15 Video Game Myths We All Believed

15. Creating Hybrid Games With 2 Discs

Anyone who grew up around shared PCs and early disc-based gaming probably heard this one from a friend who sounded completely sure of it. The idea was simple and ridiculous at the same time: put two game CDs together, and the machine would somehow mash them into one impossible crossover. What made the rumor stick was how little most kids actually knew about how those drives worked, so the gap got filled with imagination instead. It was never tied to one official release, which only helped it travel from one schoolyard to the next. No secret hybrid game was waiting inside the tray, of course, but plenty of scratched discs were sacrificed to the experiment anyway. | © Reddit

14. Gaining God Powers Through Administrator Mode

Old family computers gave this myth just enough fake authority to sound believable. Right-click a game, hit “Run as administrator,” and suddenly people swore you could unlock hidden powers, secret options, or some kind of built-in developer cheat mode. In reality, administrator privileges were never magic; they simply gave a program elevated permission to make system-level changes if it needed them. That technical wording was more than enough to confuse a generation of players who were already convinced every game had one last buried trick no guide had found yet. The rumor survived because “administrator” sounded powerful, and for a lot of kids, that was explanation enough. | © Mojang Studios

13. The Killswitch Game

Killswitch never had the clean trail a real cult classic should have had, and that uncertainty is exactly what made it linger. The legend described a 1989 horror game with only a tiny print run, built around two characters, Porto and Ghast, and a premise so unnerving it barely needed embellishment: once you finished it, the game erased itself forever. That detail turned the whole thing into perfect internet folklore, because the lack of surviving proof became part of the proof. What makes the story even stranger is that the supposed developer, Karvina Corporation, belonged to the fiction too. The myth outgrew its origin and started being repeated like lost media rather than what it actually was: a story clever enough to pass for history. | © Killswitch

12. Fallout 3 Can Predict The Future

Fallout 3 picked up one of gaming’s eeriest modern hoaxes when players began repeating the “numbers station” story tied to Galaxy News Radio. According to the rumor, killing Three Dog and making a few very specific story choices would cause the station to spit out coded broadcasts that predicted real-world disasters before they happened. That was the hook: not just hidden content, but hidden content that seemed to know tomorrow before anyone else did. It sounded exactly like the kind of secret a paranoid post-apocalyptic RPG might hide in plain sight. The problem was that nobody ever proved it in the game, and Bethesda eventually shot the whole thing down. Even so, the myth remains one of the internet’s best examples of how a creepy setup can outrun the facts. | © Bethesda Game Studios. | © Bethesda

11. Saving Aerith in Final Fantasy VII

Nothing sent players back to old saves faster than the rumor that Aerith could still be saved in Final Fantasy VII. The supposed methods changed depending on who was telling the story: max out every character, say the right things in dialogue, carry a hidden item, unlock some buried side quest, or trigger a path the game never explained. None of that ever held up in normal play, but the rumor refused to die because her death hit too hard for people to accept it as final. Square’s own creators were clear for years that the revival stories were never part of the original plan, which makes the myth more revealing than frustrating. Fans kept searching because they wanted the game to blink first. | © Square. | © Square Enix

10. The Herobrine Myth in Minecraft

Minecraft was practically asking for its own ghost story, and Herobrine filled that role better than any official monster ever could. A pale-eyed version of Steve appearing at the edge of the fog was already creepy enough, but the legend really took off once people started adding fake screenshots, staged encounters, and stories about strange structures appearing where no player had built them. The rumor became so big that Mojang leaned into it with the running “Removed Herobrine” joke in patch notes, which only kept the mystery alive for another generation of players. He was never a real mob hidden in the code the way people claimed, yet Herobrine still ended up feeling more real to many fans than creatures the game actually shipped with. | © Mojang Studios

9. Bigfoot in GTA: San Andreas

Back O’ Beyond and Mount Chiliad became hunting grounds for people who were certain GTA: San Andreas had one last monster tucked into its forests. The Bigfoot rumor spread because the map had the right mood for it: too much empty woodland, too many strange shadows, and just enough space for players to believe Rockstar had hidden something absurd on purpose. Blurry screenshots, fake videos, and later mods did the rest, turning a campfire story into one of the most famous myths in gaming history. Rockstar denied it at the time, and years later former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij made it even plainer that Bigfoot was never actually in the released game. That never stopped people from going back into those woods for one more look. | © Rockstar Games

8. World of Warcraft and Ashbringer

Vanilla World of Warcraft trained players to treat every odd line of dialogue, every strange item entry, and every unexplained event as the start of a secret quest, so Ashbringer theories spread with almost no resistance. Long before the sword’s story was fully resolved, rumors claimed there was a hidden path to obtain it, cleanse the Corrupted Ashbringer, or unlock some deeper chain that Blizzard had buried for only the most obsessive players to find. The Scarlet Monastery event tied to Corrupted Ashbringer gave those theories even more life, because it proved the weapon already carried unusual scripted behavior. That was all the community needed to believe there had to be another layer somewhere. In the end, the legend mattered almost as much as the item itself, and Blizzard later nodded back to those old rumors instead of pretending they never existed. | © Blizzard Entertainment

7. 17th Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus

The empty spaces in Shadow of the Colossus did a lot of the mythmaking on their own. Players rode across those enormous quiet fields, found strange corners that felt too deliberate to be meaningless, and started convincing themselves there had to be one more beast hidden somewhere beyond the official sixteen. That rumor picked up even more steam once people learned the game had gone through earlier plans with more colossi before the final roster was locked in. Suddenly, every unreachable ledge, every odd ruin, and every suspicious patch of land looked like evidence of a secret seventeenth fight. It never existed in the finished game, but the world felt so haunted by cut ideas that people kept searching anyway. | © Team Ico

6. The Mysterious Truck in Pokémon Red & Blue

Nothing gave playground speculation more fuel than seeing something real that still made no sense. That is exactly why the truck near the S.S. Anne became legendary in Pokémon Red & Blue. Most players never even noticed it, and the ones who did usually heard the same follow-up story: use Strength on the truck and Mew would appear. That sounded just plausible enough to survive for years, especially in a game already packed with hidden mechanics, glitches, and half-explained secrets. The truck itself was absolutely there, which made the lie stronger, not weaker. What was never there was the reward people attached to it, but a whole generation still treated that parked vehicle like it was guarding the biggest secret in Pokémon history. | © Game Freak

5. Films Are Bigger Than Games

For a long time, video games were treated like the smaller sibling of movies, a business people enjoyed but did not talk about with the same weight or cultural seriousness. That belief lingered even after the numbers stopped supporting it. Games grew into a global force that could pull in more money than the box office, keep audiences engaged for years instead of weekends, and turn releases into events bigger than most film premieres. The old assumption survived because cinema had prestige, celebrity, and a much older public image, while games were still fighting the stereotype that they were only for kids or hobbyists. Financially and culturally, that gap has been gone for a while. The myth just lasted longer than the facts did. | © Lucasfilm

4. Removing Clothing in Tomb Raider

The Lara Croft nude-code rumor spread with the kind of speed only late-90s gaming culture could produce. Somebody claimed there was a secret button combination, somebody else swore their cousin had done it, and before long the myth felt less like gossip and more like forbidden knowledge passed from one memory card owner to another. Part of its staying power came from the era itself, when cheat codes, hidden modes, and prank magazine tips were everywhere. In reality, the original Tomb Raider never had an official code that let players remove Lara’s clothing, no matter how many fake instructions kept circulating. What made the story immortal was not the evidence behind it, but the fact that people badly wanted to believe one more outrageous secret was still waiting to be found. | © Aspyr

3. Pong Was The First Video Game

A lot of people still treat Pong as the absolute beginning because it is the first early game that became a true mass-market icon. Its simplicity made it easy to remember, and its success made it feel like a starting point. The problem is that video game history was already moving before Atari’s paddles started bouncing that square dot back and forth. Earlier experiments like Tennis for Two and Spacewar! had already proven that interactive electronic games could exist, even if they were not commercial sensations in the same way. So the myth is understandable, but it flattens a much stranger and more interesting history. Pong did not invent video games from nothing; it turned them into a recognizable business and cultural phenomenon. | © Atari

2. Playable Luigi in Super Mario 64

No Super Mario 64 rumor had more staying power than the idea that Luigi was hidden somewhere in the cartridge, waiting for the right sequence, the right star count, or the right reading of that famous courtyard plaque. The “L is real” theory turned one blurry texture into a full-blown obsession, and people spent years treating the castle like it still had one last impossible unlock left inside it. In the retail game, Luigi was never a hidden playable character you could access through normal play, so the myth itself was false. What kept it alive, though, was the suspicion that it came from somewhere real, and later development material only made that suspicion harder to dismiss. That is why this legend never fully died: it was nonsense, but not entirely born from nowhere. | © Nintendo

1. Secret Level in Diablo

The original Diablo inspired one of gaming’s greatest fake secrets by putting cows in town and apparently trusting players to behave normally around them. They did not. The rumor claimed that clicking a cow enough times, or doing some bizarre ritual around Tristram, would open a hidden level that almost nobody could prove but everybody seemed to know about. That kind of myth was perfect for the early internet, when a doctored screenshot and a confident explanation could travel a very long way. In the first game, the secret level was not real, no matter how many people kept testing the theory. What makes the story unforgettable is that Blizzard later embraced the joke so completely that the fake secret eventually became one of the most famous real ones in gaming. | © Blizzard Entertainment