Urban Legend of Zelda



""We added a shitload of secrets into this thing. Seriously. You thought Hidden Palace was bad? This thing is gonna be like goddamn JFK.""

- Anonymous Sonic Team Member, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Special Edition

Every popular game has a rumor around it that elevates into near urban legend, and perhaps due to an oversight or hanging plot thread it seems just 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 (such as the Sailor Moon and Star Wars parodies you can unlock in Silent Hill 3, or the fact that Iggy Koopa's fireballs in Super Mario World will turn into glitchy blobs if you slide into them). Yet no matter how much evidence is eventually against it, the rumor just won't die.

A common source of these is April Fool's issues of popular gaming magazines. After all, if it's in print, it must be true! ...not quite. Other sources include mistranslated lines, aspects of the game being Dummied Out, and Missing Secrets.

Sometimes, the game's creators will include a character or a feature in the sequel because of these rumors. For instance, when a cameo appearance of Cut Man in Mega Man 7 led to a rumor that he was in the game as a secret boss, Capcom added him as a secret boss in the Saturn port of 8 (he also appears as a secret boss in Mega Man X 8, probably an in-joke reference to this).

Occasionally, this will reach the point where the rumors take on a life of their own. This can culminate in the creation of a "FWAK", a parody Walkthrough containing intentionally fake "secrets". The most infamous of these is undoubtedly Eggnog's hidden character FWAK for Final Fantasy VI. FWAK stands for "False Wisdom and Knowledge".

It's worth noting that the explosion of Internet access has allowed for both rapid debunking and rapid propagation of such digital legends, resulting in people being no better or worse informed about them than before.

Please do not confuse this trope for an Urban Fantasy edition of The Legend of Zelda. Even if it does or does not exist.

As an aside, this trope's name could be a "Before & After" puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.

Compare Wild Mass Guessing and Gannon Banned. For more information, check out Pop Fiction, an excellent Mythbusters-type show on this very subject.

The Legend Of Zelda (Trope Namer)

 * The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was caught by a rumor saying you could unlock the Triforce in the game, most likely caused by screenshots of the game in its early developmental stages which did in fact contain the Triforce. The final game did not contain the Triforce as an obtainable item, but that didn't stop people from looking for it anyway. These rumors were even backed up by photoshopped pictures of the "Temple of Light".
 * A (comparatively) convincing theory involved learning a song called the "Overture of Sages" that allowed you to catch a glimpse of, but not actually obtain, the Triforce prior to pulling out the Master Sword. This was accompanied by (again, comparatively) convincing screenshots. Naturally, the person who revealed this declined to give certain details of how to learn the song. Learn that story here.
 * Also, the rumor that you can beat the Marathon Man. The fact of the matter is, you can't. The game's designers, apparently, had no clue what to do if you won (can't give you a bigger bomb bag because that's somewhere else, etc.), so he always beats you by exactly one second - even if you use a cheat to finish in zero seconds (giving him a time of "00:0/"). The real point of the race ended up just being to beat your best time.
 * Also, it's a jab at those gamers who play to beat absolutely everything, no matter what.
 * There's a hacked video on YouTube claiming that you can beat him by going back in time and waiting for seven in-game years. Clever idea but this, too, is a hoax, as a simple examination of the game's text dump (which can be found here on GameFAQs) shows.
 * There was a rumor that you could, as Adult Link, climb up the back of the great Deku Tree and find a hammer which could be used to break the ice that had trapped the Zoras. With cheat devices, it can enter the Deku Tree as an adult; the place is intact, but there's nothing new to see.
 * Another OoT rumor spoke of the "Desert Pyramid", a dungeon hidden in the Gerudo Desert which contained the Triforce for whatever reason. The "pyramid" can be revealed by playing the Song of Storms in a specific location and with the right orientation; the lightning flashes illuminate a triangular silhouette on the horizon, and thus the rumor writes itself. Reaching the silhouette without cheats is impossible thanks to the desert's swirling sands, but close examination reveals a simple rock with a particularly pointy top.
 * Once, Dan Owsen (back when he was running the "Ask Dan" column on Nintendo's website) posted an almost ridiculously long code sequence that would result in several characters becoming naked—specifically, Malon, Talon, and Ingo. So many people used the "code" and complained to Owsen when it didn't work that he had to eventually issue an apology and a message that basically said "Yeah, that code is phony".
 * There was another rumor that floated around saying how you could obtain an M16 shortly after beating the Water Temple and using a certain item (Usually a bomb or the hammer) in a specific spot in Kakiriko Village during or after the shadow attack.
 * Least convincing OoT rumor of all was the obvious April Fool's joke on one site that said you could totally get a gender-bending tunic that would result in a transvestite Link. Considering that Sheik held precedent, people actually believed it.
 * One of the best was probably the existence of a Sky Temple, fueled by the fact that the first Sage you meet is the Sage of Light, who never got trapped in his temple. One memorable story of how to get there was to use a Game Shark to prevent night from changing into day and kill hundreds of Stalchildren in Hyrule Fields, causing (supposedly) a gigantic skeleton to approach you from the distance, who could be killed with a single hit. The skeleton's skull was then supposed to provide a telepad to the Sky Temple, which was also rumored to contain the Triforce.
 * The Dummied Out Unicorn Fountain was rumored to be accessed through an underwater door in Zora's Domain. A pathway does exist down there, but it just leads to an underwater dead-end with a black wall—and you don't just make a hard-to-get-to space like that for no reason...
 * There was also the "El Puerco" rumor that circulated around GameFAQs for a while, involving a strange pig-like enemy that was said to have an extremely rare chance of appearing during the graveyard race against Dampe. General consensus now is that the initial "sighting", if not a complete fabrication, was the result of a player encountering a very rare, very odd glitch with the Re Dead enemy's model.
 * What about the rumor of the Zelda movie? And that trailer was really realistic...
 * Perhaps the most insidious April Fools prank of them all: the realistic remake of The Wind Waker Electronic Gaming Monthly claimed was available with a Twilight Princess pre-order. The May issue included mocking letters from others who were fooled. Oops.
 * The fourth Triforce piece gets you Gannon Banned.
 * A few years ago there was a talk of a new, futuristic Zelda game where Epona was a motorcycle. It turned out to be an April Fools Joke.
 * Then there's the hoax known as Valley of the Flood, starring a Fake Ultimate Hero version of Link. An interview about it can be seen here.
 * While they were mostly joke topics to begin with, some people on GameFAQs tried to make up rumors about how you could get inside Fado's house in Twilight Princess. You can't. The door is always locked for some reason.
 * Also in Twilight Princess, there have been claims that you can find the hidden "Beta forest". These rumors have been fueled by what appears to be a wide open expanse of trees seen in the first two trailers for the game that is different from the usual cave-system-disguised-by-occasional-trees that passes as a forest in the Zelda games. The videos "proving" the existence of the Beta forest in the game or showing where the Beta forest was intended to be usually just consist of the player doing random stuff and exploiting random glitches in order to confuse the viewer.
 * Back in 2005 there was a bid on eBay for a game called The Legend of Zelda: The Triforce Saga for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was supposedly a half-finished prototype for an unreleased Zelda game, but the bidder couldn't post much on it due to them "being very busy" and him not being a gamer. Someone brought the cartridge for $3000 but they didn't state anything on it. It was all quite obviously a hoax.

Final Fantasy
"I don't want the future. I want the present to stand still. I just want to stay here with you."
 * The death of in Final Fantasy VII shocked many players at first, so naturally a rumor started that she could be revived. This evolved into a more refined rumor that such a quest was left on the cutting room floor. The game's producers had categorically denied this, citing it as ruining the dramatic impact.
 * One of the rumors regarding the resurrection of focused on the relatively-useless "Underwater" materia, which had no point in the Japanese version and only removed a time limit during an optional boss fight in the other releases. It was said that if the materia AP was maxed (something in itself that would take months of level grinding), you could travel underwater in the Forbidden City where  bit it and bring her back to life. It turns out that maxing the AP of the materia just set it back to 0.
 * Another tantalizing bit is there's a materia that is reachable after dies, and upon activating says something like "You hear voices" and made it seem like since  did special things with the white materia.
 * Speaking of Final Fantasy VII, a specific "Infinite GIL" cheat made the rounds not only on the Internet, but in magazines and printed video game hint books, over and over again, despite the fact that the method itself was insanely, obscurely stupid. And couldn't even work, mostly because the item (a "time card") and the town(?) ("Manchuria") central to it didn't even exist. That's not even considering how easy it is to get more Gil than you can ever spend (start by selling a mastered All materia for 1.2 million Gil, which most people will have lying around somewhere around Disc 2 and go from there)... Or, alternatively, abusing the item duplication trick and selling off excess items.
 * While not as popular, there were/are also theories about how to find or resurrect Zack. One of the most common was that the sick Sephiroth clone you find living in a sewer pipe in Midgar is Zack, and that Aerith's mention of "Sorry, I'm too weak to heal him" means that you have to buff her up to ungodly levels and talk to him again. Given that the area is only accessible (with Aerith, anyway) for a brief period in which there are only fairly weak enemies to level-build on, one can only imagine the wasted hours and snapped controllers sacrificed to this rumor.
 * Another rumour of how to find Zack was actually printed in an issue of the UK's Powerstation magazine. It involved the useless items that could be won from the Speed Square at the Gold Saucer—the 1/35 SOLDIER, Super Sweeper and Masamune Blade—and somehow using them on the ruined reactor in Gongaga.
 * Another screen-crunching leg that this rumour grew was that if you fought the infinite mooks at the end of the subway tunnel when heading to the second mako reactor for a solid hour, you would get access to a hidden treasure trove that contained an item needed to revive "Zack".
 * Also Cloud's sister Gale (New Game + mode) and the Joke WEAPONS Cheese Weapon and Chocobo Weapon. The explanation of the Gale rumor was incredibly detailed and seemed plausible until the very end, where her second Fourth Level Limit Break was "beating you to a pulp for believing such a stupid rumor." Some people still did not get the joke. The Joke weapons kind of made sense because there were already 5, one of which is cutscene-only, you fought at least one on the moon, which is a location in many FF games, and if that didn't convince you, FFVII was filled with idiotic half-finished gameplay.
 * The most unusual thing about the Aeris rumor is that it is extremely easy to disprove. You can easily put Aeris back in your party using a save game editor. However, if you attempt to use on her any of the game discs after she dies, the game crashes.
 * Another variation of the Aerith rumor was one that involved being very nice to Aerith in all of your dialogue options while being downright cruel to Tifa; doing so would make Tifa die during the infamous scene instead of Aerith.
 * Often in conjunction with the revival of Aeris, there was the rumor of a White Chocobo that could travel everywhere the Gold Chocobo could, as well as underwater, usually leading to the White Materia/Aerith's body/another WEAPON (usually Onyx).
 * Aerith/Aeris was not the first Final Fantasy character to be subject to this; rumors long abounded about getting Golbez to join your party (in Final Fantasy IV) and resurrecting General Leo after Kefka kills him (in Final Fantasy VI). Ironically, in The After Years, Golbez totally does join your party.
 * The recent GBA port of Final Fantasy VI caused a brief resurfacing of these rumors—not only was it claimed that a newly-added side quest would allow you to bring back Leo, but he could permanently join your party afterwards too. The same was even claimed of antagonist Emperor Gestahl.
 * Speaking of FFVI, a rumor went around a while back that if you got every single one of Shadow's dream sequences—scenes that you get by sleeping in various inns around the world with Shadow in your party in the World of Ruin (including a nonexistent "secret" scene that you have to do something special for, like having another character in your party at the inn) -- you could get an alternate character ending.
 * A somewhat low-key but persistent rumor is that there's some arcane trick to preventing Shadow from leaving after battles during those segments when he can (doing the "three scenarios" segment in a particular order, not making so much money from battles, changing your party order, etc.) There are tricks to stop him from running, actually, but they mostly rely on keeping Shadow from being alive and present at the end of battles (knock him out, make him run, etc.) Beyond that, it's 100% random.
 * The presence of Kappa/Imp-specific equipment in the game, the Imp named Kappa who teaches the player about Gau's Rage ability, and the Imp Robot joke auction in Jidoor are enough to make some players believe a separate Imp could be recruited into the party without having to waste an existing character with the Imp condition set on him/her. There was a photo taken of an Imp casting black magic—not normally possible, but easily faked by having the Imp use a magic rod in battle as an item.
 * One FAQ stated that if you got all the Imp-specific armor, equipped it to a character, used a Rename Card to rename them "KAPPA", and cast Imp on them, they would turn into an unstoppable new character. While this has truth in it—equipping an Imp-ified character with all Imp armor makes them a force to be reckoned with—it can be done at any time with or without the Rename Card, the character does not actually change into an Imp, and they can be turned back at any time.
 * That "FAQ" had an enormous list of these including how to get Ultros, Siegfried, Leo, Kefka, Kappa, and characters from other games entirely, in increasingly crazy ways that would have required more memory than a SNES cart could hold.
 * Various rumors surround the 1/1200-scale model of an airship and the Imp Robot that can't ever be bought from the auction house. (You will always be severely outbid by a gentleman who will offer more than your Gil Cap—and no, there's no way around it.)
 * Rumours about a ninth dragon were also circulating at about the same time as the original General Leo rumours, on the basis of a NPC who talks about a "terrible dragon" living near the Veldt Cave. It turned out to be a mistranslation of the Japanese word for "dinosaur," and referred to the dinosaur enemies found in the forest near the cave, but spawned many fan theories about a ninth dragon that could be found and fought. Some of them connected it explicitly with the Leo-resurrection rumour, claiming that defeating the ninth dragon gave you an item that could be used to resurrect Leo.
 * Slicing Final Fantasy VI's code actually reveals a powerful boss named Czar Dragon, who would have been a superboss merged from the spirits of the 8-dragons, and was built into the remake as Kaiser Dragon. Interestingly, in his home Bonus Dungeon the dragon's den, the 8-dragons and other monsters have been reincarnated into stronger forms, so it could have been used as a legitimate excuse to bring Leo back.
 * That Gogo is actually General Leo/Emperor Gestahl/Adlai Stevenson the politician (though that last one can be convincing if you buy into the fake quotes from his works.) This one kind of died when we got Final Fantasy V in North America, since he's quite obviously just a simple cameo from that game.
 * Finally, Final Fantasy IV had the twin characters Palom and Porom., they were rumored to be retrievable through a special quest you can get ONLY if you go out of your way to get it right at the moment Urban Legends of Zelda aside, they eventually really do get better without your assistance anyway, but in most versions of the game, they don't rejoin you. It should be noted that the game programmers themselves did little to quell these rumors; in-game, you can attempt to use any item in your inventory on the now-frozen pair, implying that there was something you could find that would reverse the process.
 * It was made even worse that a particular walkthrough actually quotes this as fact (or lists FWAK entries among accurate entries). This rumor has also intertwined with the very real hidden room Easter Egg from the Japanese version, and thus it has been said that Palom and Porom can only be retrievable through the hardtype version of the game.
 * This one actually has some truth to it—in the original version of Final Fantasy IV SFC, there was an item called a Golden Needle that would remove Stone (and only Stone). Using this on the twins would give you a message saying that it wouldn't work for plot reasons. The original US version of Final Fantasy II was made significantly easier for US audiences, including the removal of all status effect healing items in lieu of the "Heal" item.
 * Another FFIV rumor related to Dark Matter, which could be stolen from the initial stage of the last boss Zeromus. At the point where the only US version was the edited FF 2, which did not have the item, rumor had it that it was necessary to steal it to reduce the damage done by Zeromus's attack and that removing the need to do this was one of the changes made for the easier FF 2 version. FFIV was later brought to the US unedited for newer systems and the Dark Matter has no effect (though in the Nintendo DS version it allows fighting a Bonus Boss later).
 * A rumor about Final Fantasy VIII that still hasn't died is the Rinoa=Ultimecia theory, stating that Ultimecia was Rinoa in the future, and her Griever GF was somehow Squall. The whole theory was based on leaps of faith and small plot holes in the game. Square denied the theory in the Ultimania Guides. For a good laugh or two, go on the GameFAQs boards and ask them about this "strange rumor my friend told me about Ultimecia and Rinoa being the same person."
 * It's also based heavily in Rinoa's private talk with Squall aboard the Ragnarok on disc 3 where she announces Ultimecia's goals as her own. While it's intended to be romantic, the way she carries on about making one moment last forever makes it easy to see where the rumor came from;


 * It's a reasonably interesting theory since it makes the story much more complex, and Ultimecia is given an actual backstory, and a very tragic one at that. Of course, concrete evidence in game doesn't really support that, though there are times it could be interpreted as this, it's basically just because Ultimecia was HORRIBLY built up so everyone was willing for any reason to make her an interesting villain.
 * There is a myth about Final Fantasy V involving a secret job class. When you ride on the submarine there is an underwater rock shaped like a human face; there are a variety of myths (beat the game, land a certain number of steps away from it etc.) that is involved in unlocking the Paladin class.
 * It was popular for a time to claim that Shiva from Final Fantasy was named for a Celtic ice goddess, rather than the better-known Hindu deity. While this was untrue, there are vague similarities to the Hindu deity Shiva. Hindu deities are both male and female, and both the deity and Final Fantasy's Shiva have blue skin. (Although the former comes from ingesting poison, and the latter from connection with ice.) And the name was pretty obviously supposed to be "Shiver" anyway.
 * In Final Fantasy IX, reaching the final dungeon within twelve hours will get you the Excalibur II. (That part is true) That itself is a difficult accomplishment, but a rumor used to persist on the GameFAQs boards that beating the entire game in twelve hours would result in an alternate ending where a twenty-five year old Eiko kills Garnet and then traps Zidane in a crystal.

Pokémon

 * The original Red and Blue versions have so many legitimate secrets and glitches that it was inevitable that this trope would come into play. Many of them had some grain of truth that are only becoming obvious now.
 * There's generally one Pokémon in each set of games that can't be captured during regular gameplay (requiring a limited-edition promotional item or Game Shark to get). The rumors revolve around a hidden point and/or series of actions to take that allows you to get it.
 * The biggest proliferation happened with the first generation, which was released before sites like GameFAQs hit it big. There were probably 73 different ways claimed to get a Mew. There actually is a working glitch to get Mew, actually, but they were discovered in 2003, 5 years after the game's North American release, after most of the rumors had died down, and around the time of the release of the incompatible (due to hardware limitations) third generation of games, which due to said incompatibility couldn't use a Mew found using the glitch in the first generation of games.
 * Even the Generation III (Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald) games are not exempt. There is a persistent rumor that when the shuttle launch count in the Mossdeep City reaches a certain number (50 and 99 were two of the fairly popular numbers), you will be able to hitch a ride on one of the rockets. This will take you into space, where you can catch Deoxys or Jirachi.
 * Perhaps complicating the situation was the legitimate "Missingno" glitch which seemed just as insane and arbitrary as any of the rumors... at least to someone who isn't versed in programming. You had to talk to an irrelevant-seeming tutorial NPC in Viridian City, and then Surf along the beach of Cinnabar Island. This made weird Pokémon show up, like Golbat and Snorlax over the level cap of 100, and a pair of glitched "Pokémon" called Missingno. and 'M. They were actually placeholder values in the game, and so catching them made even weirder stuff happen - in-battle graphics would be screwy, the Hall of Fame would be permanently glitched, and if you put it in a PC box you might not be able to ever retrieve it (depending on your name). Missingno got so popular for another reason, however. The 6th item in your inventory would be cloned to 128 or 255 after encountering it. This means with a little planning, you can create infinite numbers of rare and powerful items like Master Balls and rare candies, which makes the game laughably easy.
 * Note that there isn't actually so much a "pair" of glitched Pokémon as much there are (at least) twelve of them, plus a few only available through Game Shark, as chronicled by Glitch City Laboratories. The best is LM4, which is a blur of dots that will, at Lvl. 18, evolve into Clefairy, and then immediately into Nidoking.
 * You can see some of these glitched Pokémon, as well as other glitches in this Something Awful LP of Pokémon Blue.
 * Many of the rumors centered around a truck hidden on a secret harbor of Vermilion City that could only be seen by surfing around the S.S. Anne—however, you only obtain the HM for Surf later in the game, and the S.S. Anne leaves to never return once you've obtained the necessary Cut HM on it. Clever players went around this by by either avoiding the S.S. Anne altogether by simply trading for the necessary move from another game, or by deliberately losing in battle (which automatically takes you to the last-visited Pokémon Center), which would trick the boat into remaining in harbor. While the truck contained no secrets, neither Nintendo nor Game Freak has ever made an official statement explaining its presence. However, Game Freak referenced the rumors by putting a Lava Cookie (a status-healing item that can be bought in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire) beside it for the GBA remakes.
 * The truck rumors were also referenced in Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness when a woman says "There's no Pokémon under a truck, maybe you'll just find a Muk," as part of a song she's writing.
 * Speaking of the S.S. Anne, there were also quite a few rumours based around getting it to come back. These were supported by an NPC stating that the S.S. Anne would return in a year, but the original games had no way of telling the time beyond hours played.
 * Back in the days, some people actually believed Shellder to lose its shell when evolved the first time, and then after that evolve into Gastly and follow Gastly's evolution path. This was supported by the Red and Blue instruction manual that showed both Shellder and Gastly in their slots in the Pokédex with only one slot between them. The slot between them later turned out just to be Cloyster.
 * As well, there was an infamous "trick" from the first set of games which was supposed to allow you to transform a Dragonite into Yoshi, in yet another Electronic Gaming Monthly April Fools' joke gone wrong.
 * Similarly, there was an April Fool's joke that you could evolve a Lickitung into Luigi by feeding it a Rare Candy while holding your Game Boy UPSIDE-DOWN. This one actually came from the official Web site of Nintendo of America, which to be fair made the joke more ridiculous than the Yoshi one; in addition to the requirement of holding the system upside-down, it required the Lickitung to be captured in a specific type of Poké Ball (which the games didn't keep track of until Ruby and Sapphire) in Blue specifically, with this only being possible in Yellow (which was out in English at the time), with Red and Blue having it obtained through a trade, and Luigi's "sprite" was clearly a grayscale version of his artwork for the original Super Smash Bros. and much higher-quality than the games' actual sprites.
 * Rumors for the games were practically defined by the supposed presence of hidden or new Pokémon. These new Pokémon were usually seen in the anime or online in very early Gold and Silver beta artwork and pre-release artwork, at such an early time no one expected sequels so assumed these "new" Pokémon were in the current games.
 * The most popular of these was "Pikablu", which was thought to be a Water-type Pikachu. It eventually turned out to be Marill, though it was first seen at the same time the Red and Blue versions were released, which was over two years before Gold and Silver.
 * Another rumored type of "secret" Pokémon were new evolutions for Eevee. Eevee had evolutions for nearly all the elemental stones (Fire, Water, and Thunder), but none for the Leaf or Moon Stones. Rumors began to be circulated for getting Eevee to evolve using either of the unused stones. This demonstrates just how easily a rumor could come about. Coincidentally, a Grass-type Eevee evolution (Leafeon) and a "Moon" (Dark)-type Eevee evolution would eventually become a reality, with Umbreon (Generation II) which evolved via Happiness at night and was known as the "Moonlight Pokémon", and Leafeon in the fourth generation.
 * Three words... Bill's. Secret. Garden. This was a HUGE Urban Legend Of Zelda because when one enters Bill's house, they can see what looks like a path that continues north. This "Garden" (sometimes described as a "Mountain" or "Forest") was said to have extremely rare Pokémon, usually Mew, Togepi, or Pikablu.
 * There were also rumors that you could capture Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur there, since you could only pick one at the start of the game, and as breeding hadn't existed back then, most people wouldn't want to trade their starters just to complete the Pokédex.
 * If you use a Game Shark you can use a walk through walls cheat and go back there. It's a patch the height of your character and as wide as Bill's house with nothing in it.
 * There's also the various myths about increasing your chance of a Pokémon being captured by mashing buttons in a certain order or time. The fact that the official Nintendo website once confirmed this is probably to blame.
 * Note that this is actually somewhat true: the Pokémon RNG is slightly affected by button inputs. However, as this requires frame-perfect timing, it is largely something for the speedrunners. Mostly, though, this idea persists because it just FEELS effective.
 * Most (if not all) of these Pokegod rumors involved talking to various NPCs (some important, such as your Mom, Prof. Oak, and others just random) a certain number of times to get them to say something different.
 * This was probably fueled by the fact that there was one situation where repeatedly talking to an NPC did something. (The gatekeeper outside the Safari Zone would let you in for free if you talked to him enough times.)
 * http://www.blue-reflections.net/ragecandybar/projects/pokegods/ is a project working to archive and research all the old codes and rumors in the Pokémon games, particularly the PokeGods.
 * Pokemon is also frequently subject to Creepypasta, particularly original Red and Green versions. Lavender Town is frequently the subject of these stories.
 * One of these stories was about Pokemon Black (not to be confused with one-half of Pokémon Black and White), a rumor about either a hacked rom of Pokemon Blue/Red or an actual bootleg cartridge (which would also be a hack) with a black sticker on the front. Basically, you start out with a "ghost" Pokemon you can never switch out of your main party. It has the sprite of what all ghost Pokemon look like before you get the Silph Scope which allows you to properly see them. All other Pokemon are too afraid of your ghost to attack it. The ghost's only attack is a Curse which instantly knocks out almost all other Pokemon in one hit. The victimon's defeat cry is played in a distorted way. The ball that it was in disappears from your opponent's roster (unless you fought a wild mon). Once you win, you get the previously unavailable option to use Curse on your opponent directly instead of just his Pokemon. Your opponent disappears from the screen and never returns. Some versions of this story have a grave of him appearing in his place. Usually you can talk to anyone you have defeated. The game continues as normal until you beat the Elite Four. It then flashes forward to you as an old man alone in a town. You return to either your home where you first start the game or Professor Oak's lab who gave you the ghost in the first place. You then see the image of every mon and trainer you cursed. Then your once loyal ghost attacks you directly. All you can do is the struggle command which shaves off a little of your life and does no damage to the ghost. Once your HP hits 1 or 0 the mon Curses you. The screen goes black and will not change. If you turn the game back on you will find your save file erased.
 * Speaking of Black and White, the actual early stages of release had many people claiming there was a "swimming goggles" held item which increased accuracy and Special Attack and put non-Water Pokémon using it to sleep, leading to lots of complaining that this would make Starmie overpowered. Said item did not exist, nor did anything even similar to it.
 * Another Black and White Urban Legend that spread and was believed for a short amount of time was that
 * There was also a rumour that you could drive a car at one point, probably based on the fact that actual cars appeared and one NPC talked about getting his driving license. A more obscure, but similar rumour came up between the first and second generation, where people believed there would be a way to ride your Pokemon rather than travel by bike.
 * It's worth noting that the number of these myths for newer games in the Pokémon franchise have fallen pretty substantially, given that a sizable portion of the fanbase is now talented enough to quite thoroughly dissect the code of the new games and determine what is and is not programmed in.
 * Another fuel for Urban Legends Of Zelda was the closed tunnel-way between Celadon City and Saffron City in the second generation. In general, most things that had suddenly changed between these two generations spawned rumours.
 * Yet another example from Black and White. It's been proven Zekrom and Reshiram can sadly, not be shiny. However, this hasn't stopped rumours you can get a shiny one from Dragonspiral Tower. Hackers have proven many times you can't, yet some fans still insist you can, which are sadly mistaken. Victini too is programmed not to be shiny either in-game.
 * Despite this, all three of these Pokémon do possess shiny sprite data, which leads to the possibility of future shiny versions of these Pokémon obtainable via events - though this is unlikely, as Reshiram and Zekrom are plot-critical legendaries (one of the pair, depending on the version, must be captured to complete the game), and Victini was only available via an early-adopter Wi-Fi event.
 * The reason they have shiny sprites is in case someone hacks the game into giving the player a shiny Reshiram, Zekrom, or Victini. Why do you think Diamond and Pearl have special ???-type Arceus sprites despite being completely impossible to obtain a ???-type plate in the game?

Sonic

 * Also in Sonic Generations, there was a rumor that Blaze referenced Crisis City (and thus, Sonic 06; keep in mind that this Blaze is claimed to be the Sonic Rush Blaze) when saved by Modern Sonic. As it turned out, this was completely false. Alll she said was for Sonic not to tell others of her slip-up.
 * There were also rumours of DLC stages coming out. This was also false, unless the downloadable Casino Night Zone pinball minigame counts.
 * There is now a rumor spreading about a new game coming out on the Wii U named Sonic Dimensions, which of course was never announced by SEGA but it's real anyway.
 * Prevalent to the point where a journalist asked Takashi Iizuka about it. Myth was busted.
 * There were a few rumors about some bizarre, secret levels in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and at the time what presumably was in these levels took on mythic proportions. Turns out the levels existed, kinda', but were basically left overs from the development phase. The levels existed at a certain point in development, hence the music from them and the screenshots (which spawned the urban legends) were real, but they were later axed. This is similar to Mega Man X1's fabled "White City" and "robot partners"—mentioned and shown in early previews and screenshots but removed during development.
 * Sonic & Knuckles was subject of numerous rumours regarding connectivity and several magazine hoaxes; claims that you could play as Knuckles in Sonic 1, Ecco the Dolphin and Streets of Rage 2 were the most memorable, but there were also some related to a secret if you played all the blue sphere levels with Sonic 1 connected, such as playing as Hyper Tails, Metal Sonic or Robotnik. Nothing would actually happen, and if it's assumed every blue sphere level is solvable in two minutes, it would take roughly 400 years of solid play to finish them all (there are over 100 million).
 * In an example of Media Research Failure, the Australian magazine "SEGA Megazone", who later admitted that they weren't sure that locking Sonic 1 onto Sonic & Knuckles could actually make playing as Knuckles in Sonic 1 happen, made a fake screenshot of Knuckles in Green Hill Zone and claimed you could play as Tails in Sonic 1 too.
 * Of course, there have been ROM hacks since then, so you actually CAN play as them, if you know where to look.
 * Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 gave us Chao, a mon that was a little like Pokemon. As with Pokemon, rumors spread.
 * Chaos Chao were like this after the game was first released, but fortunately, they were 100% real, and you could easily get one without an Action Replay.
 * Energy Chao.
 * Who remembers the ridiculous amounts of "secret unlockable items" there were? While there were many different rumors, the most infamous example was the Chao Cookie, a Rare Candy that would greatly boost your Chao's stats, and was only obtainable after collecting all of the emblems. Guess what? It wasn't real.
 * Speaking of item rumors, this damn game even gave us  Store  rumors, as in Grocery Store. Apparently, if you collected all of the emblems, you could buy the "White Market", which was like the Black Market, but you could get really rare Chao egg colors like Olive, Moon, Rainbow, and yes, Energy...

Super Mario

 * When Super Mario Bros. came out on the NES in North America, several rumors went on about how you could access a secret World 10-1 but proved to be false, although thanks to how the Famicom games were programmed when the Game Genie came out you could use a code to access a world labeled 10-1 but it was just a botched graphical version of World 1-1.
 * Super Mario Bros. also had a supposed 'no death' trick by holding on the second controller's B button with your toe (or, presumably, with the help of someone else's toe. Or finger, for that matter), that one proved to be false also.
 * Many people are convinced that something great will happen if you jump over a flagpole in Super Mario Bros. While this is possible to do in World 3-3 by using the scale lift at the end, there's nothing past the flagpole except featureless, infinitely repeating landscape. Then you just have to wait for the timer to kill Mario, because the Ratchet Scrolling won't let you go back.
 * There was a rumor going around back in the late 1980s that if you beat the original Super Mario Bros. for NES twice in a row it would open up an option to play Super Mario Bros. 2. Of the many rumors on this page, this one probably makes the least sense—if SMB2 had already been completed at that time, why not just release it seperately?
 * What does happen when you beat it is that all 8 worlds repeat, with changes to the platforms and enemies to make everything harder. This fact probably led to the misunderstanding that rescuing the princess unlocks a whole new game.
 * Super Mario World has a real secret bonus world called the Star World accessed via a Star Road that paths from normal levels lead to once completed (generally after getting to an alternate goal and not the standard one). It contains several Star Roads itself that lead to various parts of the game's large world map... except for one hidden Star Road that instead leads to the even more secret Special Zone that is accessed via the alternate goal of the last Star World level, which if completed will change the graphics from Summer to Autumn; a rumor persisted that if you did the Star World/Special Zone again you would get a Winter & Spring seasonal change respectfully.
 * A SMW Game Hack/Patch DOES exists with graphic changes and ice-and-slippery snow everywhere where if you go through the Star Road it changes it back to normal game play, but sorry no spring-style dino islands.
 * Super Mario 64 was rife with theses style of rumors including how to get a Hammer Brother Mario (a joke about Super Mario 3's Hammer Brother Suit which was at one time a secret) and Yoshi to ride (again a lovely rumor spread by Monthly Gamer Magazine) but nope...not true.
 * Super Mario 64 contained only Mario as a playable character. That didn't stop some, though; a rumor of a playable Luigi spread across the Internet. This was exacerbated by rumors about a mysterious inscription on a fountain in the Big Boo courtyard that some said read "L is real 2401."
 * The rumor was perpetuated by none other than Dan Owsen. He didn't ever hint that it was real, mind you, he just refused to answer the question when someone wrote in asking about it (his/Evil Dan's initial response was "the truth is out there". He then repeatedly refused further requests to answer the question, using his "Evil Dan" e-persona to mock everyone the whole time, despite requests that he stop doing that. At the end, he put in answer into his FAQ confirming it wasn't anything, but by then, the rumor had spread far and wide. Had he done his job and simply answered the question (or ignored it and not put in his Q&A in the first place) the rumor would likely be long dead.
 * Luigi was eventually made playable in the DS remake... which, in conjunction with Wario, then led to a rumor that you could unlock Waluigi.
 * There were a couple of other unlockables rumored in Mario 64, including a controllable Yoshi (which was why the Yoshi model existed, but there was apparently no time to actually implement the feature), Ninja Mario, Fire Mario (with fire power), and Naked Mario.
 * The Luigi rumor attached to the original Super Mario 64 may have been fanned so widely by an earlier grain of truth: early beta screenshots printed in Nintendo Power, and recent interviews, have revealed that Luigi was intended for the game, but later removed. Likewise, hacking reveals the invincible star as an item, though Ninja Mario, Fire Mario, and others are untrue.
 * Rumours of being able to find Bowser's submarine after it vanished were sometimes thrown around. The typical "do something for an unreasonably long time" rumour also found a home in claims that it was possible to climb the endless staircase if you just stuck at it long enough or jumped at exactly the right moment.
 * You actually can reach the top of the Endless Stairs without 70 stars, as demonstrated by the 16-star speedrun at speeddemosarchive. It involves exploiting a glitch that rockets Mario up the stairs faster than the screen can scroll (to be specific, you're being warped backwards constantly, so if you go fast enough, you'll rocket past the part that warps you back, and you'll make it upstairs) and letting you reach the top. Very likely not intended by the developers at all, of course.
 * Same goes for the zero (Yes, zero) star run found here.
 * One of the more elaborate myths came from a site called "W is real", it involved using the wing cap to hit a (Nonexistant) black box that showed up in the file select screen due to a glitch, exactly on the corner, and it would change the Wario door to a door to a secret Waluigi dungeon. They even went so far as to photoshop pictures of a unique level, boss, and Waluigi sprite.
 * One of the theories is that '2401' was supposed to be one of the release dates of Paper Mario; it was released in North America one day after the fourth day of February, 2001, which rendered by a simplified version of that region's format is 2/4/01. Luigi's role in the game is fairly minor, North America wasn't the first region to get it and the Month/Day/Year format is rarely used in Japan.
 * Ultimately, the text that supposedly reads "L is Real 2401" was revealed to actually be "Eternal Star", though the image used lost a lot of resolution when it was imported into the game. It wasn't fixed in the remake either.
 * In Super Mario Sunshine, there's a rumor going around that if all the Shine Sprites are collected, Mario can fight Waluigi, who is holding Luigi captive in a cage. When the battle is won, Luigi becomes a playable character.
 * One of the companions from Paper Mario can be interacted with in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. This, on its own, started rumours that the other companions were there as well. This was before hackers discovered sprite sets for the lot of them.
 * Back in the day, Super Mario Bros 3 had a very popular rumour of a 9th world hidden in the game. Despite the fact that the actual 9th world is the Warp Zone (i.e. the "World (insert number here)" display changes to say World 9 when in it), which is hidden but hardly a mystery. This was likely fueled by a combination of not paying attention and the fact that the boxes of SMB3 had screenshots of a level that didn't entirely match any of those appearing in the finished game. It's worth noting, though, that there are real hidden levels in the game, but they're (sometimes unfinished) prototypes only playable via a hack or cheat device.
 * To elaborate slightly, it was said by some that you could reach World 9 by finding and using the "Golden Whistle". This probably wasn't the only method proposed...
 * Yoshi's Story had "Purple Yoshi," a ninth Yoshi color. Allegedly, you unlocked it by collecting every single coin from every single level, from the ones buried in the ground to the ones only found by using a Super Happy Fruit. Some unofficial hint manuals even printed the rumor. Yeah, no, the only two hidden Yoshi colors are white and black.
 * Fun fact: The game did, originally, contain a Purple Yoshi and a Brown Yoshi, during the beta phase. They were switched out for some reason.
 * Take any game where Luigi's not playable. There are rumors going around about how to unlock him in that game.

Action-Adventure/Action/Adventure
"Mario: It'sa me! Mario!"
 * Many games featuring Third Person Seductresses are subject to "nude code" rumors, most famously Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.
 * 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.
 * One of these (for Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball) was the subject of one of Electronic Gaming Monthlys infamous April Fool's Day jokes.
 * IGN 64 played a similar April Fool's prank in its early years with IGN 64.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."
 * Arguably 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 Golden Eye 1997, 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.
 * In Mortal Kombat 2, the female characters were rumored to have "nude-alities". Heck of it is, 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?
 * 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.


 * 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. Look for PikolUploader on YouTube, or "last big secret" on Google, which points to the forum thread for finding such things.
 * Buck Bumble had a cheat actually published as legitimate cryptically called "Dark Stinger" which had you input a long button combination before the opening logos appeared.
 * LEGO Rock Raiders has an annoying rumor of three cheat codes. Extensive looks and hacks show that they do not exist (though you can mod in what they are supposed to do), yet the rumor just keeps on.
 * An interesting example is in 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 was 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..
 * In a similar vein, beating Shift 3
 * Players initially believed that the dormant volcano in the first area of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst could be entered somehow, allowing access to the D'ni civilization. While 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 modification has not only made the volcano climbable, but ALSO allows the player to import data from Myst V: End of Ages into Uru - meaning that jumping into the volcano will actually allow access to the areas of the volcano seen in Myst V. Damned cool.
 * One persistent rumor on a few gaming sites said that jumping off of the Statue of Liberty 30 times in the game of Spider Man 2 would let you play as Kermit the Frog. Sadly, this does not happen.
 * Back in the C64 days there was a graphic adventure game named Castle of Terror which 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 publishing 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 designers confessed the game was in fact Unwinnable by Design and it was impossible to kill Dracula.

Beat 'Em Up/Fighting

 * An earlier Electronic Gaming Monthly April Fool's Joke insisted that Simon Belmont of the Castlevania games was a secret character in the NES port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the Arcade Game. After they got called on it, the "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). How were they to know that later someone really would make a game called Battletoads and Double Dragon?
 * Then there was their infamous "Sheng Long" and "Sonic and Tails in Melee" tricks mentioned below.
 * The magazine even shown a photoshopped image of Link fighting a bird enemy, both of them being in the style of Twilight Princess, while the area the screenshot was in was from an area in Wind Waker. EGM joked that you could get a "Twilight Princess" version of Wind Waker if you deposited some money to a pre order of Twilight Princess. Sadly, some people fell for it and actually asked local retailers if the pre order offer was really happening.
 * In fighting games, this trope takes the form of incessant rumors about unlockable characters. The most famous instance of this was the rumor about an impossibly hard way to cue a hidden final battle against an opponent named Sheng Long in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. The character Ryu's win quote in the game was, "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance [against me]"—using the Chinese name for his Dragon Punch, and mistranslating it; the proper translation would be more like "You must overcome my Dragon Punch to stand a chance [against me]." A version of this rumor was later published by the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1992 as an April Fool's Day joke. It's rumored that the character Akuma in Super Street Fighter II Turbo was added because of the attention, as his appearance and abilities are similar to Sheng Long's; however, Capcom has neither confirmed or denied this (EGM repeated the joke five years later after Street Fighter III: New Generation was revealed, complete with more doctored screenshots and even character artwork).
 * The EGM version of the rumor was that the player had to play as Ryu and win every fight without getting hit once UNTIL reaching M Bison, at which point you had to go 10 rounds not hitting M. Bison and not getting hit by him until finally Sheng Long was supposed to step in and fight you. If you won that fight, you unlocked Sheng Long. Talk about Nintendo Hard (EGM knew it too. The name of the fictional contributor to the trick was given as W.A. Stokens (Waste tokens)) of Fuldigan, HA (Fooled ya 'gain, HA!).
 * Capcom acknowledged the joke on April Fool's Day 2008, when the official Japanese development blog for Street Fighter IV teased that Sheng Long was a playable character in the new game. At this point, though, everyone was cynical enough to know it was a joke. But a couple of weeks later, Capcom revealed that his actual equivalent, Ryu and Ken's master (and Akuma's brother) Gouken, was to become a character that players could fight in the arcade version...and control on the home versions. (On April 2, the Japanese site explained the origin of Sheng Long, and stated that "Sheng-Long is still now and always will be, truly a character of legend.")
 * Taking the acknowledgement a step further, Gouken actually resembles the original "Sheng Long" graphic that EGM cooked up...and he has, in one way or another, every move EGM listed him as having. This may count as a Defictionalization Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * Prior to EGM's April Fools gag, "Sheng Long" was actually considered to be the name of Ryu and Ken's master by Capcom USA before the character was even given a name in Japan. In the manual for the SNES version of Street Fighter II, Sheng Long is mentioned in Ryu's and Ken's profiles. However, the manuals for all subsequent Street Fighter II games removed all references to Sheng-Long and the name "Gouken" was used instead.
 * On the note of Street Fighter II, a quite persistent rumor when the SNES port came out was that of a "Boss Code" that let you play as the four boss characters. Some felt this justified because there was a code that let both players use the same character in their Champion Edition colors, something not possible in the arcade version of World Warrior; plus, the CPU (including the bosses) would always use their character's alternate color if the code was entered. There's no actual way to play as the bosses in the game short of using a game enhancer and replacing your character's sprite. They did became playable in Street Fighter II Turbo.
 * Theories abounded as to how to perform Ryu's "Red Hadoken" in Hyper Fighting... Which was actually a random bug that was kept in the game. Then in Super Street Fighter II, it was actually possible to deliberately perform a Red, fiery fireball...
 * Electronic Gaming Monthly, a veritable Urban Legend Of Zelda factory, claimed that Super Smash Bros.. Melee featured Sonic and Tails as unlockable characters, and gave a nearly (very nearly) impossible method of unlocking them. Naturally, none of it was true, but not many gamers could find out for themselves before EGM confirmed that this method was actually their annual April Fool's Joke. To a lesser extent, someone online also said that Toad was unlockable. (The believability of the original rumor was enhanced by the fact that Sega had stopped producing its own game systems not long before, and the GameCube hosted the first Sonic game on a Nintendo system.) This rumor then moved to the game's sequel, Super Smash Bros.. Brawl, and eventually proved to be true.
 * This suggests if you make Kirby suck up Mewtwo and then jump off a cliff, you'll get Mewthree. This version is adorable.
 * Same with playing as Giant DK and Metal Mario in the original Super Smash Bros., which were eventually acknowledged by the addition of Super Mushrooms and Metal Boxes in Melee. If you use a Gameshark to play as either of them (or Master Hand, or any of the Fighting Polygon Team, for that matter), the game freezes at the end of the match, because none of those characters have an animation for the post-match "applause" screen. The same thing happens in Melee if you use the Debug Mode to play as any of its normally unplayable enemy characters (Giga Bowser, the Wire Frames and the Hands).
 * IGN recently joked that an Expansion Pack for Brawl would be offered as part of a faux 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.
 * When it was announced that there were non-Nintendo characters in Brawl (and were pretty much instantly identified as Sonic and Solid Snake), the rumors instantly started that there would be a third character from Capcom in the mix (Mega Man being the most popular guess). When the full roster was announced, with no Capcom characters, scuttlebutt was (and still is) that there was some sort of falling out between Nintendo and Capcom that led to the proposed Capcom entry getting left out.
 * The Other Wiki shot down almost-legitimate screen shots of the full select screen (the picture of Wolf was wrong, though Wolf really is in the game) shortly after the game was released in Japan... due to the fact that Bomberman wasn't on it. Seen here.
 * An interview with Keiji Inafune specifically asked if he was ever asked by Nintendo if they could put Mega Man in Brawl. He wasn't, but notes that if he was, he'd have said yes in a heartbeat.
 * Let's not forget the rumor stating that Miyamoto (or maybe Sakurai) said on a radio program that Bowser Jr., Ridley and Wind Waker Link would join Brawl while Ice Climbers, Young Link and Game & Watch would be taken out. The Link part was true, but pretty much by coincidence.
 * There are also persistent rumours that the otherwise useless Goldeen will use Horn Drill under certain conditions.
 * One of the most well-travelled examples; there were many, many rumoured ways to play as Goro, Shang Tsung, or Reptile in the first Mortal Kombat. None of them worked.
 * Goro however, could be legitimately unlocked for normal play in the Game Boy version. There is also a glitch to (barely) control him in the SNES version through a glitch.
 * The rumor that Sub-Zero could become a polar bear in Mortal Kombat 2 was so persistent that the creators added in "Animality" transformations to the third installment. Care to guess what Sub-Zero turned into?
 * Likewise, there were many, many rumors about Shang Tsung being able to transform into the character Kano, who was absent from MK2 for plot reasons. The message "I HAVE NEVER SEEN A KANO TRANSFORMATION" briefly became a fan meme as a result. (This was all caused by a counter in the Arcade's test mode reporting the number of Kano morphs.)
 * Similarly, in MK2, it was heavily rumored that the trees in the Living Forest stage could eat the opponent as part of a secret stage fatality. Not only was this bogus, but it remained so for all subsequent remakes of the stage.
 * Referenced in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (It was actually a requirement to progress in the Living Forest stage) and finally made into a real stage fatality in Mortal Kombat 9.
 * Mortal Kombat 2 had a very well known rumor that you could knock people onto the hooks in the Dead Pool stage.
 * The first Mortal Kombat allegedly had a rare occurence where Scorpion or Sub-Zero would appear in a red outfit (believable since some other characters are Palette Swaps of each other), and the words "ERMAC" would appear over the life bar, as shown by a faked screenshot in Electronic Gaming Monthly. There hasn't been a single case where the supposed Ermac "glitch" was triggered without hacking into the game (the name, short for "error macros," only appeared on a debug menu). Ermac nevertheless made his official debut in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
 * The beauty of the above 4 entries is that when they made Shaolin Monks, they took pretty much every widespread rumor that could be even remotely possible and made them true, so yes, you can fight Kano, feed Mooks to the trees in the Living Forest, knock them into the hooks in Dead Pool and fight Ermac as well. Subverted slightly in that they inserted a lot of even more fake rumors into the random "hints" the game gives you whenever you die, although those are far less likely to end up on this page.
 * One they didn't insert was the common, highly juvenile belief in a secret character named Go-Nad. Or the similar hoax Computer And Video Games magazine put in one April issue regarding the second game, where they claimed one version contained Pedro, a Mexican brawler with a flammable anus.
 * An obscure red Kitana palette character called Skarlet. She would later become DLC in Mortal Kombat 9 complete with defined abilities.
 * Since Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, rumors of "Super Unlockable" characters have emerged, with completely ridiculous methods of acquiring them coming to light. None of them have ever been proven true.
 * Mortal Kombat: Deception had a rumor that if you beat Onaga on Very Hard, you could unlock Motaro.
 * Finally, there's the infamous "Nudeality" rumor. Mortal Kombat seems to be a magnet to this trope.
 * This is based on Tattoo Assassins, a cheap knockoff of Mortal Kombat. Its only claim to fame is its "Nudealities". There is a video on Youtube if you are so inclined.
 * There's also the infamous Nimbus Terrafaux hoax by EGM.
 * Way back before all this sequel nonsense, when videogames were made of wood, NMS (Now ONM) magazine printed a hilarious and widely believed article explaining exactly how taping a penny to the top of your SNES Mortal Kombat cartridge, adding a certain amount of weight to it, then certain codes at certain times while using certain fighters would unlock the blood and new fatalities. It was called "Killer Kombat Mode".
 * Babalities and Friendships also originated as spurious rumors.
 * There was a long rash of rumors revolving around the SNES port of Mortal Kombat, mostly about how to enter a blood code. The SNES was the more popular console at that time and most gamers only had one console, so a method of unlocking blood for SNES was the holy grail. Most of the rumored codes were nearly impossible, like entering a long string of buttons in some tiny time frame such as when Goro appears on the opening screens.
 * On the SNES version of MK, it actually was possible to use a Game Genie code to Palette Swap the "sweat" back into blood. However, there never was any way of restoring the original fatalities, since the necessary animation frames simply didn't exist in the ROM.
 * Fighting games seem to attract these sorts of things. In Killer Instinct, one of Orchid's finishing moves was flashing her opponent (though of course the player couldn't see anything). Reportedly, on one stage, if you positioned her in front of a mirror and performed the finisher, you could see her breasts. The developer's response? "I don't recall a mirror in that stage."
 * There is a cheat that was in some early FAQs of the first Guilty Gear for the PlayStation that would unlock Justice, Testament and Baiken without having to beat the game all the way through. Turns out it really just increased the game's difficulty in Normal Mode.
 * 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 forced to fight Sylvia (the hero's girlfriend) as a Bonus 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.

Driving Game

 * There were rumors everywhere talking about being able to break free a Thwomp named Marty in Mario Kart 64. Fans dubbed the name to the Thwomp that was behind bars in the Bowser's Castle track. Once Mario Kart Wii showed N64 Bowser's Castle as a retro track, the rumors briefly resurfaced, but most brought it up as a joke.
 * There were also unrelated rumours in nearly every other game in the series. Super Circuit had the rumour of Waluigi as playable, DS had the rumour of an unlockable Rainbow Cup (four retro Rainbow Roads in a row), Double Dash had the April Fools Day joke and rumour of Retro Cups, and Wii had a Maple Treeway glitch rumour which turned out to be a hoax.
 * Mario Kart 7 ALSO has a Maple Treeway glitch rumour/hoax. Different supposed 'trick', but it too ended up getting disproved by a fan made video...
 * Crash Team Racing held rumors that Nitrous Oxide was a secret playable character if you beat certain requirements. This was a persistent rumor for a good while since the game's release.
 * It didn't help that every single other boss is unlockable, and there was actually another super-secret character, Penta Penguin, who could only be unlocked through cheats. You get Tropy for beating all of his (easier) staff ghosts, so it stands to reason that you get Nitrous for beating all of his extremely difficult ghosts. Instead, you just get a shortcut to the scrapbook on the main menu (100% Completion is a much easier way to see the scrapbook).
 * Each time a new Gran Turismo is released, there are rumors that the McLaren F1 is a hidden playable car. The FIA GT1-spec race car made its debut in GT4, while the road car was added in GT5.
 * There also have been rumors of a combined version of Special Stage Route 5 and 11 named Route 16. GT5 has track named SS Route 7 set in the same city, but it's a different beast.
 * Also, there have been many rumors surrounding the Dummied Out courses in GT 2 and why you can't get 100% completion in that game.
 * 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).

First-Person/Third-Person Shooter

 * A good example would be the rumored hidden levels of Marathon with wall-climbing invincible red Drinniols. People believed it because The Marathon Secrets Guide is who said it, and everybody trusts them. Subverted, when, years later, the Aleph One sourceport is released. Guess which level you can select now.
 * There were false rumors of a true 3D Marathon game called "Dr'At'Er", and one website claimed to have screenshots of it. The pictures were actually dolled up Quake screenshots. BTW, Drater is "retard" backwards.
 * Arguably the oldest and first existence of this trope dates back to 1980: Atari's Battlezone 1980 and its vector graphic system became the stuff of legend when it was reported that one could actually drive to the edge of the "zone" and climb into the mountains, to the peak of the volcano. Reportedly, there was a castle at its peak, which could be explored, if only you drove far enough. Sadly, such an exploration was never possible; it was far beyond the capabilities of the era.
 * This set of rumors was prevalent enough that arcade owners were complaining about people hogging the Battlezone machines without actually playing the game. As such, the developers ended up adding a small bit of code in later variants that would make a missile instantly home in and kill a player if they failed to kill anything within a reasonable amount of time.
 * This set of rumors may also have made it into The Matrix Revolutions. Where was the Machine City?
 * Electronic Gaming Monthly once had an April issue prank where they claimed that you could unlock all the other actors of the James Bond series in the N64 game Golden Eye 1997 007. There was some minor truth in that the game did have the data for the other actors present, but it had been Dummied Out over not being able to secure the likeness of the other actors for the game. ROM hacking has allowed the fandom to (a tad bit messily) add that back in, though.
 * Rare actually went so far as to lie about the above, and about another rumour that turned out to be true; a supposed secret level known as "Citadel." Via some serious hacking, Citadel turned out to exist; it's an engine test level.
 * A large amount of speculation, including about the mythical All Bonds cheat, centered on the missing entry at the end of the cheat menu. It turns out this is actually for a cut cheat called "Line Mode" which can be accessed only through a button press code and has no normal unlock method.
 * An unaccessible island in the very first level also provided a lot of rumor fuel, from being the result of leftover testing artifacts to housing secret items of unimaginable power. It was later revealed that it was indeed meant to be an integral part of the first mission but abandoned to allow for space in the hardware for local multiplayer and for being uninteresting, and what had been developed at that point was simply left in.
 * Rumours of a third secret level based on Goldfinger and/or A View To A Kill circulated due to the presence of the characters Oddjob and Mayday in the multiplayer character list. Oddjob is actually in the game 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), but 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 were 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 was 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 infamous Yellow Banshee rumor from Halo, which was possibly referenced in Halo2 with the heretic Banshee. In fact, each Halo game has rumors of a secret vehicle, the most prevalent being Drivable Scarabs and the Golden Warthog.
 * Halo 3: ODST's not-quiet-Metroidvania style gameplay is ripe for this kind of rumormongering. Stories of hidden energy swords are pretty popular. Rumors of living Elites hidding somewhere in the city crop up from time to time as well. Don't even get started on all those strange markings that pop up in VISR mode.
 * A legend said that if you looked carefully through the Library level in Halo: Combat Evolved you would have found the mangled corpse of Marvin Mobuto, said in the game-inspired book to have made his way through a decent part of the Flood-infested library before getting overwhelmed by the monsters.
 * Back when Quake was in development, there was a rumour that another 3D shooter, Hexen, contained a hidden demo of the game that could be unlocked by performing a complicated sequence of actions in the first level. The instructions for it required very precisely timed moves, which of course helped keep the rumour going - if it didn't work, people just assumed they didn't do it quite right.
 * Also, an inversion: Quake found itself announced for the first time in the April issues of many popular games magazines, who found themselves receiving numerous letters telling them how "obviously fake" the idea of a full-3D FPS was.
 * The Team Fortress 2 fandom is rife with fake updates—some, like the Guard Dog Update, are jaw-droppingly realistic and are only given away by the obviously not Valve-sponsored URLs. Valve's response to the above, in character as Saxton Hale.
 * As the Engineer Update was approaching, there were all sorts of rumors about what you had to do to get the Golden Wrench. Nerf Now demonstrates.
 * The Passing in Left 4 Dead 2 spawned this immediately on the day it was released.
 * People also insist that you heal each other instead of yourself because it 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 people will still push you to heal them instead of yourself as if the theory were true. This is actually stated on the L4D wiki, so true or not, it's pretty widely believed.
 * There's also another myth passing around with the bots of the old survivors in The Passing. It is believed that giving Louis (or any of the other guys) pills or shots will make the bot have better aim and give players better items. The bots will only give certain items based on the situation; if the survivors are hurting, health items are more likely to be given. If the players are doing well, they will generally get bomb items. The bots can also toss down an M60 and a Chainsaw, but those are extremely rare. On top of this, the bots do not get any better in their shots since it is possible for the team to get wiped, even if you gave the other bots items beforehand.
 * The rumours about Church Guy then? Some believed that he could become a Tank or a Witch instead of the other Specials available. The truth is that Valve didn't intend it, but as demonstrated here, it isn't hard to make him one.
 * Many previews for the dino-hunting game Carnivores 2 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, snfg.exe - nicknamed "Sniper Frog", supposedly running in the background and doling out "luck" like headshots and better kill streak crates. Of course, there has never been a source for this beyond unnamed "hackers" and worst of all, the people spreading the rumors can't even agree who the program is supposed to be benefiting. Some claim that it favors low-level players to encourage newbies and others claim it supports high-level players to keep them interested and buying map packs as opposed to moving on to new games.
 * Kid Icarus: Uprising has an interesting ULZ of note that involves donating Hearts, the currency you gain from monsters.
 * The game outright tells you there's no items rewarded for doing so, but bring the Goddess Palutena closer to the screen, but others believe this leads to a higher chance for weapon discounts in the shop.
 * There actually is a reward of sorts, however, it's just not items: donating enough hearts unlocks a few extra lines of dialog with Palutena or Viridi, depending on who you give them to. It's only one or two per chapter, and most players who even have given enough hearts might overlook it, especially if they do so for the first playthrough of a given chapter.
 * One ULOZ that crossed over with New Media Are Evil: shortly after the Columbine school shooting, it was discovered that both boys played Doom religiously, and that Darren Klebold made his own custom WAD files. For a while the media loved to claim that he made a level based off of Columbine HS for "training"; ignoring the fact that this is impossible, people found and tested out the "Klebold Levels"; all they were was mods to make the game Bloodier and Gorier, with nothing remotely resembling a school anywhere to be found.

Hack and Slash

 * The original Diablo game had a rumor of a "secret cow level" that the player could access by clicking on a certain cow in the town of Tristram. Although this rumor proved false, in Diablo 2 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 wasn'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. (It's false; there is a cow level. Thunder Bluff is full of Tauren, 8 foot bipedal cows.)
 * The Diablo II instance of the secret Cow level was again referenced in one of their most recent April Fool's jokes: an advertisement for their new "Diablo 3 body pillow" featured a disclaimer at the bottom warning users "do not transmute the pillow with Wirt's Leg and a Tome of Town Portal."
 * Also, in the Battle.net chat interface in Diablo II, there is a gem that can be clicked on to toggle a lit/unlit state, but appears to do nothing functional. Occasionally when you click on it, it will give a message, such as "Perfect gem activated." Hundreds of rumors about the gem's actual, secret function have spawned. All Blizzard has said about it is that it is "Working as intended." It is possible, by clicking the gem a certain number of times, to trigger a message saying "Perfect Game Activated" (normally the message is "Gem Activated/Deactivated"), but the number of clicks required to do so is random and has no effect on anything else.
 * After initially being very hush-hush about it, Blizzard eventually came clean: all it does is turn off and on. It's not connected to anything.
 * The official site for Diablo III, specifically, the home page, has its own chat gem. After a massive thread on the Battle.net forums discussing whether clicking the gem a certain number of times would unlock the playable version of the gameplay demo seen when the game was released (started by a forum troll and helped by various random people confirming it), 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 was to change colors, changing the gem from "on" to "off".
 * This was 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.

MMORPGs

 * 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.
 * MMORPGs tend to develop a ton of rumors due to their fluid and ever-changing nature.
 * 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, draws 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.
 * There were also some rumors of classic ultimate weapons in the Final Fantasy series existing in Final Fantasy XI. For example, the Ultima Weapon, the Infinity+1 Sword of the series, existed in the database of sites like Allakazam. Many claim that the weapons do actually exist in the game database, they just haven't appeared in the game yet.
 * There's also the infamous Vulcan's and Jupiter's Ring, complete with "screenshots."
 * 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, who have logged hundreds of crafting attempts and performed the appropriate analysis, and who have mathematically determined that theory to be complete bullshit, generally go ignored.
 * This is a huge drama in the FFXI world and has started long arguments, guides, images, 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.
 * There's also Absolute Virtue. AV's difficulty, as well as the dev team's habit of changing the fight if someone beats him spawned numerous strange theories about how to bring him down.
 * World of Warcraft's Ashbringer. The developers left just enough (especially when they put in the corrupted Ashbringer and its 'special scene') to make people believe they could actually get (or cleanse) the legendary sword. The problem is that they kept pushing the cleansing back, it was supposed to appear in the original game, but than was pushed back to The Burning Crusade, and then was finally pushed back to Wrath of the Lich King. The actual hints in the game are meaningless, instead of the second son being found in Outland like the quest was supposed to Darion Mograine is located in Northrend as the leader of the playable Death Knights. They are releasing a 4 issue miniseries that deals with the Ashbringer. This being said, there are some less than clear hints (if you access/compile your own WoW database) that at one time Blizzard had begun laying the questline for Ashbringer (such as the actual sword having a database entry, and there being multiple inaccessible quest fragments), the quest originally had something to do with the legendary Warcraft fisherman Nat Pagle, and the bits of his guides on fishing that may or may not actually be part of some secret message to reveal Ashbringer's location. Blizzard was reportedly so impressed (odd, because Blizzard has a record of hating modders and private servers) with the detective work that they added in a legendary dagger called Dustbringer that is a random drop aquired from fishing in Northrend. The Ashbringer rumors have also been fueled by the many strange things that happened in Pre-Burning Crusade WoW when you carried around the corrupted Ashbringer (things like triggering random hidden cinemas, and the sword talking to you, sometimes delivering cryptic messages) and by Blizzard's habit of adding/removing/messing with very hard to find items in the game (see: Atiesh, greatstaff of the guardian).
 * There are also rumors about quests only attainable while in ghost form that nobody has found. This might be true because there are some quests that require you to be a ghost, and a GM has given a cryptic response that suggest that those are not the only quests of that type. There was also a rumor you could stay ghost form and revive anywhere else there was a restoration statue. This, while true in the Beta Testing phase of the game, was taken out during official release.
 * There use to be a way to get to GM Island, a weird net wide rumor spread fast by younger players that if you reached GM Island you'd get crowned an in-game GM. The truth is if you get to GM Island you're most likely to get punished by being banned.
 * There were also rumors and even a forum dedicated to some of the most unusual things in World of Warcraft; the first being that you could get to certain areas that at the time didn't exist (or still do not) in game, the second was that you could find a secret merchant if you were able to go all the way out into the ocean in Seal Form as a druid not too far away from Duskwood, the third being you could swim to GM Island and if you managed to do so you would become a GM (instead you would be banned), and the final rumor was thanks to South Park, that the Sword of a Thousand Truths was an actual IN GAME item.
 * The Sword of a Thousand Truths WAS actually put in Wrath of the Lich King, though renamed to Slayer of the Lifeless. The description for the sword says "Foretold by Salzman", a reference to the South Park episode, and its name refers to the unnamed player killer in the same episode, who is described as having "no life", and is defeated with The Sword of a Thousand Truths. Another sword called Gladiator's Slicer in The Burning Crusade was originally going to be The Sword of a Thousand Truths in beta versions.
 * For April Fool's Day 2009, a quest involving an airship was implemented in zOMG!. Of course, this being the first of April, 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 was 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 stated that using a fake ability called "Hack the Ground Smash" at a certain location would cause the ground to break away, and you'd 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 showed a player using a Hacker ability that involved smashing an energy-charged fist into the ground. This ability never made it into the live game.
 * The introduction of several boss characters in Maple Story 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 involved either killing certain enemies, letting certain enemies spawn, or both at once. In truth, the boss spawns every hour from when it is killed.
 * Kingdom of Loathing has killing the hermit (a certain shopkeeper), with a multitude of ways (supposedly) abounding to defeat 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...
 * The German-based MMORPG Tibia had a number of these for a number of years, with ways to get legendary items like the Sword of Fury (a converted spike sword that was readily available outside the beginning area) in the first levels, access to a GM island, and of course, a way to open up the Pits of Inferno or fight the Ruthless Seven.
 * The Pits were eventually opened and the Ruthless Seven became playable bosses.
 * RuneScape once had a player swear 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 found said item would get a free lifetime membership.
 * There was another pervasive myth, dating back to 2001, about an underground farm that could be accessed by using a sapphire on a particular tree. Later versions of the myth swapped the sapphire for a herring. The farm was generally rumored to contain fantastic new armor; the herring era whispered of a place where the then-rare rune armor could 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...

Platform Game

 * Jet Set Willy was plagued by rumors that it was 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's Stop 'n' Swop. Oh God, Stop 'n' Swop. To get specific: Throughout the game there were certain odd areas and things that seemed suspicious, but didn't actually do anything -- a sealed off door a small distance away from the sphinx in the desert level, a tiny spit of land nonetheless dubbed "Sharkfood Island" in the beachfront level, and, most suspiciously, a patently visible and patently unreachable Ice Key in one area of Freezeezy Peak. Mumbo Jumbo the shaman showed you pictures of these areas in the end cutscene, revealing that the desert door and Sharkfood Island held secret special eggs within them, and told you the eggs and key would be useful "in Banjo-Tooie" (the sequel). Tons of rumors circulated about the items, and eventually, a fan site released codes that would allow you to get the ice key, visit Sharkfood Island, and break open the door. More special eggs were since discovered in the following areas: an unbreakable barrel in one area of Mad Monster Mansion, on top of Loggo the toilet in a separate area of the mansion, the bed in the captain's cabin in Rusty Bucket Bay, and the table in Nabnut the squirrel's house in the winter portion of Click Clock Wood. This opened up a feature called Stop 'n' Swop, which showed you your collection of special items, but didn't seem to allow you to do anything with them. When Banjo-Tooie came along, there was no more mention of Stop 'n' Swop, and nothing came of it. After years of pestering on the part of fans, Rareware finally admitted that it had once had plans, but they were killed by the higher-ups for being incompatible with the Nintendo 64 hardware: specifically, as the name suggests, the idea was to change the game cartridges while the game was running, but later versions of the N64 dropped the amount of time the data would remain in RAM after removing the cart from 30 seconds to 3 or so. To make up for it, there were three secret areas in Banjo-Tooie that contained Banjo-Kazooie cartridges that, when cracked open, gave you the items Mumbo showed you in the previous game's ending. Nabnut's special egg was also in the game, though it is not obtained through breaking a Banjo-Kazooie cartridge. None of these items, however, required any interaction with the first game to get. The two ports of the original B-K games for Xbox Live Arcade have integrated Stop 'n' Swop into the games after all these years. Banjo-Kazooie will unlock extra vehicle parts in Nuts & Bolts, while Banjo-Tooie will unlock extra vehicles for Nuts & Bolts as well, provided that you've downloaded the L.O.G.'s Lost Challenges Expansion Pack. As for Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie themselves, you will get the same bonuses as before, as well as a Gamer Pic of Banjo and Kazooie, and a Banjo-Kazooie Theme for your Xbox Dashboard, in addition to something else we'll bring up a couple of bullets in...
 * There were dozens of impossible ways to "unlock" the ice key and so on, to the point that everybody swore up and down that no, there was absolutely no way at all to possibly even get close to the mysterious eggs...and then, years later, it was revealed you really could. Bonus points for the fact that the legit unlock was almost as ridiculous as the rumors—you had to figure out, then noodle in phrases as long as "CHEAT AMIDST THE HAUNTED GLOOM A SECRET IN THE BATHROOM" one letter at a time on a gigantic alphabet grid.
 * here is a list of those codes, for anyone interested.
 * For a double example, one rumor (apparently trying to salvage previous ones from the reveal of the actual codes) claimed that, no, there were real ways to get all those items without the passwords, and using the passwords meant you couldn't get the rewards for getting the items. Dastardly.
 * Upon the release of Banjo-Tooie on XBLA, Rare manages to spring a new one on us: Stop 'n' Swop II. This one is more of a list of seven objectives to complete. In order to get them all, you must hatch all of the original Stop 'n' Swop eggs, find the new Bronze, Silver, and Gold Eggs, defeat all the bosses under a total time of 15 minutes, become every possible transformation in the game, and kill yourself during boss battles a number of times. These are said to be useful in another game, but for now, they're just Bragging Rights Rewards.
 * The Mega Man Zero series had a few of these. There was a rumor that you could play as X in Zero 2 and that X series recurring villain Vile would be an optional boss in Zero 4. Both turned out to be Photoshop hoaxes. There's also the legend of Ghost Sigma, who was supposedly a hidden boss. This rumor even resurfaced upon the release of Mega Man ZX. It didn't help that in Zero 3 you could have a rematch with Phantom, who died in the first game.
 * Also one of the bosses in Zero 2 used Vile-shaped projectiles for one of his attacks, adding fuel to those boss ideas.
 * In the original Metroid, finishing the game in under an hour will let you see Samus in a bikini (also, you get to play as Samus wearing only a leotard if you beat it in under 3, and can play as her wearing a bikini by entering the code word JUSTIN BAILEY). Naturally, some claim that beating it in under half an hour or some other humanly impossible time will let you see and/or play as her naked. This is not the case.
 * One site even discussed a myth that you could play as Kraid if you beat it fast enough.
 * Another Urban Legend Of Zelda is that "Justin Bailey" has an actual meaning. It doesn't. It's not a person's name and "bailey" is not a slang term for "swimsuit". It's just that the password system uses real letters and lots and lots and LOTS of different combinations work for it. "Justin Bailey" was just simply the first meaningful-looking combination found that resulted in Suitless Samus.
 * Interestingly enough, there actually IS a meaningful-looking code that's hard-wired into the game and not a result of the password calculations: "NARPAS SWORD" followed by blank spaces or zeroes. (No, there's no Narpas Sword in the game; due to how password components are spaced this is just how the game formats what should be "NAR PASSWORD." "NAR", depending on who you ask, stands for either North American Release, Not A Real Password, or Tohru Narihito, who converted the game to cartridge format from the Famicom Disk System version, which used saves instead of passwords. The rest spells "PASSWORD".)
 * There's also the rumor that you can play as bikini-clad Samus in Super Metroid, which persisted even after Nintendo Power issued a post-interview statement just near the end of SNES days that it was categorically untrue. This desire to play as suitless Samus in Super Metroid has let to various fan-hacks. A similar myth is associated with Metroid Prime, where the scantily clad mode can supposedly be unlocked by a special button sequence.
 * Super Metroid has been the subject of many other false rumors, such as a hidden green Chozo statue and a secret area called "Warfair". Considering the insane things you CAN get away with in this game and its sequels, rumors of this sort are hard to quash. These two myths and some other old chestnuts are dealt with here: http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/19122
 * Drawn to Life: After paying 10,000 coins in the Wishing Well, one is given access to the Developer's Room. One character in which asks if you found the secret flower in the Villain's Lair which . He lies, this is fake.
 * 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, the original PlayStation game, came with an instruction booklet that had somewhere in the last few pages, an illustration of what was presumably an older Spyro. I recall there being quite a few rumors about ways to obtain this form of Spyro in the actual game. They were all false, of course.
 * Especially since that dragon that was put in there was rescuable as one of the first dragons in the game.
 * There was an unreachable island in the background of the Midnight Mountain home level in Spyro: Year of the Dragon. No matter what, it was impossible to glide or otherwise get to it, and you would lose lives in the process. Of course, rumors spread about what was on this island, such as another egg, or a secret level. Eventually, it was discovered through hacking that the island contained three life butterflies, and that was it. So much for wasting your childhood...
 * Recently there have been a lot of rumors for a new Crash Bandicoot game. The most common cites the game as a game called "Crash Bandicoot 3D: Uka Uka Resurrection".
 * There were a number of very persistent rumours about the voice cast for Kid Icarus Uprising, most notably that Pit and Palutena would be played by Johnny Yong Bosch and Tara Strong. The rumour just would not die even after Johnny denied playing Pit at Otakon. Even after the anime shorts on Nintendo Video confirmed their true VAs (Antony Del Rio and Ali Hillis), some people continue to believe them and claimed that they were replaced for the shorts.

Puzzle Game

 * 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 exists levels beyond 1,300, but no one has been able to confirm this rumor. And the best part about this rumor? The source is none other than Ichiro Mihara, the producer of the TGM series.
 * Myst was once rumored to have a fifth age called the "Thelastic Age", as well as a red button in the Selenetic Age maze, etc.
 * Of course the later realMyst remake (as well as the PSP release) did add a fifth age, Rime. Still no red button though.
 * realMyst is also rumored to have an as-yet-undiscovered Easter Egg which allows the player to carry a working gun around Myst Island. While there *is* an actual Easter Egg that gives the character a gun, it can't be fired.

Racing Game

 * LEGO Racers had 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 or something along the lines of that. It started to spread all over the Internet, until it was eventually confirmed false through nine toys debunkings. Modding has further shown that there are no indicators of the cheat ever existing to begin with, or planned at any point in time.

Rhythm Game

 * There's one of these in the making with Rock Band 2. The game contains a "Game Modifiers" menu that serves the same purpose of the newer Guitar Hero games' "Cheats" menu but without actually calling them cheats. One of the modifiers is called "Awesomeness Detection", its description is simply "Lets Harmonix know that you are awesome!", and it has no apparent effect on gameplay. Speculation as to its purpose runs rampant—especially since, almost a year after Rock Band 2's release, Harmonix is still being cryptic about its true purpose and has offered little advice beyond that if you're a high-level player, you should definitely be playing with Awesomeness Detection on.
 * One rumour is that Awesomeness Detection makes vocals different when you are online (warps the original singer's voice or something), but that's been proven false.
 * In a recent podcast by Harmonix, one of the game's senior designers announced that Awesomeness Detection does absolutely nothing.
 * Guitar Hero 5 included live DLC from the Rolling Stones. Rumors immediately started that it was the recording from their infamous concert at Altamont, CA. It was actually from an earlier show in New York.

Role-Playing Game

 * There are many rumors about getting "secret" Mons not listed in the Digimon chart of Digimon World, particularly ones that are known to exist in the game but aren't normally available. For example, Metal Etemon and Gigadramon function more or less properly, as do their digivolution items, but there is no way to obtain them without the help of a cheating device. Although the "hints" you can find around the Internet tell a different story.
 * Related to Final Fantasy, Electronic Gaming Monthly came out with an April Fool's joke about a Kingdom Hearts / Super Mario Bros. crossover called Mushroom Kingdom Hearts. Some people bought it, of course.
 * There was a comic named that by Wil, but it only has Nintendo (with Sonic the Hedgehog) mingling.
 * In a case of a rumor coming true in a later revision of a game, players were finally allowed to legitimately reverse in the remake of Phantasy Star II. It's extremely hard and time-consuming to pull off, and it also requires a save file from the remake of PS1.
 * This page was originally titled Schala Lives in reference to the uncertain fate of Schala in Chrono Trigger that led to constant insistence there was a relevant subquest in the game to find her again. The game's sequel Chrono Cross did eventually address this, albeit very strangely. The rumor is that the quest was, in the original game, unfinished at the time they had to start manufacturing the game, so it was left out completely... except for a couple of mistranslated lines which suggest that there is one last subquest to save her. This was eventually proved incorrect when early versions of the game were examined.
 * And like many games, Chrono Trigger is filled with doors that don't go anywhere or blocked by the dreaded Insurmountable Waist High Fence, but it's hard to tell a real explorable area from one that's just there for the heck of it. Spekkio's room in the End of Time in particular has a back gate that's purely decorative, but it hasn't stopped people from planting Epileptic Trees.
 * In the DS version, you could find Schala after completing a subquest, which was started after you began a New Game+.
 * How about the infamous Wheat Sword from Golden Sun?
 * Also popular were hoax cheats to enable Feizhi or Kraden as player characters. But most of all...
 * For several years, the most popular Golden Sun hoax was rumors of a third game in the series. And then in 2010, it actually happened.
 * The makers of Fallout 2 have specifically and maliciously started a rumor that made its way into several FAQs and countless forum discussions by having some NPCs claim that you would have gotten 100% completion if you did action X once the game is over.
 * Also in Fallout 2, many rumors abounded regarding Sulik's sister and methods for actually finding her in game. Such was the frustration at not eventually rescuing her that some mods have placed her in the game. Van Buren had planned to tie up that dangling plot by including her with an explanatory backstory.
 * And the Fallout 3 'Barking Lasers' hoax, which was a patently labeled joke, took on a life of its own and spread netwide through fansites and Wikia. The origin was a two-frame animated gif which showed Dogmeat shooting lasers from his mouth, and this encouraged fans to expend hours of time and go to great lengths, up to and including killing Dogmeat, in an attempt to get him to use the Wazer Wiffle.
 * Thanks largely to a misprint in a strategy guide, it was a rumor for years that you could beat Balio and Sunder from Breath of Fire III in their initial, Hopeless Boss Fight occurrence. This did not seem so far fetched, as the reward promised was unremarkable at best, but it was proven years later that it was, indeed, impossible.
 * In Secret of Mana, there was a rumor that both the Girl and the Sprite can receive another elemental since they only have seven each, and there are eight elemental slots (when you look at their magic descriptions). However this rumor can easily be dispelled by the fact that while each character only gets seven summons, there are eight total — only the Sprite gets dark magic, and only the girl gets Light. Naturally, the Girl has an empty space where dark magic would be; likewise the Sprite for light magic.
 * Oh yeah, the Solar elemental. One rumored way to get it was to go around resealing all eight seeds.
 * Likewise, two empty spaces in the complete Magicite menu in Final Fantasy VI prompted rumors of hidden Espers that would grant various absurd and powerful spells if you could find them. In reality, one of the empty spaces was the one vacated by the Odin esper when it evolved into Raiden (destroying the original in the process), and the other was there because you needed a blank space on the menu to be able to remove an Esper from a character.
 * Of course, the reality of the situation (and Odin's unique level-up buff) only encouraged the rumor that there was a way to get Raiden without losing Odin. A popular one was that you had to kill the dragon in the underground castle using Break. Possessing all of the espers (both Odin and Raiden included) was in turn supposed to unlock the Czar Dragon battle.
 * And then Final Fantasy VI Advance came out, which had four new Espers (Gilgamesh, Leviathan, Cactuar, and Diabolos) and the long-awaited Kaiser Dragon boss battle (at the end of a brand-new dungeon!).
 * In Legend of Mana there were rumors that after, if you gave specific answers to Inspector Boyd, took the right Jumi party member, made an item called "Sandra's Core" through a tedious tempering process of Emerald to produce Alexandrite, and fought to the inaccessible (it's only seen in cutscenes) deepest level of the underworld, Sandra would return and become a playable character (with incredible stats and Syncro effect, of course!).
 * Planescape: Torment had a few persistent rumors about alternate ending animations (based on the unused evil/neutral ending songs on the soundtrack), a proper romantic subplot with Fall-From-Grace (originally intended but removed for budget/time constraints), the ability to read Fall-From-Grace's diary, and an opportunity to have sex with Annah if you keep her invisible "morale" stat at maximum level at all times.
 * She comes onto you at one point, describing...er, in good detail the things she plans on doing to you. Any further dialogue choices will result in her backing off and claming she wasn't serious.
 * Lufia 2 for the SNES had a locked door in the final area rumored to be openable if all the Iris Treasures were obtained from the Ancient Cave. The woman who stores them for you hints that something may happen if they're all gathered, one of the Sinistrals is named Iris, and the Iris Treasures were extremely time-consuming to collect (one can only be obtained through a boss battle that's all but rigged, while the others are random drops in a 99-level dungeon). For years, gamers looked for an explanation beyond them just being Bragging Rights Rewards until the rumor was finally killed by Word of God...which didn't help, as realizing that one spent fifty hours of their life collecting useless artifacts for shits and giggles makes one want to climb a bell tower with a rifle.
 * Back in the days before GameFAQs, YouTube, and others, there were NUMEROUS examples of these. Some were true, others weren't. One good example is the Mother trilogy, with numerous rumors that were both true and false. Two of them in particular surrounded the final boss of Mother 2 aka EarthBound, Giygas; if you had looked into the background at just the right time, you would see the image of a fetus in the black.
 * Somebody on DeviantART in fact could've been a Trope Namer had it not already been named, since he actually shows an image of when you can see the Fetus in Mother 2. He also confirms that when the game starts to become staticy near Giygas' defeat, you do NOT hear Giygas crying for help, as the SNES' sound technologies are unable to handle that. (even Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean sound staticy and distorted).
 * Part of why the story's survived for so long, other than the vagina/birth canal/whatever part of it corresponding with the biological background in the area where you fight Giygas, is that the final battle takes place in the past and Giygas's infancy and childhood are a big part of the first game's plot.
 * The map for Might and Magic VII includes a frozen landmass to the northwest of the main continent named "Vori". Absolutely no mention of it is made in-game, and there is no way to travel there (which, of course, didn't stop some people from claiming that you could).
 * The previous installment also had its share of rumours, being the most successful of the series. There were rumours of a white goblin and an elaborate "flute quest" which originated from the fact that there was a flute quest item in the game, only it didn't do anything; probably a leftover from a removed quest.
 * Tales of Vesperia's GameFAQs board have a started a minor rumor about getting into Estelle's room. You can't, except in the PS3 version.
 * Lunar: Eternal Blue for the Sega CD had a weapon in the game manual called The Dark Scimitar that was not included in the final release of the game. Many fan communities went wild trying to find out where The Dark Scimitar was located (believing that if it was in the manual, it had to be hidden in the game somewhere). With many people claiming to have found it and making up ridiculous ways to do so (none of which worked), communities exploded when a fan finally did find a way to not only get The Dark Scimitar but many other unusual items through a glitch that's created when characters, specifically Lemina (the glitch is called the Lemina Bug for that reason) leave your party.
 * Legends abound about the mysterious locked door in Oaklore Keep. When a player tries to enter it, it simply says you must be Level 100 to enter. This hasn't stopped new players from posting theory threads on the forums constantly, though, thinking they've discovered something new.
 * Much of The 7th Saga's popularity depended on one of these. According to the storyline, the other characters are actively searching for the Runes at the same time you are. It was commonly believed that, if you're too slow, it's possible for someone to beat you to one of the Runes...however this only happens twice, with the Star Rune and Sky Rune, and no matter how fast you are you can't stop a randomly-selected character from stealing the Rune. Nintendo Power even mentioned it was possible to get to the Sky Rune before it was stolen in their review.
 * On a related note, Mystic Ark was long held up as an actual sequel to The 7th Saga, rather than a mere Spiritual Successor... until someone finally started work on translating the game and discovered right off the bat that their stories are entirely unrelated.
 * The original Diablo by Blizzard spawned a rampant rumor that there was a secret level you could access by clicking a specific cow a certain number of times. This rumor was dubbed "The Cow Level", and was debunked by Blizzard themselves via a cheat code in their Warcraft series: 'There is no cow level'. It was due to this rumor that a real Cow Level was added into Diablo 2, accessible by combining Wert's leg and a tome of town portals via the Horodric Cube.
 * From Morrowind we have this mod Fanfic/rumor.
 * From Morrowind we have this mod Fanfic/rumor.

Shoot 'Em Up

 * Proving that this Trope is Older Than They Think, the first example might come from way, way back in 1980 with the arcade game Battlezone. The rumor claimed it was possible to drive to the end of the zone and climb the mountains in the background with the tank, and if you did, you'd find some sort of castle you could explore. Of course, the developers couldn't have put such a feature in it if they wanted too, as such advanced graphics were impossible at the time. Still, the rumor persisted, and some arcade owners complained that players were hogging the Battlezone game to study it without actually playing it.
 * Almost as old, there was the "triple ship" rumor in Galaga. In this game, certain ships can capture your fighter with a tractor beam; then, assuming that isn't your last ship, you can shoot the enemy holding your previous ship and combine them into a more powerful double-ship. The rumor claimed that the double-ship could be captured and you could create an even stronger triple-ship, but alas, you could not. This may have been the first Ascended Meme in a video game, because the developers were inspired by this to indeed put such a feature in the later Galaga '88.
 * Star Control II had an extremely persistent myth of a cloaking device for the main flagship. Despite Word of God that such a device was not in the final game, screenshots of it were 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 made the Pkunk Fury ship immortal.
 * There was 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.
 * There were many theories back in the day that there was a way to shoot the dog in Duck Hunt for the NES. One was that you had to get to Stage 99 to do it. Easily the most straightforward example of wish-fulfilment 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 PlayStation 2 game. There were also rumors of a flying level, which actually appeared in Super Spy Hunter, although that was a Dolled-Up Installment.
 * There are many (joking) rumors on how to unlock secret characters for 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 MUGEN based on the SWR spriting style; many of them emulated the look incredibly well, going so far as to modify SFX from the game to fit the fanmade sprites. (The Cirno rumors were officially killed with her inclusion in 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.
 * Every time a new Touhou 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.
 * The soundtrack to Do Don Pachi: Daifukkatsu BLACK Label has an extra song titled "Zatsuza", an even faster remix of Hibachi's theme, giving rise to rumors that there's a True True Final Boss after Hibachi if you beat the game with no deaths.
 * In the past decade a legend surfaced of a game known simply as Polybius a mysterious arcade game that surfaced sometime in 1981 in a suburban Oregon neighborhood. Legend has it the game created adverse side effects including nausea, dizziness, even sleep disturbance and aversion to video games. Other claims surfaced that the side effects were more violent, selective amnesia, horrifying nightmares, suicidal tendencies and "the inability to become sad." The game was said to have vanished without a trace which has lead to speculation that the game was a secret government prototype created by the CIA and that shady Men in Black agents would come to the arcades that housed the stations to collect information. The legend has been debunked as being simply a glitchy prototype of Tempest which was known to trigger mild reactions to those who were already photosensitive, but there are still those on YouTube who claim to possess authentic videos of gameplay, which are in actuality recreations of the rumors. The alleged game even made an appearance in The Simpsons after Bart enters an old arcade shop.
 * Back in the Coin-Op days, there were rumors surrounding the old Missile Command game that the Pentagon kept track of high scorers, just in case.
 * When Galaga was released, rumors were that you could get a triple ship. That wasn't true. In Galaga '88 you can get a triple ship though.

Simulation Games

 * Games magazine Amiga Power once claimed that Theme Park players could unlock a Syndicate crossover by setting up a bouncy castle to explode on a particular day. This was merely done as a cruel prank and not as an April Fools' day joke. For years afterwards, they and other magazines got letters from people complaining that they couldn't unlock the bonus.
 * It was claimed in Amiga Power that this mode could be unlocked by building a certain ride, getting a maintenance man to repair it on a certain day, and typing in "A clown is my friend. A clown will not bite me or throw me in the basement".
 * Amiga Power subverted this Trope by featuring a real crossover between Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder as a playable demo on its coverdisk. The match was England vs. Germany, and the football was a bomb which would explode every so often, killing any nearby players. It may be inferred that the games shared a similar engine, and they were in fact near-sequential releases from the same studio (Sensible Software).
 * One of the all-time classics is the Mirage ship in Frontier: Elite II. They wound up chucking it into a secrets guide (complete with made-up specifications) and added a Mirage II into Elite III: Frontier II: First Encounters.
 * 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 C 12 DS for short) added an actual Secret Adventure Mode to the game along with a plethora of other easter eggs.
 * The creators of Neopets have somewhat double-crossed this Trope, similar to the example above. 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.
 * However, If you're lucky enough to get the lab ray and zap your pets with it, . Some will obsess over the non-existence of these pets, and will try to get them.
 * 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 was 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 increased 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 was 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 was 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.
 * In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, there was a shed with a door that could never be opened. On one forum, a lot of rumors spread about how to open the door and what you would get. In actuality, it was just a piece of leftover code that was blocked off rather than removed.
 * The numerous rumors that sprung up about acquiring those bloody (not literally) animals that hung around the valley, which all wore neckerchiefs like the one that the player's dog wore.
 * All those rumors for Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and its female counterpart about how you could get your dog to have puppies. This one's likely due to the fact that you could do so in Back To Nature, which Mineral Town is a remake of.
 * Likewise, in Rune Factory: Frontier there's a popular rumour that Raguna can marry his depressed neighbor Kross.
 * One that runs throughout the series — in the games where you can marry the Harvest Goddess, your child will possess farm-improving magical powers.
 * HM 64: Leaving your dog in your greenhouse will keep it from being destroyed by storms. Persists even after people have posted video proof that it doesn't work.
 * Magical Melody has the "Rival marriage" system that was apparently left out of the international versions. The supposed "marriage pictures" are fanwork.
 * In Rune Factory 2 (a Harvest Moon Spin-Off series), 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)
 * In Animal Crossing, there tends to be a rumor (or an accusation) made that a certain male townsperson (specifically, a cat named Bob) wears a dress. According to some, this is a programming error — he's supposed to have normal "guy" clothing. However, this is false — Bob wears the same type of sacklike clothing both male and female cats wear. His "default" shirt pattern has flowers on it, but it's a flower shirt that is available to all characters (players included) and is worn indiscriminately regardless of gender.
 * Brutus is apparently a purple version of one of the dog townspeople in the game who will move in if you neglect your game for too long and has a house full of nothing fish that crashes after entering it. 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.
 * And 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 neighbor's homes up a hill from below and causing all the neighbors to be mad at you for a week. The reality is, after a certain number of resets, the game simply recycles the last six conversations.
 * There was one rumor floating around for the Game Cube version that if you opened your file everyday and talked to the same neighbor (again, everyday) for a straight year, you'd have the option to marry that neighbor. But alas...
 * The Sims 2 has many of these, including several alleged methods of getting twins and another cheat that supposedly will get Bella Goth back.
 * The forcetwins code does give you twins, and Bella Goth is an NPC in Strangetown. You can ask her to move in with you, make her move into another lot, put that lot into the bin, and finally send it over to Pleasantview if you really want her to reunite with Mortimer and his family. She won't have the related memories or be a relative to them, though.
 * But she's not the same Bella. The Bella hidden away in the coding for Pleasantview has a different appearance then the one in Strangetown, which can be seen if she's hacked back into your family. She doesn't have any memories, either, though she's related to the others. This can be fixed by hacking her memories using Sim PE.
 * It's also potential bad for the long-term health of the game to move Sims between neighborhoods (the developers really should have disabled that feature). Additionally, the forcetwins cheat (and the cheesecake) was only added later in the franchise, probably in response to all the fake rumors of how to get twins (which ranged from fake cheat codes to eating spaghetti or cookies at particular times of the pregnancy). The food part is easy to prove as false, given that number of children is determined upon conception, as a measure to prevent 8+ family sizes.
 * A pregnant sim who eats cheesecake will deliver twins; this is the result of a typo in the coding. It was only supposed to increase the chance of twins.
 * Nintendogs has had its fair share of these over the years. The most common ones are: That Nintendo created a "Nintencats" but either never released it because they believe a cat game wouldn't sell or that it was a Japan-only game that was too poorly received to be released anywhere else. The other rumor is that your dogs could breed - this is despite the fact they're puppies who can't be more than 3 – 5 months old.
 * And now there's a "Nintendogs + Cats". Go figure.
 * In Monster Rancher 2, anything concerning ??? monster, especialy 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 Japanese game only White Mocchi(thanks to DNA capsule). Doesnt stop thousands of rumors about them though.
 * There has 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.

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 would be challenged by audience member Donkey Kong. If defeated, he would be knocked back into the audience.
 * NBA Jam had a myriad of rumors about additional secret characters with souped-up abilities. The most popular of these were Michael Jordan (who could dunk from the three-point line), Superman (who could dunk from halfcourt), Shaquille O'Neal (who couldn't be knocked down), and select characters from Mortal Kombat (which was planned for the console release but dropped). The recent next-gen remake has 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 out but still (very rarely) can appear randomly as 'Unknown' in a Royal Rumble or Slobberknocker match. Rumors persisted that you could unlock them, but it wasn't possible without a cheating device, and even then they lacked 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.

Stealth-Based Games

 * Rumors of secret weapons and characters for multiple completions of Metal Gear Solid were widespread. Claims such as completing the game 50 times with Otacon and 50 with Meryl would garner you Raven's Vulcan Cannon were even mentioned in magazines such as Powerstation.
 * Even more widespread were rumors of 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.
 * Also rumours of a FAMAS being available on the Tanker chapter; these were based on early trailers, and the weapon itself never showed up in the final game.
 * Further fueled by the flashback footage showing Snake using the FAMAS against the guards on the Tanker.
 * 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.
 * In 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.
 * 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 peoples' heads.

Survival Horror

 * 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 3-D 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 could find some way to go through it, find Rebecca Chambers fighting zombies, then play as her. Rebecca was likely a result of using a cheat cartridge or PC skin, you could find the gate but there was no way to go through it.
 * Many have claimed that the first Silent Hill game has an "Ambulance Ending" in which Harry rampages through the town in an ambulance; a common piece of joke fanart is the so-called "lost" UFO ending for Silent Hill 4 (which doesn't have one).
 * They mean this, a budget Japanese video game called Zombies vs. Ambulances.
 * In the first Silent Hill you could allegedly "commit suicide" by nonstop running — running until Harry dies from a heart attack. Which is odd, considering James is the heavy wheezer.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Another rumor was Silent Hill Origins (Aka 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.
 * 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 had speculated 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 was 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 implied 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

Turn-Based Strategy

 * Team17 are notorious for this. They 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 1, was the ** spaceman ** cheat, which would supposedly summon 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.
 * 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 force himself into a Barmaid.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics could actually be considered a subversion. Rumors were you could get Cloud Strife by doing an absurdly long list of instructions, including traversing a mine full of Chemists who want to shoot at you for no apparent reason to find a friendly dragon, scaling a volcanic spire in an otherwise non-noteworthy battle map to find a Materia Sword that was necessary to activate Cloud's Limit Breaks, fighting a robot (in a medieval-themed swords and sorcery setting) with game-breakingly powerful hidden versions of the weakest spear and shield in the game in his battle, and ultimately using a trans-dimensional portal powered by a Zodiac Stone to bring Cloud to the world of Ivalice and finding him protecting Aeris after he runs off. Turns out... every word of this is entirely true.
 * Super Robot Wars has the extremely persistent "Two Year Rule", the belief that developer Banpresto won't include an anime in their installments until two years after its conclusion, for various reasons (the most commonly cited being an attempt to avoid spoilers). However, this can be disproven simply by checking the release dates: Macross Frontier: The False Songstress will be in Super Robot Wars Z2: Hakai-hen just over a year after it hit theaters, while Mobile Suit Gundam F91 was in the original Super Robot Wars just over a month after its theatrical release. The truth is, if it takes a while for a series to appear, it's usually because the licensing rights aren't available for a couple of years.
 * Also previously, there has been an Urban Legend that Banpresto was sued by Winkysoft which caused the Masou Kishin characters in Super Robot Wars Alpha only appearing up to Alpha Gaiden, and only Masaki Andoh, Lune Zoldark and Shu Shirakawa appears in the OG series for the Masou Kishin representative, and that there will not be any other Masou Kishin coverage for that... the last part was debunked when the Masou Kishin saga was included in the SRW OG Saga mini-series, and Banpresto revealed that Winkysoft never sued them but they just want a break from Masou Kishin. As of the inclusion of the rest of the Masou Kishin that appeared in the Classic Timeline during Super Robot Wars EX... while they haven't appeared officially, Banpresto already said that they CAN appear if the timing is right.
 * In Tactics Ogre, you were apparently 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.
 * However, the remake actually does make one of the Dark Knights recruitable - Instead of one of those three, it's Ozma.
 * The fact that younger Lans Tartare was the incredibly idealistic and sympathetic protagonist of his own game probably helped this along.

Visual Novel

 * 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 said sister character must exist somewhere in the game. The more-believable rumor is that it was supposed to, but got cut during development
 * Remember 11 is rumored to have a secret ending for Satoru. It doesn't help that the flowchart explicitly says that there is one.

Wide-Open Sandbox

 * Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had two recurring rumors. One was that there existed a Yeti character somewhere on the map, and the second that there were "ghost cars" that would spawn in some precise locations and drive around without a driver. The first rumor was "proven" by some people with photoshopped images. They both turned out false — there's no Yeti in the game code, and "ghost cars" were just abandoned, wrecked cars that the game spawned in hilly areas. Since new cars don't spawn with their parking brakes on, they'd sometimes just roll down the hills. Then there were the rumors about zombies being in the game, fueled by a rather mysterious corporate building in San Fiero. Many similar rumors abound, such as the existence of Jaws, the Loch Ness Monster, Leatherface, etc. Most of these have been officially refuted.
 * Grand Theft Auto IV has Lola the prostitute, who was featured on the PS3 box and has a page on the police archives (accessible if you use the computer in the police vehicles), so there's rumors that she's in the game.
 * One piece of fan rumor turned out to be correct. In IV, you receive an achievement called "Impossible Trinity" after completing a mission in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After it was revealed that Johnny (who appears in that mission) was the playable character for the first Expansion Pack, players seized upon the achievement name and correctly predicted that Luis (who also appears) would star in his own DLC.
 * San Andreas had a single mission where you fly to Liberty City and have a shootout in the Italian restaurant which features prominently in 3. There were an enormous number of rumors suggesting that there was a way to unlock all of Liberty City. Hackers figured out how to get there, either getting outside the mission area or returning later; a surprisingly large part of the city is actually present (about 70% of Portland), hovering in the air miles above northeast Los Santos, but is useless because the ground isn't solid except in the area used in the establishing shot.
 * Another common rumor that their are aliens, UFOs, and other extraterrestial in the game, which are partly true, sort of. Two of the Truth's missions have some interesting content that may or may not be caused by aliens . A glitch in the game can cause the lights of planes to spawn, but not the plane itself, creating what technically is an unidentifiable flying objects in the sky.
 * Vice City wasn't immune to this, either; claims that there were ways to make the military submarine submerged off the North coast of the East island surface were made, up to and including talk of a secret ending where you could nuke the city.
 * The Yeti rumor became a Hilarious in Hindsight moment when Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC lets you encounter and skin a Yeti.
 * And let's not forget the achievement you get for doing so - "Six Years In The Making". Undead Nightmare was released six years after San Andreas, to the day.
 * The manual for Elite made 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 swore they had seen a Dredger just as they left hyperspace. One of these, hermit asteroids, were added to later versions of the game.
 * Minecraft has Herobrine, the supposed dead brother of the game's creator, known for creating strange objects and being elusive. Although confirmed by its creators as a hoax, some still believe it's real.
 * Although in the patch for beta 1.6.6 he actually stated "removed Herobrine" as one of the updates. What he actually did was remove the unused Human mob from the game code.
 * Every update has a line that says "removed Herobrine", or at least most of the updates.
 * Which leads one to wonder, if Herobrine is a hoax, how does he keep coming back?
 * Even when Minecraft became a full version 1.0 game, "removed Herobrine" was still listed in the release notes. This is most likely Notch poking fun at the rumor to mess with everyone's heads. On top of this, in a multiplayer server, if a player is killed by an arrow shot from a dispenser, the message that displays the cause of death is said to be from Herobrine, another nod at the rumor.
 * Word of God had jossed the rumors of Herobrine, stating the rumor was probably started by some douche and then someone else making a mod for it.
 * Proving that the developers have too much fun with the Herobrine rumor, the release notes for 1.2.5 has "Removed all ghost entities under the command of Lord Herobrine", causing people to once again believe that the rumored character is real.
 * On 9 March 2012 at the GDC, Notch mentioned that "there is one [recipe] people haven't found yet.", this happening about a week after two unused textures for hieroglyphic-covered blocks mysteriously appeared in the texture file. This has sparked a huge number of rumours and speculation.
 * Blockland has "The Golden Brick" which supposedly exists in the Slate map, and, upon clicking it, you apparently unlock Blockland Adventure Mode. It's untrue, but it's still thought to be such a cool idea that many players pretend that it's real just for fun.
 * There's also the Renderman, an apparition not unlike Herobrine from Minecraft. It's supposed to appear when you take a screenshot on a dark map, and in DOF screenshots(basically screenshots taken while your character shakes violently, to produce a very blurry image) he appears very close to the player. Many pictures have been provided of him to 'prove' his existence. He was recently revived in the Halloween Update, where a 'new form' of Renderman appeared: Preppers. Flashing red ASCII Terror Faces which randomly appeared on dark maps. Combined with the usual presence of Nothing Is Scarier in dark maps, many did not want to load these maps for fear of encountering HIM.
 * Prototype seems to be becoming a fairly recent example of this. Even before the game's release, the developers touted information that you could unlock a new character and secret mission if you had met certain criteria and found a hidden severed leg. A few weeks after the game's release, a member of the GameFAQs community found the leg, and was disappointed to find that nothing happens. The developers even acknowledged that people had found the severed leg, but they refused to give further information. Rumors now focus on things such as all the crazy things you have to do to get the leg to work, and some believe that there's another leg out there and that this leg is just a red herring.

Non-Video Games

 * Supposedly, Konami and Upper Deck Entertainment has 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 gave this a nod very early on, establishing that Pegasus' Toon monsters were 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 recently 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 and the Winged Dragon of Ra.
 * Slifer the Sky Dragon has now gained a tournament-legal release, which 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".
 * In the early days of Magic: The Gathering, 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 had "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 mentioned 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. Its collector number is 141 out of 140.
 * Another one is a player ripping up Chaos Orb in a tournament as a desperation attempt. Depending on the version it was either successful or his opponent called the judge and got his opponent disqualified for having less than 60 cards in his deck. Became an Ascended Meme in with the un-card http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=5712
 * Older Than the NES: Numerous rumours surrounded the works of Ultimate Play the Game, later known as Rare. Most famously, the cover of Lunar Jetman featured a moon buggy towing a trailer. The game featured the buggy, but not the trailer. Or did it? Rumours abounded about what the player had 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 never existed.
 * There's a rumor in the Lucky Star fandom that in a manga omake, Word of God confirmed that Kagami had a one-sided crush on Konata (which of course is prime fuel for the shippers). Except...that this omake doesn't exist, but of course the shippers love to propagate the rumor without ever checking for a source. (The lack of scans online beyond the beginning of Volume 2 contributes to this.)
 * A prank on Tumblr has started a rumor that the snake Harry Potter frees in the zoo is Nagini, Voldemort's pet snake. From the looks of things, thousands of gullible fans have reblogged the quote.
 * There's also a very highly reblogged post that appeared around the time the last movie premiered about the child actor playing Albus Severus was the same one who played baby Harry in the first movie, despite the fact that a quick IMDB check shows that the first baby Harry was actually played by a set of triplets. Also, bonus points for using a picture of baby Harry from Deathly Hallows instead of the baby Harry from Sorcerer's Stone.
 * There are a few stories going around about bits and pieces of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. When online fans in the pre-DVD days bragged that their theater's print of the film had the UK-exclusive song "Super Heroes" intact, one fan attempted to top them by claiming that his theater had an otherwise lost scene in which Riff and Brad engaged in anal sex. This became a long (LONG) running in-joke among the Rocky community, with two fans actually writing and filming an intentionally blurry version of the scene for the 2001 'Frankie Goes To Hollywood' convention. Currently, the scene circulates in a fan-created 'extended edition' in the film, strictly for the sake of keeping the legend alive, though it should never be considered canon.
 * Prince Uranus refers to a fan-created rumor that was stated to have come from an unnamed Japanese magazine's article interviewing Naoko Takeuchi, who supposedly explained that Sailor Neptune's and Sailor Uranus's lesbian relationship was in fact that of Sailor Neptune and Prince Uranus, who had died and was reborn a girl.
 * Game Informer does an annual part of their April magazine called Game Infarcer, where they parody their own writing in honor of April Fools Day. In 2006, the first edition of Game Infarcer, they wrote many fake articles about 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 happened to be a cyborg, and a review on downloadable content for Madden '08, where people would have to purchase such elementary things as air for the ball. Put bluntly, there are actually people who didn't notice the word "PARODY" written at teh bottom of the page and sent angry letters to GI about their info 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.
 * A few years ago, it was widely believed that all games in Freecell were winnable. This changed when it became public knowledge that this, in fact, wasn't the case. This hasn't stopped some people from believing so, and Solitairelabratory.com and other number-crunchers have shown that the Free Cell win rate is 99.999% or 1 unsolvable game per 78,000 deals.
 * A popular rumor was started that the finale of Captain Tsubasa ended with Tsubasa on the hospital waking up with no legs. As it turned out, he was run over by the truck seen in the first episode and the whole series was All Just a Dream. Many people have stated that they "saw" the episode, but no rips appear on the internet, other than a picture of Tsubasa in a hospital bed.
 * Doraemon has a very similar rumor.
 * The still-persistent belief that Renamon was male in the original Japanese

''Those lines. What are those lines on the left there? Must be some way to use them to access the secret All The Tropes bonus level.''

I figured it out! *types in the code* OH SHI-