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Video & Computer Game Urban Myths

Likewise, utterly adored the game.

I hadn't heard the Level 99 before Midgar version of the story - that's just cruel, though definitely of the same breed as so many playground video game rumours, in that it requires you to do something either so difficult or so tedious that you'll either never bother, or be convinced you didn't pull it off quite right to get the desired effect.

The version I heard, from several sources, was to do with - I'll get the names wrong, it's been twenty years! - the toy soldiers you found in a few places called something like "1/34 Soldier". The idea was that you had to collect all 34, and then take them to a specific location - the location was some sort of blacksmith's house, which you only ever had to visit once during the course of the story, but nevertheless had its own designated location on the World Map. So you had a combination of a location that felt like it should be more significant than it was, and an item that was utterly useless, in a game (and indeed a genre) where useless items simply don't exist.

I can't remember if it was definitely "1/34 Soldier" or something like "1/16", but the name implied that there was a set number of them available, but there were actually fewer than that in the game, so again the task required would be an impossible one. IIRC, it was one of the game's many poor translations, and a more accurate name would have been something like "1:16 Soldier", with the number representing a ratio, not a quantity, as they were supposed to be toy soldiers, or scale models. Hence why they were won as low-rank prizes at the Gold Saucer, or found in kids' bedrooms, or beside the bed of trainee soldiers. It was just a bit of a joke item.


I think you were probably correct. The translation of FF VII to English was not a great one. Rushed, filled with typos, and in fact in some cases mistranslated things pretty badly.

Like during the first mission mission at the MAKO reactor, you fight that giant Robot Scorpion? The dialogue tells you "Attack while its tail is up!" So you do. Only to be followed by "And it will counter attack with its laser!" By which point it's too late. You've attacked and learnt that the hard way.

A guy named Daniel Burke actually spent 5 years re-translating the game in its entirety, in an attempt to rectify much of this.

Cruel as hell for anybody trying to find all those soldier toys, though.


The other version stemmed from the Japanese version of the game - there was, hidden in the source code (as I don't believe it was accessible in-game), a Materia called something like "Underwater Breathing", which led people to believe that it was used to go underwater to recover Aeris' body. But, in the Western release, they added the WEAPON optional bosses, and the Underwater Materia was required to battle Emerald WEAPON underwater.

Apparently there was a perception at the time that American gamers wanted more of a challenge from their games, so Square added the optional bosses to provide that on the Western release. I wonder how many other urban legends stem from regional variations in game content, back when that sort of thing was more common?


You do wonder. But people will latch onto the smallest of things when they start data mining a game.

As a guy who works in that industry the number of things which get cut from a title during development can be significant. What causes those can be down to anything from time constraint, artistic choice and even just not being able to get a system to function in the way in which you want or to the quality it needs.

And in doing so it's rare that the abandoned content is removed from the game entirely. It usually just gets sheared off from being accessible - in case, at some later date, the decision is made to rework it back into the game in a properly functioning state.

I've worked on titles where very late into development we'll find some place where the User can unexpectedly fall through a wall, revealing huge parts of the map (complete with NPCs wandering around) which were either never finished, or cut for other reasons.

The fix, of course, is not to finish developing the map at that stage. It's just to stop people falling through that wall. :)

It tends to be that this happens in adventure and RPG titles more than other games purely because of the higher number of variable in narrative driven games. I think of Bioware's Dragon Age Origins, for which they recorded significant amounts of dialogue, and created cutscenes, for Teryn Loghain being a Party member throughout the entirety of the game. Only then it was decided that it would only be possible to recruit him as a Party member in the latter stages of the game, AFTER most of those dialogue sequences would have been accessible. They all exist as files 'on the disc' but they can't be used in the game itself.

With a game the size of Skyrim there's even more on the cutting room floor. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages has two large sections dedicated to unfinished quests and unused NPCs. And of course it's natural for gamers to speculate why these things were cut, why and how thing were originally going to be much grander or more complicated originally - 'the huge amount of almost complete files clearly suggest that!'

But often things get abandoned over a year before release, long before they reached a playable state. There is no conspiracy. Just a change in direction.
 
Engrossing video from Digitiser:

It's about the 80s arcade game Bezerker, and whether it was cursed (or rather, was one of its machines cursed?). Well worth ten minutes of your time.
 
I’m not sure if it’s been discussed in this thread before but what about the Polybius cabinet games that supposedly made kids ill or turned them to madness?Theres only a handful of pictures of the games and it’s unsure whether they really existed.Super interesting
 
I’m not sure if it’s been discussed in this thread before but what about the Polybius cabinet games that supposedly made kids ill or turned them to madness?Theres only a handful of pictures of the games and it’s unsure whether they really existed.Super interesting

Polybius has been discussed multiple times within this thread, dating back to 2005.
 
Engrossing video from Digitiser:

It's about the 80s arcade game Bezerker, and whether it was cursed (or rather, was one of its machines cursed?). Well worth ten minutes of your time.

"The robot enemies homed in on you like high street clipboard wankers" :D
 
I remember playing a game on my AtariST in the late 80s/early 90s, some freeware or demo, I honestly can't remember. It was a game where you flew a small silver jet-like craft and had to avoid mountains on either side. I'd played the game many times before but on one occasion the controls just stopped working, the plane flew itself and landed on a small patch of land. I watched as this little pixelated man got out and had a wee! Little wee-pixels arcing into the air! The he got back into the craft, took off and my joystick started working again!

I ran and told my dad and replayed and replayed the game in front of him, but it never happened again! Similarly with friends, I could never replicate the incident. I could tell people thought I was making it up, but I know it happened! It was so odd.

Looking back now it was probably some joke the programmer put it, to only occur when certain criteria was filled. Strange though! My own urban legend!

Blimey that takes me back.
I remember playing what sounds like the same game on a large Atari console version in a pub back in the late 80s.
Was playing in 2-player challenge mode and I'd just completed a level, when the flying saucer landed and the alien gets out for a comfort break near the edge of the screen. I remember being surprised and saying to my mate "bloody hell look - he's having a pee!"

A lot of the other urban legends mentioned in this thread are really intentional Easter Eggs built into games. I remember one of my favourite space games on the Speccy - Dark Star, had a complete new game pop up if you entered some specific code words on the high-score table.
 
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