allow this, and it was removed in all versions of the European release. Rest assured, if you live in North America and own this game on NES, you can in fact microwave the hamster. You Monster!
  • Myst:
    • realMyst is rumored to have an as-yet-undiscovered Easter Egg which allows the player to carry a working gun around Myst Island. There is an easter egg that gives the character a gun, but it can't be fired.
  • Originally, Portal 2 was going to include the scene where Caroline is forcibly uploaded into GLaDOS, but it was deemed unnecessary (and doesn't mesh with the final game's story) and cut. However, some of Caroline's dialogue from this scene were still Dummied Out in the game files, consisting of many variations of the sentence "Mr. Johnson, I don't want this". Some people started the rumor that the scene was cut for sounding too much like a rape scene, which many assumed to be true.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master 3's Shirase mode ends at level 1,300, assuming you've met the time requirements to be allowed to continue past levels 500 and 1,000. Allegedly, there exist levels beyond 1,300, but no one has been able to confirm this rumor. Its source is none other than Ichiro Mihara, the producer of the TGM series.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • Homeworld:
    • There was a very brief, quickly-disproved rumour that if the player lingered an absurdly long time on the first mission, they could actually trigger a secret alternate campaign branch and fight the Taiidani Imperial Navy taskforce that shows up to glass Kharak while the Mothership is elsewhere. It didn't really spread beyond a single thread on the Relic Entertainment forums, being the result of a joke that a couple of newbies didn't get, but became a minor running gag in the community afterwards.
    • Parodied by the "Goat-throwing Viking Ship" from the sequel, which was either a Photoshopped hoax or a screenshot of a placeholder model in a development build of the game, but either way sparked a bunch of joking suggestions that there would be a cheat code that made it playable.
    • An honourable mention for the number of players who were convinced that the game was originally developed as a Licensed Game based on Battlestar Galactica (1978), seemingly for no other reason than because the two media share some slightly similar themes. If this was ever a serious consideration it was abandoned very early in development, and the final product owes far more to the Terran Trade Authority franchise, at least in terms of art design.
  • Pikmin (2001):
    • Back during the early days of the franchise when the game was still new and dumping ROMs online and looking at the code was still in the very early stages, there were hundreds upon hundreds of supposed cheats that would net you colors of Pikmin that weren't in the game. The most infamous was a possible "Rainbow" Pikmin, who were either striped with multiple colors, changed color at random, or had red, blue, and yellow on their body in some way. The only thing most of the rumors shared was that they had all the other Pikmin's facial features and possessed all Pikmin powers too. Exactly how to get them, however, varied from source to source, from beating the game in an impossible amount of days which would unlock a New Game Plus you can use them in, to one source that said you had to throw Yellow Pikmin holding bomb rocks into the spring at the Impact Site then immediately end the day as soon as they hit, and the Rainbow Pikmin would be there the very next day. They were all fake, but this hasn't stopped people from wanting actual Rainbow Pikmin in a future game, even if it ends up being a Bragging Rights Reward.
    • There was an old "glitch" rumor that you could get the Beady Long Legs out of its arena in one and taking it to where the Libra is causes it to crash the game. Not only is this impossiblenote  but hacking the game to have it go out of bounds to where the Libra and abyss are simply causes it to de-spawn if it goes too far into it.

    Rhythm Game 
  • Rock Band 2 has a "Game Modifiers" menu (basically Guitar Hero's "Cheats" menu under a different name) which include a modifier called "Awesomeness Detection"; its description says only that it "[l]ets Harmonix know that you are awesome!" It has no apparent effect on gameplay. There are lots of rumors, though, as to what its true purpose is; one suggests that it changes the singer's vocals when playing online, although that one's been proven false. Harmonix enjoyed being cryptic about what it does, suggesting that things will totally happen if you truly are "awesome enough", and that high-level players should definitely be playing with Awesomeness Detection on; they eventually copped to it doing absolutely nothing.
  • Guitar Hero:
    • Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock has two bonus characters available for purchase in the shop. These characters are different depending on your platform (Wii or PS2 give you Elvis Presley wannabe Elroy Budvis and rock 'n roll robot Metalhead, but PS3, Xbox 360, and PC give you Grim Ripper, a recurring member from the previous games, and the God of Rock, who is shown in the opening cutscene). Also, the creepy vocalist can be replaced by Bret Michaels — but again, only on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC versions through a cheat code (the non-HD versions technically load Bret's model when you play his songs, but it's been overwritten with a duplicate of the default male singer, so it's impossible to tell anything's different). Some people fell for a rumor suggesting that you could unlock all missing characters via a cheat.
    • The DS game Guitar Hero: On Tour has only one bonus song, "I Am Not Your Gameboy", which is unlocked by completing the Guitar Duels mode, but many cheat code sites list four additional bonus songs: "Crazy Train", "Dani California", "Master of Puppets", and "Welcome to the Jungle", which could be unlocked by getting 5 stars on specific songs (or all songs) on all difficulties. When people accomplished these conditions, but did not unlock the songs, some sources added the requirement that you had to be playing on the original DS (which needs a special adapter to fit the Guitar Grip into the GBA cartridge slot), and not a DS Lite.
  • In 2011, a rumor spread, claiming that the Wii version of the Hannah Montana: The Movie Licensed Game contained an exploit that would open up the console to homebrew software. As a result, the game quickly sold out, with scalpers reselling it at ridiculously inflated prices, before it came out that the hack was a hoax.

    Shoot 'em Up 
  • Star Control II:
    • There was an extremely persistent myth of a cloaking device for the main flagship. Despite Word of God that such a device is not in the final game, screenshots of it are actually printed on the back cover of the game, and it wasn't until the source was released that it was confirmed to be absent. Likewise for the secret code that makes the Pkunk Fury ship immortal.
    • There's also the legendary Black Spathi Squadron, a splinter faction of the Spathi composed of brave warriors who fly Eluders painted jet black and fight bravely throughout the universe! They're not actually in the game, of course.
    • A new player asking where to find the Androsynth is always a source of humour on the Ur-Quan Masters forum. (You can't find them. Don't ask about the Androsynth. You make me *frumple*.)
  • There were many theories back in the day that there is a way to shoot the dog in Duck Hunt for the NES. One is that you have to get to Stage 99 to do it. Easily the most straightforward example of wish-fulfillment on this page, and a good chunk of Duck Hunt hacks let you do just that. It's entirely possible in the arcade version, but only in the bonus round — if you accidentally shoot the dog, the bonus round immediately ends and the dog walks out in bandages and on crutches to admonish you to "SHOOT THE DUCKS, NOT ME!"
  • Older-than-NES example — Spy Hunter. There was an urban legend about there being a run-and-gun shooting level taking place in a graveyard. Completely bogus...although it may have led to the addition of the third-person shooter levels of the second PS2 game. There were also rumors of a flying level, which actually appears in Super Spy Hunter, although that's a Dolled-Up Installment.
  • Every time a new Touhou Project game is announced, the fans will say that Mima will be in it. Even if it makes no sense. Ditto Shinki...until ZUN trolled all the Shinki fans by giving Byakuren one of Shinki's most distinctive attacks.
  • When Galaga was released, rumors were that you can get a triple ship. That isn't true. You can in Galaga '88, though.
  • Rumors in arcades in the early 80s convinced several teens that NORAD kept track of high scorers of Missile Command, just in case of World War III.
  • Bio-Hazard Battle: Several internet cheat lists told of a "bonus stage" that took place in an asteroid field which players could supposedly access by dying due to the auto scrolling at a certain point of Stage 4. It doesn't exist.

    Simulation Games 
  • Amiga Power claimed that Theme Park players can unlock—with enormous difficulty—a violent Syndicate crossover, creating an urban legend that wouldn't die. The magazine's writers never admitted that "Sinister Theme Park" mode was a hoax—only that they were responsible for its creation, that the screenshots were doctored, and that "literally no one" has ever managed to trigger it. But do keep trying, because Bullfrog precisely implemented their idea in later copies of the game!
  • Elite:
    • One of the all-time classics is the alien Mirage ship from Frontier: Elite II. They wound up chucking it into a secrets guide (complete with made-up specifications) and featured a Mirage II in the sequel First Encounters.
    • It was also rumoured in Frontier that there is a black hole at the centre of the galaxy, with even the game's creator David Braben backing this story up at times. Many players wasted hours looking for it, but disassembling the game files shows it's not true. Elite Dangerous does have a black hole at the centre of the galaxy, specifically this one.
    • A persistent one is the planet Raxxla, mentioned in The Dark Wheel (a novella that came with the first game). According to Word of God, it does exist somewhere in Elite Dangerous, but no one has found it yet.
    • The manual for the first game makes reference to rock hermits who lived on asteroids, enormous ships called Dredgers, Generation Ships, and the hidden planet Raxxla. These were added by the developers just for flavour text, but many players swear they'd seen a Dredger just as they left hyperspace. One of these, hermit asteroids, was added to later versions of the game. As of April 2017, generation ships can now be found in Elite: Dangerous.
  • Creatures is a virtual life game series involving cute aliens, and has a ridiculously large amount of actual easter eggs. When a person asked a very off-topic question in the Creatures help community, they got an extremely sarcastic reply. The "Secret Adventure Mode" quickly became a fandom in-joke, confusing many newcomers to the games into thinking it actually exists. The port of the first game as an expansion to the fourth game (conveniently titled Creatures 1 to Docking Station, or C12DS for short) added an actual Secret Adventure Mode to the game along with a plethora of other easter eggs.
  • Neopets:
    • There's a myth of a place called Jelly World where everything, even the people, is made of jelly. But it's not a myth — Jelly World is a real place, yet not on any official map. Denizens of the site, however, like to aggravate others by insisting it doesn't exist, even when most of them know it does, following in the footsteps of the creators of the site, who originally denied its existence. Of course, there isn't really a Jelly World. However, if you're lucky enough to get the lab ray and zap your pets with it, you can actually turn them into Jelly Neopets. Like Jelly World itself, they are claimed to be non-existent by the creators of Neopets. Some will obsess over the non-existence of these pets, and will try to get them. In fact, one user has gotten sixteen of these pets. Oddly, despite the obvious nonexistence of Jelly World, there's a word filter on the chat boards that turns "Jelly World" into the name of any one of the legitimate worlds.
    • In the original Neoquest game there exists a door that's locked and has no apparent means of opening it. For years people tried various means of unlocking the door or obtaining the key, to no avail. To make it worse, the staff hasn't revealed whether it's actually possible to open the door.
    • The Neopets Team has a somewhat haphazard approach to how they build new features on the site, which can lead to confusion and Wild Mass Guessing. The Discarded Magical Blue Grundo Plushie of Prosperity, for example, was a page with a discarded magical blue Grundo plushie and nothing else. The sticking part is the "prosperity" part, as it seemed to do absolutely nothing. Rumors abounded on how to make it pay off, from the standard blatant lies about achieving impossible conditions resulting in a reward of rare items to more placebo effect-driven claims that it increases the frequency of Random Events. The truth? TNT just hadn't had the chance to activate it yet. Years after it was programmed in, they added the option to talk to the plushie, which can result in various good or bad effects (which is just part of an overhaul of the world it resides in).
    • New players can get this from the veterans, as the Neopets world is rife with old, inactive features and locations left over from previous events.
    • There's also the infamous Bonju avatar (avatars being essentially the Neopets equivalent of "achievements", rewarding you with little icons for your user lookup/forum posts for completing specific tasks around the site), which had players puzzling for three years over how to unlock it, and was the subject of countless wild rumors. TNT finally caved in and revealed the ridiculously obtuse solution in one of their editorials. Mix a Blumaroo Steak, Gourmet Cooking for your Pet and Orange juice at the Mystery Island Cooking Pot - NOT Bonju's cooking pot. Oh, and you have to have the Mad About Orange avatar as your active at the time. Oh, and this only works during the month of August. Whew!
  • During the early days of the mobile game Pou, an urban legend circulated that the player's Pou can have children after reaching a certain high level. It could be that the players misinterpreted Pou's poop as a child.
  • Story of Seasons:
    • In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, there is a shed with a door that can never be opened. On one forum, a lot of rumors spread about how to open the door and what you'll get. In actuality, it's just a piece of leftover code that was blocked off rather than removed.
    • The numerous rumors that sprung up about acquiring the animals that hung around Forget-Me-Not Valley, which all wear neckerchiefs like the one that the player's dog wears. Carter's and Flora's Chihuahua are especially popular. Despite all rumors, the only pets you can own are the initial dog and a cat that Romana later gives you.
    • All those rumors for Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and its female counterpart about how you can get your dog to have puppies. This one's likely because you can do so in Back To Nature, which Mineral Town is a remake of.
    • One that runs throughout the series — in the games where you can marry the Harvest Goddess, your child will possess farm-improving magical powers.
    • That leaving your dog in your greenhouse in Harvest Moon 64, Back To Nature or Mineral Town will keep it from being destroyed by storms. This persists even after people posted video proof that it doesn't work.
    • Harvest Moon: Magical Melody has the "Rival marriage" system that was apparently left out of the international versions. The supposed "marriage pictures" are fanworks.
    • There are often single characters who are well-liked, such as Carter from More Friends of Mineral Town and Flora from A Wonderful Life, who have rumors on how to marry them. They're never courtable.
    • Doctor from Friends of Mineral Town is named "Tim" and reveals this in an event. In reality, he is only ever called "Doctor". His name is Trent according to the DS games. This rumor is likely mixing him up with a dog named "Tim" from Back to Nature.
    • In Back to Nature: For Girl, there's a reoccuring rumor that you can keep playing if you marry Gray. That's not true. Even with him the game ends after marriage.
  • Rune Factory:
    • In Rune Factory Frontier there's a popular rumour that Raguna can marry his depressed neighbor Kross.
    • In Rune Factory 2, there are two: One where there are methods to find the rumored ghost that haunts the clinic at night - never mind that Jake specifically tells you that he started that rumor as a joke. The other is a way to unlock a so-called "third generation", presumably with the child of Aaron/Aria and his/her "betrothed". Mentioning this on an HM forum is a good way to start a chain of mocking replies regarding the ridiculous things that will "unlock" the third generation (i.e. feeding Herman every recipe, even the stuff he hates, or fighting Douglas, Gordon and/or Jake in a duel)
  • Animal Crossing:
    • Brutus of Animal Crossing (2001) is allegedly a black version of one of the dog townspeople with red eyes. He is claimed to move in if you neglect your game for too long, speaks and sends letters in binary, and has a house full of nothing but fish that crashes after entering it. He apparently leaves the town after just one day. Everyone who claims to have seen him has either misplaced their cameras or had him...mysteriously disappear as they were getting ready to snap a photo. The one "screenshot" available on the internet is clearly edited.
    • There were rumors that you could catch a whale in the original Gamecube game. There actually is an extremely rare chance of seeing an enormous fish shadow when riding the boat to the island, but it's only possible to catch it with cheats and glitches... However, if you manage to pull it off, you don't actually get a whale, but an ordinary arapaima with an incorrect text box.
    • Then there were the numerous other rumors of what Resetti does to you if you continue to reset long after he nearly has a stroke trying to hammer in "RESET THE GAME NOT!" into your head. Without going into the more gory or "colorful" outcomes that are blatantly false, one particular (and common) variant to this rumor is that if you reset over 60 times, Resetti will finally get fed up and dig like crazy underground, migrating all the neighbors' homes up a hill from below and causing all the neighbors to be mad at you for a week. Less outrageous (but just as false) is the rumor that his joke about erasing the player's save data stops merely being a joke at some point (this also tends to be claimed to be triggered by a certain amount of resets). The reality is, after a certain number of resets, the game simply loops through the last six conversations.
    • There was another rumor floating around for the GameCube version that if you open your file every day and talk to the same neighbor (again, every day) for a straight year, you'll have the option to marry that neighbor. But alas...
    • Super Tortimer is a fake NES game Tortimer gives you as an April Fools' Day prank in the GameCube title. No matter what fans say, there's no data to play it.
    • When the series was new, gamers didn't know what could and could not be done. There were various rumors on how you could date or even marry villagers, add new buildings (like libraries) to the town, start those clubs that villagers mention, and get your own car similar to Gracie's. These rumors died out by Wild World.
    • The release of New Horizons has caused new rumors to emerge. Claims spread when the game first came out that the island (both the one you live in and the ones you visit on mystery tours) would be procedurally generated and no two islands will be the same. Data miners have proven this false and released topology maps of all the islands encoded into the game as proof. Later, claims spread on social media that if you use the joy command in the airport until Orville the dodo starts blushing, your chances of getting flown to a rare island increases. Data miners and regular players alike have also proven this false, with data miners who reverse-engineered the code remarking that the island would be statistically chosen and then encoded into the ticket at time of redemption.
  • The Sims: The game's wiki has an entire page devoted to the various mysteries surrounding the game.
    • The mystery of Bella Goth is one of the big ones. In the interval between the first and second games, many fans believe that she was abducted by aliens and dumped in Strangetown, where an NPC townie with her name but no memories of her past life can be found. This became an Ascended Meme in the PSP version of The Sims 2, where it is said that she's hiding from aliens.
    • The Sims 2 has many of these, including several alleged methods of getting twins and another cheat that supposedly will get Bella Goth back.
    • A small rumor claims that the urn of Vita Alto, a premade sim in The Sims 3, can be found in a basement in Pleasantview in Sims 2, and she can therefore be revived. Of course, this was proven untrue both by the fact that none of the houses in Pleasantview even have basements, and because she cannot be found in Sim PE, which a deceased character would be able to be.
    • Lots of Sims are suspected of being murderers.
  • An old rumor was that SimCity 2000 contained a secret "Lost Arcology", with several convincing-looking screenshots floating around (the inclusion of one such screenshot in a licensed strategy guide implied that it may have been present in early versions of the game). Accessing it was typically said to be via ridiculous, impossible methods (like having your city reach a population of 100 trillion, when the limitations of the game put the maximum theoretical population somewhere in the double digit millions).
  • Nintendogs has had its fair share of these over the years:
    • The most common one is that your dogs can breed. This is despite the fact they're puppies who can't be more than 3-to-5 months old aren't old enough to breed. Numerous videos exist "proving" this can occur.
    • To go with the above, your puppy never grows. Many fans cite their dog aging into adulthood but that's not true.
    • Despite rumor, your dog or cat cannot die or permanently run away. The manuals specifically mention that your puppy will not die.
  • In Monster Rancher 2, anything concerning ??? monsters, especially the Enemy monsters. To put it simply, the enemy monsters are a Boss monster that is unable to be unlocked for yourself, with the exception of Japan-only White Mocchi. Didn't stop thousands of rumors about them, though.
  • There have been rumors of dead animals in Zoo Tycoon 2 turning into ghosts as an Easter egg. There are glitches that cause animals to turn transparent. However, people who believe the rumor claim that the glitch ghosts are not the same as the "real ghosts". Blue Fang has stated that any "ghosts" in the game are just glitches, although the rumor still continues.
  • New players to the X-Universe games are often enjoined to go look for the UFO base, a station that's supposedly the source of the flying saucers you occasionally see flying around and sells every item and ship in the game dirt cheap. This started as an Urban Legend of Zelda, but at this point it's basically a Running Gag in the fanbase.
  • Talking Angela of the Talking Tom And Friends franchise became subject of a rather alarming urban legend: the chatterbox app was harnessed by pedophiles and used by them to collect personal information from children, helped by the fact the AI was highly realistic and could ask some slightly iffy questions. Some even claimed to see the camera of a strange man in one of Angela's pupils. Fortunately, it was all a hoax and has been debunked many times, but it still haunts the game to this day, to the point the chatterbox feature was nixed.
  • Tomodachi Life infamously lacks a Gay Option, which can be a bit offputting to gay players, since the game has a strong focus on romantic relationships and all but forces you to make your first Mii a Self-Insert. Shortly after its US release, a rumor cropped up asserting that the Japanese version has a bug to allow same-gender marriages, and that it had been patched out despite player requests to leave it in. No such bug actually exists, though, and any screenshots of an apparent same-gender couple are due to Dude Looks Like a Lady or Lady Looks Like a Dude. This can be exploited, of course, by deliberately giving one Mii the wrong gender so they can marry someone of the "same" gender, but that's possible in all versions and in no way a bug, since there's no imaginable way to detect whether a player is doing this.
  • Alcohol in Dwarf Fortress does not explode upon contact with a source of fire (e.g. a burning, oblivious dwarf going for a pint), but it's a common misconception in both the fandom and on This Very Wiki. Alcohol does, however, boil, leading to a visible cloud of alcohol vapor erupting from the barrel (easily mistaken for an explosion in the ASCII graphics of the game), and the loss of the fortress' vital alcohol stocks.
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon had a number of cheat codes entered by renaming your guests, such as Chris Sawyer (the developer of the game) which would cause the guest to take pictures of your park, referencing his research of real life theme parks. Among online lists of these cheat codes, some fakes were commonly circulated, most notably one involving naming your first two guests E=MC2 and E=MC3. They would supposedly start brainstorming and speed up your park's research of new items. No such cheat actually exists. More deviously, sometimes it was claimed you needed to close the park and wait an in-game year for them to come back before it would take effect, so any player attempting it would find they've only wasted their time.
    • Another case involving Roller Coaster Tycoon happened when a joke posted on Twitter by YouTuber Karl Smallwood in 2012 got out of hand. Said post detailed a way to use a giant coaster to send problem guests flying through the air into a "rival park next door" in order to artificially boost your park's rating. No such feature has ever been implemented in any installment of the series to date.
  • Zoo Tycoon is very similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon, in that it had a number of legitimate cheats entered by renaming your guests or exhibits, plus other more contrived secrets such as putting a lion, tiger, and bear in the same exhibit to unlock the yellow brick road path. This naturally made it very common for fake cheat codes to pop up alongside real ones, with varying levels of believability.

    Sports Game 
  • In the arcade versions of Punch-Out!!, rumors abounded that, should you build up a string of repeated victories over the final champ, you'll be challenged by audience member Donkey Kong. If defeated, he will be knocked back into the audience. Maybe that has something to do with why he's in the Wii game.
  • NBA Jam has myriad rumors about additional secret characters with souped-up abilities. The most popular of these are Michael Jordan (who can dunk from the three-point line), Superman (who can dunk from halfcourt), Shaquille O'Neal (who can't be knocked down), and select characters from Mortal Kombat (which were planned for the console release but dropped). The next-gen remake restarted the cycle.
  • WWF Smackdown 2 has Ken Shamrock and Big Show's names as part of screenshots on the back of the case. They were dummied outnote , but still (very rarely) can appear randomly as 'Unknown' in a Royal Rumble or Slobberknocker match. Rumors persisted that you can unlock them, but it isn't possible without a cheating device, and even then they lack entrances (you have to turn entrances off to prevent the game from crashing when playing as them). What's more, most of their parts and moves can be unlocked to create them except for their heads.
  • A nude code for Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball was the subject of one of Electronic Gaming Monthly's infamous April Fool's Day jokes. It consisted of playing the 2-week vacation in 13 minutes, which basically amounted to Button Mashing to skip everything as fast as possible. Suffice to say, the few people who actually managed this can confirm it doesn't work.

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • Metal Gear:
    • Hard-working perverts have confirmed neither Johnny Sasaki in the first game or Raiden in the second game have any junk in their texture sets for any hypothetical action to uncover.
    • Rumors of secret weapons and characters for multiple completions of Metal Gear Solid were widespread. Claims that completing the game 50 times with Otacon and 50 with Meryl will garner you Raven's Vulcan Cannon were mentioned in magazines such as Powerstation.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
      • A great many rumors spread concerning the possibility of replacing Raiden with Solid Snake during the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2. This one became partially true with the release of Substance, where you can play as Snake on the Big Shell in a series of non-canonical scenarios (or go skateboarding on it). There's still no way to control Snake during the actual Big Shell Incident, however.
      • Rumors of a FAMAS being available on the Tanker chapter were based on early trailers — the weapon itself doesn't show up in the final game. This was further fueled by the flashback footage showing Snake using the FAMAS against the guards on the Tanker.
    • The Nintendo 3DS version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is often said to disable the system's 3D effect in first person view after Naked Snake loses one of his eyes. This is not true — as demonstrated in this Twitter video, the game always turns off the 3D when entering first person view, even before that point.
    • The release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain spurred a large number of rumors and alleged missing content, due to the Troubled Production that ensued between Konami and Hideo Kojima. Some of the biggest include:
      • That there was something planned with all the unused level space outside Camp Omega in Ground Zeroes. Various videos showcase all of the buildings and terrain outside Omega itself via clipping through the gates, including detailed textures and far more space than what is normally visible inside the camp. While this may have been intended to be part of an Old Save Bonus that would have transferred to Phantom Pain, nothing appears in the final version and the only remnant of Camp Omega is in a Metal Gear Online map, now cloaked in fog and called "Black Site".
      • That the "Classified Intel Acquisition" tape found in a Side-Op in Ground Zeroes is actually a secret audio recording that contains untranslated data from the MSX game system. There was rampant speculation as to its true purpose, including claims that it might be a secret message from Kojima himself or used to unlock additional content in Phantom Pain (and there is an additional MSX-related tape that could be found in that game). It was eventually discovered that the MSX data is an incomplete ROM for The Portopia Serial Murder Case (which inspired Kojima when he was younger), and that there is no hidden secret to be found.
      • That there is an alleged missing chapter of the game, referred to as "Chapter 3", which was removed prior to the release of the game and was/is intended to be released as a content patch. Fans often refer to this missing content due to the unfinished nature of some plotlines (notably, Eli and the child soldiers steal Sahelanthropus from Mother Base and fly away to parts unknown). Evidence pointing to this includes a supposedly-unused entire ending detailing Mother Base celebrating global disarmament (in actuality, it's a difficult-to-unlock ending that requires the online FOB mode), the existence of an unused and incomplete mission called "Kingdom of the Flies" (which appears in a pre-viz/animatic form on the Collector's Edition extras disc) and supposed hints in-game that there is more content to be discovered. This even got the attention of producer Ken-ichiro Imaizumi, who stoked the fires by claiming that he "couldn't tell" the fanbase what needs to be unlocked. It even inspired an entire sub-Reddit forum dedicated to datamining its secrets. Although there are aspects of a "Chapter 3" still on-disc (namely, text files referring to a number of scrapped missions that are all Hard Mode Filler of missions from earlier in the game) and a "Chapter 3" title card, it appears that nothing new was intended and most people have given up on waiting for the alleged content patch.
      • There were also rumors that an alleged content patch would be unlocked on September 11, 2015. This is in reference to an image of the World Trade Center towers that appears at the end of the unused "Kingdom of the Flies" mission with Liquid Snake's famous line ("It's not over yet!"), as well as a site called Ingsoc.org that referred to an unrevealed game called "Black Hound". While the "Black Hound" game is a real title (though not developed by Kojima or Konami - it's developed by an individual coasting on the uncertainty and confusion around Phantom Pain), no such content patch ever arrived.
      • One rumor that was later retroactively added to the game was how to get Quiet back after she seemingly dies in "A Quiet Exit". Everything from specific sets of missions that had to be completed, to arbitrary emblems being equipped in a specific order, to certain in-game outfits being unlocked, was all on the table, and players resorted to outlandish troll methods of seemingly bringing her back. While fanmods were later created to artificially re-add the character back into the game after completing the mission, nothing was answered until Konami, in one of the later patches, gave players a legitimate way to bring the character back, via a method that is just as outlandish and arbitrary — replay the first "Cloaked in Silence" seven times, at which point Quiet and her photos reappear in Venom's chopper like nothing happened.
      • Speculation has abounded over environmental appearances of characters like Ocelot and Code Talker at Mother Base in free-roam — who are located in inaccessible areas and can't be spoken with. While this may have been part of an earlier version of the game (pre-release videos had developers comment that Ocelot and/or Miller may have walked beside the player and given them mission updates), nothing has ever been confirmed. The Infinite Heaven mod re-adds accessibility for these optional environmental encounters to Mother Base.
  • Thief: The Dark Project:
    • There's an underground graveyard level called the Bonehoard. You have a rough map of this place, which insinuates the existence of an area called "The Alarus Extension", which players tried for years to find. Not only is the extension sealed off, but it doesn't even exist in the level! Additionally, Thief players love to spread the falsehood to newbies that within this non-existent area exists a Bow Upgrade, along with complicated instructions on how to get into the extension. It often takes the gullible neophytes hours, if not days, to realize they've been duped. What doesn't help is that the Bonehoard level is one of the most frightening in the game, which puts players on edge right from the start. So you'd assume that, if you couldn't find it, you just weren't looking hard enough, and were being distracted by all the eerie noises and creepy rooms
    • Many of the numerous fanmissions for the series like to make reference to one or the other, as well, either because the author thought it was funny or because s/he was deliberately messing with people's heads.

    Survival Horror 
  • Resident Evil:
    • In yet another case of Electronic Gaming Monthly's seemingly endless April Fools jokes, the April 1998 issue of EGM2 contained a method claiming to unlock Street Fighter boss Akuma in Resident Evil 2 as a secret character by finishing the game 12 times with an A rank using only the knife and the pistol, and entering the username as "AKUMA" on the computer terminal in William Birkin's lab. Images depicted a full 3D Akuma (probably ripped from the Street Fighter EX games) throwing Hadokens at Zombies.
    • Around March or April 1999, Play magazine were very excited over the discovery of a hidden gate in Resident Evil 2, opposite the police station. Speculation was that after going up to it, you can find some way to go through it, find Rebecca Chambers fighting zombies, then play as her. Rebecca is likely a result of using a cheat cartridge or PC skin. You can find the gate, but there is no way to go through it.
  • Rumors leading up to the release of Resident Evil 3 (Remake) claimed that Nemesis could chase you into safe rooms. The developers finally revealed that no, he cannot chase you into the safe rooms. On the other hand, he will wait just outside for you to leave.
  • Silent Hill:
    • Many have claimed that the first Silent Hill game has an "Ambulance Ending" in which Harry rampages through the town in an ambulance This rumor often revolves around the bottle of distilled water in the alternate school. Supposedly, you can somehow use it build a bomb of some kind, which will allow you to blow open the traffic gate in front of the Alchemilla hospital. This is probably due to confusion with a budget Japanese video game called Zombies vs. Ambulances.
    • A common piece of joke fanart is the so-called "lost" UFO ending for Silent Hill 4 (which doesn't have one).
    • In the first Silent Hill you can allegedly "commit suicide" by nonstop running — running until Harry dies from a heart attack. Which is odd, considering James is the heavy wheezer.
    • Long ago, the Red Herring items in Midwich Elementary such as distilled water and glucose were also the source of rumors that Cybil Bennett was originally supposed to be a playable character in an alternate scenario, and that the items were for her to use.
    • There's an engine in the Shell station. Rumors say it can be installed in one of the cars, despite how the setting offers plenty to contradict this; too many paths are collapsed/caved in to travel freely by car, and protagonist Harry is a writer by trade, who is highly unlikely to know how to install an engine by himself.
    • The boat cabin wheel is also a subject of discussion; it doesn't do anything in-game, but Harry has dialog for it. Current opinion holds that it was part of a cut ending involving boat travel a la Silent Hill 2.
    • Now there are claims that you can save Lisa and get an "Excellent" ending.note 
    • A consistently-stated rumor about Silent Hill 2 is that if you turn off your flashlight and equip the Great Knife, enemies flee because they hear the sound of the scraping knife and believe you to be Pyramid Head. In reality, enemies are less aggressive when you turn the light off and move slowly simply because they don't know you're there and don't react to sound, and the Great Knife forces you to move much more slowly than normal, so simple Confirmation Bias makes it seem like they're avoiding you.
    • Rumor persists of Silent Hill 3's mysterious "secret" level inside the hospital (which is impossible to get to because even with hacking, there is just a big empty building with no textures) on the PC version. There are mods out there that can "make" the hospital, but there is no official way.
    • At one time it was a pretty common rumour that completing extreme mode 10 would unlock Alessa's dress as an alternate costume. What you actually unlock is the God Of Thunder outfit.
    • Another rumor comes from Silent Hill: Origins (a.k.a. ZERO), where you can use the otherworld mirror trick to bypass the apartment level and head straight into the hotel. There is no normal way to do this even using the described trick because the apartment is necessary to trigger the events in the hotel.
    • There existed rumors of a monster who stood on two legs and yelled much like a person when struck. You'd find them littering the streets, and they weren't terribly aggressive. Supposedly they would be found around Silent Hill, and could be encountered after beating Alchemilla, but before entering the Sanitarium, and were found frequently in houses. The truth is that these monsters existed in the beta and never made it into the full game.
    • Shortly after its release, rumors existed of being able to play as The Bogeyman in Silent Hill: Downpour after completing the game multiple times. Supposedly one had to use every pre-order code in the game on the lockers at least once, and had to do so on a single file, meaning one would have to play through the game several times and look up all the codes. Of course, this is entirely false, as the codes were for pre-orders of the game. The code you got differed based on where you bought it, so people were never supposed to have these codes unless they pre-ordered the game, and were certainly never supposed to have all of them.
    • Another one for Downpour focused on unlocking the outfits of Harry, James, Vincent, Henry, Travis, and Alex. You would have to finish every sidequest in the game in a single playthrough while also not dying at any point. While this is very doable, it doesn't give any rewards mentioned.
  • In Clock Tower: The First Fear, the game features multiple endings, many of which are determined by whether or not each of Jennifer's friends are killed off during the game, bar a few exceptions, some varying on what Jennifer does in the last few screens, while others are determined by acts unrelated to the girls. Out of those endings, many players have speculated on what would happen if Lotte survives, Anne and Laura survive, or all three girls live alongside Jennifer. Due to a mass number of glitches, it actually is possible to achieve these (or in the former's case, technically count this by chalking it up to "if I don't see it, it didn't happen"), but unlike the rumors which imply that all the girls can potentially be saved to earn the best ending possible, the designers had partially anticipated this enough to automatically lead to ending F which involves Jennifer being killed in the elevator; it's triggered if she had, at minimum, not witnessed either of Lotte's deaths. Note that it is also legally impossible without exploiting unpredictable glitches to have both Anne and Laura survive.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's:
    • The Five Nights at Freddy's franchise is so saturated and inundated with false rumors that legitimate events ingame have been confused for hoaxes in the past. Most infamous of these are Shadow Freddy and Shadow Bonnie, rarely appearing animatronics who were introduced in the second game and originally received as hoax photoshops of recolored characters.
    • Beating the first six nights in the original Five Nights at Freddy's unlocks a customizable seventh night that allows the player to set the difficulty of the Animatronics from "1" to "20". Naturally, this kickstarted a rumor that entering the numbers "1-9-8-7" will trigger either a cutscene, or will unlock a supposed "8th night". Neither are true, and putting in the "1987 code" causes Golden Freddy to jumpscare the player and crash the game. It turns out developer Scott Cawthon was well-aware that people would attempt this and added in the "1987 code" as a joke on the players.
    • Another rumor that persisted in the early days of the game's release was that of "Sparky the Dog". The rumor was that Sparky is a hidden 6th Animatronic that either appears randomly, or if the player performs some form of various convoluted step-by-step instructions. Sparky is then said to appear in the "parts and service" room before vanishing. It turns out that Sparky doesn't exist in the game and is merely a fancharacter someone photoshopped into a screenshot of the game.
    • The belief that, when you ran out of power, you could keep perfectly still to delay Freddy's Jump Scare and hopefully buy enough time for the clock to roll over to 6AM has consistently persisted, and is even cited as fact on numerous pages of this very site, despite having been proven to be false by this data miner who analyzed the code of the game's AI. The belief was started by Phone Guy's suggestion to "play dead" if you ran out of power and simple Confirmation Bias from merely getting lucky, when in fact how long he takes to jump scare you is entirely dictated by random and nothing in the game checks to see if you're moving the mouse. Incidentally, Phone Guy's advice does have some merit, but not in the case of a power outage: he simply suggested playing dead "if you get caught", but did not mention doing this specifically after running out of power, and "playing dead" by not using the monitor while Bonnie and Chica are in the office means they can't attack you and Freddy can't get in. (Foxy can still get you if you don't/can't close the door on him, but sometimes you just need to buy a few more seconds.)
    • Data-mining revealed that some popular interpretations of Foxy's behavior are false. A misunderstanding of one of Phone Guy's calls (he speculates that Foxy is deterred by camera use because he doesn't like being watched) led players to believe that Foxy will start moving and eventually charge if you don't check Pirate Cove constantly. However, Foxy's movement is stopped by pulling up the camera anywhere, and Pirate Cove exists so his progress can be checked. Additionally, it's believed that Foxy will get angry and attack if you check Pirate Cove too often on later nights or at high levels in custom mode, so keeping the camera in other areas prevents him from moving. In reality, Foxy doesn't move because you're constantly checking the camera on later nights to monitor everyone else, not because you're ignoring him.
    • Freddy's erratic behavior led to a short-lived belief that he can sneak into the office even if both doors are closed, the supposed method being a hole behind one of the room's posters. This is just an unlucky coincidence: if Freddy attacks while the doors are shut, it's because he already snuck into the office but delayed long enough for the player to not notice, as he doesn't attack at a set time after entering unlike the other animatronics.
    • The first game has an anti-piracy rumor, stating that trying to exit the game while playing a pirated copy will trigger Freddy's Jump Scare. The claim doesn't make much sense (the first game was a Sleeper Hit from a then-unknown creator and so implementing Copy Protection would be excessive, and copy protection that exists to scare a player instead of preventing them from playing would be lousy at its job), and dataminers confirmed that Freddy's jumpscare scene isn't loaded in on the main menu, making the scenario impossible in a normal copy.
    • A rumor that that began spreading shortly after the release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2 centered around supposedly encountering the Purple Guy. There are supposed screenshots and even video of the event showing players being attacked by the murderer. However, this also turned out to be a hoax. The screenshots were photoshopped images of Toy Chica combined with Shadow Freddy, and the videos were created by people who hacked into the game to create custom renders.
    • While the unlock conditions for most endings in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator are fairly self-explanatory, many fans were stumped on what you had to do to get blacklisted by Fazbear Entertainment. This led several online guides to speculate that you needed to rack up at least three lawsuits a day without going bankrupt, with some adding further requirements such as never settling any of those lawsuits or scrapping at least one of the salvaged animatronics. In reality, none of these things are taken into account; the only requirement for the 'Blacklisted' ending is to have a risk rating of 50 or more on the last day.
  • In Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning, the game plays out like a normal (and shoddy) educational game until you begin getting "glitch" questions consisting entirely of scrambled gibberish that the player is forced to get wrong (and thus invoke the wrath of their easily angered teacher Baldi). When the game became unexpectedly popular, naturally rumors began flying around that there actually is one correct answer to Baldi's gibberish questions, and getting the questions correct would enable the player to complete the game without ever angering Baldi. If such an answer actually exists, it hasn't been discovered yet.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Chess: "Vertical Castling" supposedly took advantage of a loophole in the castling rules that allowed you to castle using your King and a newly-promoted Rook (which was technically unmoved), causing FIDE to add an Obvious Rule Patch after its discovery. In reality, even the original FIDE laws from 1930 prohibited this by requiring that the king and the rook must be on the same rank. This rumour was started by Tim Krabbé's 1985 book Chess Curiosities.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • In the original Civilization, the normally peace-loving Gandhi was noted to start threatening players that "our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" around the time democracy and uranium became available, which was put down to an interaction of his Aggressiveness rating of 1 with the Democracy government lowering it further, causing an underflow glitch that "lowered" his Aggressiveness to 255. Years later, "Nuclear Gandhi" became a meme that was even acknowledged in Civilization V and VI by making the leader's AI fond of nukes. But when Civ creator Sid Meier released his memoirs in 2020, he explained the whole thing was nonsense - there was no underflow glitch (C uses signed ints by default, so while underflow is technically possible, you'd either need a much larger drop or to go out of your way to use unsigned ints), and Gandhi's threats were the same as other nuclear-powered civs in the first game, and making them was his AI's way of deterring war. That whole "glitch" story only got started in 2012, a quarter-century after Civilization I's release, and stemmed from edits to the series' wiki and TV Tropes itself.
  • There was a Final Fantasy Tactics rumor that gained a bit of momentum but died with the growth of the internet - that evidently, you can recruit Olan into your party. Part of the reason this had momentum was because hackers discovered he actually doesn't glitch the game out, implying that he might have been intended to join or return as a guest.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has rumors from the GameFAQs board that there's a hidden job called the Barmaid. It says that if you dismiss all of your clan members and do the mission "Wanted: Barmaid", Luso will become one.
  • There are several from the Fire Emblem series. A list of them, along with debunking evidence, can be found here. Granted, some of the things that were actually Dummied Out of games in the series are almost as crazy as the rumours.
    • A rumour that Canas could upgrade to a Dark Druid (the class of the Big Bad), due to the class appearing in the game's Attract Mode.
    • That all heavy weapons give more Weapon Exp. (They don't; many heavy weapons do tend to have higher wexp yields to compensate for the fact that you won't be striking as often with them, but this isn't always the case.) The weapon weight rumor was very popular during the early days of Path of Radiance, when people noticed that forging allows players to increase the weight of weapons. Since heavier weapons in the GBA games usually have higher Weapon Exp gains, people assumed that increasing the weight would increase the exp gains, and the rumor spread from there.
    • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: A very persistent gameplay rumour is that Calill receives Largo's Old Save Bonus as well as her own, Largo being the only Path of Radiance playable character to not return in Radiant Dawn. Testers eventually proved this false: Calill only receives her own transfer bonuses and Largo's don't go to anyone, but this information is still listed on many walkthrough websites.
    • Fire Emblem Fates:
      • A very persistant rumour is that Azura and Silas were originally planned to be the game's Gay Options. This has no direct evidence or Word of God to back it up, and while a placeholder name for a support between the Female Avatar and Azura's children as siblings exists, there's no evidence of the Female Avatar having an S Support with Azura at any point in development. Also, the rumor about Silas being a Gay Option can very easily be debunked by the fact that there were never any placeholder supports in any of the appropriate areas. Not only did Silas and a male Avatar not have an S-Rank at any point, Sophie and a female Kana never had any sibling supports, either.
      • Fates had quite a few rumors about the plot flying around during the early days of fan translations as well. One of the biggest ones were the Cure Your Gays accusations aimed at Soleil's supports with a male Corrin (in fairness, the former's bisexuality is not well-conveyed in the original and really only comes up during their S support), which were at least partly responsible for the chain being completely rewritten for the English release. Another was that the ending of Revelation changed if the Avatar was married to Azura.
    • Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake have two very similar ones that go hand in hand. First, in Gaiden, Genny/Saber was a Fan-Preferred Couple, because they were the only two characters whose endings said they got married without specifying who their spouse was. However, they were never officially stated to be a couple. This became important when Echoes: Shadows of Valentia rolled around. Many fans assumed that Genny/Saber had gotten sunk due to the age gap (data mining revealed that Genny is 15 and Saber is 34), and a few other characters getting similar marriage endings. However, there was nothing to be sunk, as they were never canon in the first place.
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a rumor involving the Blue Lions house being intended to have a route split at some point in development, similar to how the Black Eagles path branches out into two routes late into Part I. This was born from a Dummied Out scenario where two units native to that house would spawn as enemies in Chapter 18 of that route, complete with unique battle dialoguenote . The rumor was debunked by a developer's interview stating that only the Black Eagles house was planned to have a route split, and similar scenarios have since been discovered to exist on other routes, but thanks to several forced dialogue choices and the interesting direction taken by Dimitri's character arc, a lot of fans still believe there's more to it.
  • A popular claim on various cheat/FAQ sites is that in the first Shining Force, if you use an exploit to get outside the town of Guardiana (by forcing an NPC to move into the path of a guard blocking the exit from the town), continue on to the first battle at the Gate, and proceed to clear it using only the player character/"Max", you will unlock something called "Shining Influence". It is never explained what this glitch would do, and some speculated that it would give an additional boost to the other party members for the rest of the game. It was later proven that no such item or glitch unlocks after completing the first battle solo — if anything, it's a major drawback because the player is subsequently unable to recruit the first four (normally mandatory) members who join you after speaking to the king for the first time.
  • Super Robot Wars
    • A game mechanic example: all units (allied or enemy) throughout the franchise are classified as either a "Real Robot" (accurate and agile) or "Super Robot" (strong and tough), yet some players have noticed there are certain units in some installments who don't belong in either classification (eg. a real dealing more damage than a super, or a super being more evasive than a real), deeming these units as "hybrid" robots (Evangelions being an examplenote ). Most players insist there's no such thing as "hybrids": a unit is either a "real" or "super" - there is no in-between.
    • Super Robot Wars Destiny has the infamous "armor bug", which is actually the result of enemy units packing far greater firepower than most other games provide them, such that the normally Nigh-Invulnerable super robots that rely on tanking hits through strong armor instead lack enough durability to survive through this method. This is such a radical departure from the norm for the franchise, which usually strongly favors super robots, that rumors began of a Game-Breaking Bug by players who didn't run the calculations.
    • One persistent rumor sees fans claiming that Mist Rex, protagonist of Super Robot Wars K, will be appearing in whatever game is upcoming. This is simply a Troll joke, since Mist is hands-down the least popular protagonist who's ever appeared in SRW (details on K's page) and is done to elicit angry reactions from fans not savvy enough to realize it's a joke.
    • One rumor that existed since Super Robot Wars Z was that Mitsuo Fukuda hated the franchise because it "fixed" the problems in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. However, in interviews made during the release of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom, he's said he's proud that the SEED franchise and GEAR Fighter Dendoh got into the franchise and others have clarified that he just wasn't happy at Shinn's portrayal, not the series' alteration.
  • In Tactics Ogre, you were said to be able to recruit Lans Tartare, Balzepho, and Volac. However, battle data for Volac does not exist in the game, and as it turns out you can't make the three join you unless you hack them in, or any of the Dark Knights for that matter. Not to mention, saying those three are recruitable carries an implication that Balzepho would actually join forces with Haborym - which, given their history together, would end in disaster. The fact that younger Lans Tartare was the incredibly idealistic and sympathetic protagonist of his own game probably helped this along. However, the remake actually does make one of the Dark Knights recruitable — instead of one of those three, it's Ozma, who has become an Ascended Extra.
  • Worms:
    • Team17 mentioned in passing to magazine PC Zone that a mission pack was coming out for a Worms game (Worms 2) that would make worms babies and set missions at night.
    • Then, of course, their most infamous claim, made on April 1st, was the **spaceman** cheat, which supposedly summons a UFO in Worms 2. Many people tried it before the official announcement at Noon that day that it was an April Fools joke.
    • Team17 had a bit of fun with this when they made an announcement regarding Worms 4: Mayhem on April 1, claiming that in this game you would be able to use the ninja rope to pull crate drops closer towards you. This turned out to be absolutely true.
  • An interesting case in X-COM. The original game, UFO Defence/Enemy Unknown (the name was changed in certain countries) had a bug in which the difficulty of the game would always be set to the easiest, regardless of what difficulty you actually picked. This is not an Urban Legend of Zelda, because the bug actually existed. What is an Urban Legend of Zelda is that the sequel, Terror From The Deep had the same bug in reverse, locking the player into the hardest difficulty regardless of the original difficulty choice. This is not true, but it's not hard to see why people thought that.
  • Soon after the release of XCOM2, a rumor appeared that characters gain a hidden 5% bonus to their Hack stat for every successful hack on security towers. This may have appeared due to Specialists gaining 5 points to Hack every level-up, and XP for hacking towers, but the rumor explicitly claims the hidden bonus can't be seen on the promotions screen. Looking through the source code shows no such effect, but people still enjoy encouraging people to take risky hacks even if they don't want the reward.
  • The first two Disgaea entries on the Playstation 2 were rumored to have ways to unlock the bonus bosses Zetta, Priere, Marjoly, Baal, etc. Nippon Ichi would make it possible to recruit most of the bonus bosses in the remakes and ports, however this is not actively possible on the original game, and any game that showed footage of this either used cheating devices or was a homebrew modded copy of the game.

    Visual Novels 
  • Yume Miru Kusuri features a Not Blood Siblings sister character who has a reasonable amount of romantic tension and interaction built up with the PC. This, coupled with a character in-game who talks about how these games love to have secret characters whose routes can only be unlocked after meeting some arbitrary goals in previous playthroughs, has a lot of players firmly convinced that a hidden route for the sister character must exist somewhere in the game. The more-believable rumor is that it was supposed to, but got cut during development. (Or that it's an intentional parody to create such a rumor. It is something of a Genre Deconstruction.)
  • Remember11 is rumored to have a secret ending for Satoru, perhaps due to the story arguably having no ending at all. It doesn't help that the flowchart explicitly says that there is one.
  • The obscure (to English audiences) visual novel / adventure game Crystal Dragon is well-known in Japan for a supposed hidden strip rock-scissors-paper game option, which was made up by a gaming magazine to see who would copy their work.
  • Misha from Katawa Shoujo doesn't have a route. There is no sign that she was ever meant to have one. She was always written as gay and unobtainable, in an earlier version she was actually intended to die, in the earliest concepts she was just intended to disappear from Shizune's arc over time, and the only chance to have sex with her in the final version is pure Fan Disservice that leads directly into Shizune's bad end. The rumor persists because she's a fan favorite.
    • Thanks to numerous April Fools jokes created by the community and the creators, there are fake screenshots floating around showing new girls with new routes, the most notable being a white-haired girl name "Rika" which had dialogue in the screenshot implying she also had a heart defect. No such DLC exists, no such route is in the game, and all of it is just a prank that still occasionally tricks newbies to the Katawa Shoujo fandom.

    Hardware 
  • Naturally, while the Virtual Boy was on the market, there were persistent rumors that color graphics are indeed possible through the use of cheat codes, system modifications, and what have you. There are even mock-ups circulating the internet of VB games with colorized graphics. This was in spite of the fact that Nintendo themselves unapologetically proclaimed that the Virtual Boy's internal graphics processor has only a two-color palette, and thus more colors would've been physically impossible given the hardware specs. Needless to say, these rumors died when the VB did.
  • Owners who poked around with their NES found a port on the bottom of the console covered by a piece of plastic, and there were many rumors as to what this was for. In reality, this is where the Famicom Disk System would go, but no NES equivalent was ever released. There are converters that let you do this, though, albeit through the cartridge slot.
  • In the weeks leading up to its release there was a persistent rumor that the Xbox (as in the very first Xbox released in 2001) would be able to play Sega Dreamcast games, this was obviously debunked pretty quickly. The rumor likely came from the fact that the Dreamcast has some Microsoft components to make porting PC games easier and the console has a Windows CE logo decal on the front, and from the Dreamcast going out of production before the Xbox was even released. The Xbox ended up being a Spiritual Successor of sorts to the Dreamcast (despite the Xbox being developed as a competitor to the Dreamcast), as most of the Dreamcast games that were cancelled ended up moving over to the Xbox.
  • There was a rumor that the original Xbox One included a secret second GPU based on a revised AMD architecture that MS would activate when AMD announced the update with the apparently weaker GPU (12 CUs v 18 in the original PS4) being a(n incredibly expensive given that many versions of the rumour had this supposed secret being stacked on the processor and the difficulties that would present for manufacture and cooling) ruse by MS to fool Sony. This persisted for a surprisingly long time even after the One's release.

    Pinball 

In-Universe examples:

    In-universe examples 
  • In a possible Shout-Out to the infamous 'playable Luigi' rumour in Super Mario 64, at random intervals during the A Hat in Time DLC Seal the Deal, Snatcher says this:
    "Did you know you can unlock a "Luigi" by completing every Death Wish on the first attempt? I don't even know what that is, but that has to be genuine. I read it online!"

Those lines. What are those lines on the left there? Must be some way to use them to access the secret TV Tropes bonus level.
Ah, good, you found it. Now, figure out the secret code behind TV Tropes and you'll be able to tropify every webpage in the world. Here's a clue — T42-V86-454-559-T68-R24-450-O28-592-42P-28E-4S3...the decoder is in the source.

Alternative Title(s): Schala Lives, The Rumor Lives, Urban Legends Of Zelda, Video Game Urban Legends

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