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Video & Computer Game Urban Myths

sirwiggum said:
I remember Jet Set Willy flushing the character down a toilet and going to another area. Was this an actual move?
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See how JSW ended by going to the 11 minute mark here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkGqVcqjY_4

Basically he gets his head flushed down the toilet.

JSW 2 ended like this, on the other hand:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI58TIRxS4M

Which might be what you heard of, though it was really a joke. Poor old Willy! Whatever happened to Willy Meets the Taxman, anyway?
 
I think this fits here.

Video games depict religion as violent, problematized, study shows
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-vid ... olent.html
February 27th, 2012 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences

In the past few years, the video game industry has grown from a niche
market into a major part of mainstream media. This increase in popularity and use of technology has allowed video game developers to insert more detail and nuance into the storylines of their games. Many video games have begun incorporating religion as a key aspect to plot points and story lines. Greg Perreault, a doctoral student in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found that the many newer-generation video games equate religion with violence in the game narratives.

Perreault examined five recent video games that incorporate religion heavily into the storyline. The video games he studied were "Mass Effect 2," "Final Fantasy 13," "Assassin's Creed," "Castlevania: Lords of Shadow" and "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion". Perreault found that all of these video games problematize religion by closely tying it in with violence.

"In most of these games there was a heavy emphasis on a "Knights Templar" and crusader motifs," Perreault said. "Not only was the violent side of religion emphasized, but in each of these games religion created a of problem that the main character must overcome, whether it is a direct confrontation with religious zealots or being haunted by religious guilt."
While Perreault observed a relationship between violence and video games, he does not believe video game developers are creating an intentional commentary on religion.

"It doesn't appear that game developers are trying to purposefully bash organized religion in these games," Perreault said. "I believe they are only using religion to create stimulating plot points in their story lines. If you look at video games across the board, most of them involve violence in some fashion because violence is conflict and conflict is exciting. Religion appears to get tied in with violence because that makes for a compelling narrative."

Perreault presented his findings at the Center for Media Religion and Culture Conference on Digital Religion.

Provided by University of Missouri-Columbia
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They missed Bioshock 2 out of that and the wonderfully smug and unpleasant Sophia Lamb, voiced by the actress who played Agatha Christie in Doctor Who.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
They missed Bioshock 2 out of that and the wonderfully smug and unpleasant Sophia Lamb, voiced by the actress who played Agatha Christie in Doctor Who.
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Ah Bioshock. An absolute treat if you are into early 20th century / Art Deco / Steampunk design in an underwater metropolis setting. Gorgeous.

References to Ayn Rand everywhere - Andrew Ryans name, Atlas the character, the intro movie.

I recall in the 2nd game a cat in a block of ice called Schrodinger. Amusing.
 
Ever hear a rumour about a game based on Stephen King's novella The Mist? It was true! Here's someone playing it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4O_38-tATM

Although it seems really difficult if you're gonna be sacrificed by Mrs Carmody every twenty moves. Like Hitchhikers' Guide difficult.
 
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!
 
I have never been able to recall the name of a game we used to play in the office when we got bored trying to sell computers to teachers. I am pretty sure it ran in b & w on the one-box Macs. Normally it was a simple space shoot-em-up but there was a hidden alt-start game option which replaced the craft and usual targets with a flying phallus and assorted lady-parts. I have tried online a few times to trace this but all I came up with today is this very strange video:

Giant Flying Penis

Evidently made with lurve but not NSFW! :eek!!!!:
 
Ta but I've just found the rude version of Frak on Youtube and it definitely was not that! Nice tune!

It was def. a space shoot-em-up in standard form.

You would think such an option would be legendary but I have always drawn a blank on this. I'm sure I did not dream it. :)
 
Creepiest urban legends in the history of gaming

The usual suspects appear in the list: Polyibius, Majora's Mask "Ben Drowned", Herobrine...but there's one or two new ones.

Killswitch is a game that was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989. Only limited copies of the game were produced (between 5,000 to 10,000 copies) and it was very popular among Soviet gamers. The game itself was a pioneer in the survival horror genre. You had to choose between two characters, a girl or an invisible demon. The goal of the game was to navigate through an abandoned coal mine while battling demons and coal monsters. As it was hard to navigate the game with an invisible character people choose to complete the game with the girl character. Unfortunately, No one ever completed the game with the demon, because upon beating the game all trace of it would be erased from your hard drive.

In 2005, an unopened copy of the self-deleting game surfaced on Ebay where it was promptly bought for $733,000 by a man from Japan named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube. The only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
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Is it possible he was crying as he paid $733,000 for game that didn't load? :lol:

Fallout 3 is a vast open world role playing game. Therefore, it would not be surprising to find that there are things within the game that many people have yet to discover. However, it is claimed by some that they have found something in the game that may predict the future.

The story goes that the post-apocalyptic game predicts the future, in the real world, using morse code and hidden messages within the games radio station. There are stations that broadcast morse code in the game. However, some claim that you can hear a DJ on the station rambling off such cryptic phrases as "The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these we are all Brits" and "I can't believe Britney's actually won an Oscar!" These phrases are followed by a series of numbers in morse Code that can be interpreted as dates. Whether or not the Queen will die on March 19, 2014 remains to be seen. Bethdesa, the company that designed the game, denies that these cryptic radio stations exist.
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So there you go..her Madge will pop her royal clogs in a months time !
:shock:

One or two others in there I've not read on this thread.
 
I've played Fallout 3 a LOT, and have never heard this.

Sounds like nonsense.
 
I've never played it myself. I can't stop shooting zombies on Transit at the moment. It does say "some people".....who they are....???

Over on Creep Pasta I've found a whole thread on the Majora's Mask, Ben Drowned haunted video game. It's a long read, even longer if you've never played the game but in short...it drove Matt insane and "Ben" might not be Ben after all, something more sinister according to Matt.

LINK
 
Yeah I've played a lot of Fallout 3 & New Vegas and never heard that either....
 
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!
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Could it have been "river raid" A view from above of a jet flying up a river avoiding the banks? (Which I owned, but never saw a pilot peeing, alas) or Canyon bomber which I didn't own but seems to be a view from within the canyon?
 
I've googled a few times, although uncertain of what to actually search for, regarding a weird quirk that happened to me while playing Silent Hill.

Must have been Silent Hill 1 or maybe Silent Hill 2 on the PS1 or PS2.

Anyhow, was playing as the lead character and it occurred just before discovering an abandoned fairground and then some underground sewers. If I recall you had to shoot a policewoman character at some point at the fairground.

Anyway, I did something and died but when my character regenerated one of his legs was just a long pole. He looked like the normal character but one of his legs was like a metal pole vault, which inevitably caused him to walk difficultly and made playing the game quite hard as he couldn't run away from things quickly.

I think I eventually restarted from an earlier save game to get around the issue but have not been adequately able to find online reference of this being a regular glitch in the game.

Silent Hill was an amazing game when it first came out, further versions seemed to ramp things up to the point where the original atmosphere and survival horror elements were lost.
 
Mr Bin has played a huge number of hours of Fallout 3 (a couple of hundred hours, when we go away he copies his save game onto a memory stick and takes it with him as it's just about the only thing we couldn't replace if there was a house fire), I've just asked him and he says that he has never heard any messages like those. That's not to say it's not true but I wold be very surprised.
 
a man from Japan named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube. The only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
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Which one is it? Ryuichi, Ryichi or Ryuchi...?
 
:sceptic:

As gamers grow older and more suspicious, the rumors need to get more difficult to debunk. We live in an age where the rumor birth/death cycle happens months before a game is even released. So – the Fallout 3 morse code rumor. Each Fallout game has been filled with obscure references and secret Easter Eggs that are still only now being discovered, so a lot of people were ready to believe strange morse code messages might be real in Fallout 3 – even if they were predicting the future.

If you killed Three-Dog and completed the game through the destruction of Raven Rock, Galaxy News Radio would occasionally turn to a "numbers station" (think Lost) followed by morse code messages.

The creepier interpretations of these involve the exact date of the Queen of England's death, Britney Spears winning an Oscar, and someone rambling about the end of the world. What gave these messages credence were some other supposed decoded messages – predicting Gary Coleman's death and the BP Gulf oil spill. The real advantage of this hoax was that the messages were hard to come by, and even if you could find some, most gamers can't easily interpret morse code transmissions. So instead, our instinct was to trust the internet. Internet rumors…internet rumors never change.
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From "The 6 Cruelest Hoaxes and Urban Legends in Video Games
 
Not an urban myth but I used to play The Hobbit on the Sinclair Spectrum 48K ... it had a type in your instructions/choose your own adventure type of game play. Being about 10 years old, we would inevitably get bored and type in stuff like "tell Gandalf to **** off" and other such sparkling wit. The first time you swore it would warn you not to again, the second time the game would shut itself down.
 
Yeah, swearing in computer adventure games could provide literally seconds of entertainment. Gremlins used to say "How uncouth!", The Very Big Cave Adventure put you in a Swear Box where you had to wash your mouth out with soap to get back to the game, but Robin of Sherlock had a problem. If you swore in that, the game reset - and if you typed "BREAK WINDOW" it only read the first four letters of each word and thought you were farting. Then it reset!
 
That's funny, I'd heard the BREAk WINDow story too but about the game mentioned in the post above yours.
 
gncxx said:
Yeah, swearing in computer adventure games could provide literally seconds of entertainment.
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Something used to happen in Valhalla for the Spectrum if you swore but I can't remember what it was now.
 
davidplankton said:
Something used to happen in Valhalla for the Spectrum if you swore but I can't remember what it was now.
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Mary used to walk onscreen and poke you.

Then your character would turn a few shades of colour, I assume out of embarrassment.

It was especially funny if your character was on one side of the screen, and she appeared on the other - you had to wait until she trudged all the way over to you, then all the way back again.


BTW it wasn't The Hobbit that shut down after swearing - it was more something like Pi-mania. The Pi-man didn't like swearing. Or violence.

This reminds me of the game The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (based on a choose-your-own-adventure book) - putting swear words into the high score chart would prompt responses, and entering "The Hobbit" would give you the reply "The only game more tedious than this..."
 
OneWingedBird said:
That's funny, I'd heard the BREAk WINDow story too but about the game mentioned in the post above yours.
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I must admit I never farted while playing an adventure game, but it might have applied to more than one of them. "Break wind" sounds like a quaint thing to type in, doesn't it?
 
This reminds me of the game The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (based on a choose-your-own-adventure book) - putting swear words into the high score chart would prompt responses, and entering "The Hobbit" would give you the reply "The only game more tedious than this..."
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That was because WOFTM was a repurposed and vastly inferior version of Halls of the Things.

As far as I recall, it bore no similarity whatsoever to the actual choose-your-own adventure book. :lol:
 
It didn't! And yes, HOTT was much better, probably the Spectrum game I played the most (as well as The Hobbit :D )
 
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