We all knew one. That kid who always told lies about video games. Maybe they knew a cheat code to make Lara Croft naked, or said that something special happened in Sonic if you collected 1000 rings, or that there really was a Carcer City in GTAIII that you had to be awesome to get to. Maybe you were that kid.
Do video game lies arise out of a desire to trick people, or because the liar wants to look cool? We may never know, but we can record all of these lies for posterity. Years from now, historians will be able to observe this unique bit of video game culture.
Because of positive response in a thread I started on the TIGSource forums, I’ve created a wiki at Wikia to record the odd phenomenon of video game lies. The history of video games is poorly-recorded, and this is especially true of the cultural history. The video game liar seems to be a universal experience of people who grew up around video games, and I’d like it if we could better document our experiences with it.
Visit the Video Game Lies database, and browse through the entries or add one of your own. The site’s a bit rough right now, but I’ll try and clean it up when I get the chance.
great idea and very useful for researchers, thanks a lot!:)
This is a fantastic idea.
I vaguely remember encountering a ton of Pokemon/MissingNo misinformation I picked up over the internet, as well as countless, countless lies for how to get the Triforce in LoZ: OoT or the Stop n’ Swop menu working in Banjo Kazooie / Banjo Tooie.
Still, those lies were sometimes beneficial: they added a mystery and a thrill to the games – there would always be some things you’d never know. In fact, I believe that the flash game, “Nicholas’ Weird Adventure 2” has a secret room which you can get to through a convoluted and impossible-to-guess series of tasks, created specifically to imitate ‘video game lies’ the author had encountered in the past.
In Everquest, some of the lies started as a rationalization to explain some game mechanic poorly understood by the players (like the plains pebble making food last longer – some foods lasted longer than others by design, but players didn’t understand why, until that stat was displayed to players). Some started as tricks to fool later groups and guilds into failing encounters because the correct trick wasn’t done. Some were done for fun – like the original write up of a brownie illusion quest (nowadays, such an illusion item actually exists) with obviously hoax steps, like to acquire the “gnomish marital aid device” from an NPC who’s name was a barely mangled “ron jeremy.” And some were pure malevolant – such as the claim that Jade Reavers dropped off of the mayor of Rivervale (halfling home town). That item was the bottleneck for many rangers doing their epic quest, and far too many rangers were tricked into trashing important factions in the hope that they’d get what they were waiting months to obtain.
And one of the most cherished and beloved was a make-believe hoax done to someone who just bought a high-level character on ebay (before it was banned on ebay). One of the lines from that hoax still reverberate to any EQ player “where is burned woods this week?”
I really have to laugh because i fell for many of the lies, but one in particular is street fight 2 alpha when they said that if you win with ryu you will unleash shin guoken ( akuma’s brother). I guess that wasn’t a lie after all he’s in the new street fighter now, but as a different name.