Starting from the earliest days of its appearance, the games began to quickly acquire all kinds of rumors, myths and speculation. Perhaps you know about some of these myths, but the world of video games is so huge that you often need to be a fan of a particular genre and even a specific title, if only to hear about certain myths with an ear. One of these myths, for example, is a kind of cheat code, thanks to which you can resurrect the main character Aerith from Final Fantasy VII, after the death of which a real drama broke out among the fan community with tears and snot, and angry developers fell on the game developers. However, there are rumors and more scandalous, such as the one in which it is said that there is a special code that can completely expose Lara Croft from the popular Tomb Raider series.
But game myths are not only rumors and conjectures about secret characters and locations. Mysterious, mystical, often funny and intriguing rumors also circulate around game-like themes, such as those that say that games can directly cause cruelty, or that only boys play video games. Therefore, if you knew, but forgot, or did not know about them at all, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with a dozen of the most popular rumors that are somehow connected with the video game industry.
The curse of sports sim Madden NFL
We have American football simulators are not very common, but in the West, the next myth is perhaps one of the most popular in the history of the gaming industry.
His story begins in 2000, when the developer and publisher of Electronic Arts decided that the annual publication of photos of the best football players on the covers for his popular sports series Madden NFL would be an excellent marketing ploy. And from this moment strange and mysterious events begin. The first under the “curse” got Dorsey Levens, a player of the team Green Bay Packers. Shortly after he appeared on the cover of the game, the footballer seriously injured his knee and was unable to return to the team. For several years, almost every player who was on the cover of a game series, after some time either got injured or lost his health altogether (as a result of strange incidents) and could not continue his sports career anymore. So people started talking about the curse of Madden. In 2012, there was even talk that EA decided to make a film based on all this. But so far deaf.
Nevertheless, in all this there is a logical explanation. Any football player (like any other athlete) who visited the cover had both successful and not successful seasons. American football is a very harsh sport. There are often injuries and damage. But this does not mean that the appearance on the cover of a video game in some magical and mysterious way subsequently leads to a sprained ankle.
In Tomb Raider there is a code that allows to expose Lara
In 1996, Tomb Raider was like a breath of fresh air. The game about the young Countess Countess in the best traditions of Indiana Jones turned out to be very atmospheric. There were ancient ruins, mythical treasures and even dinosaurs. Lara Croft has become a new game icon, and not so much because of the game itself, but due to its presence in it. Nobody argues, the adventure component of the game was strong, but it was her heroine who attracted the attention of the players - a slender and busty adventurer. Needless to say, a large number of rumors and myths immediately spread around the game on this basis. One of these myths argued that the game has a code that allows you to unlock the "suit" of Eve for Lara.
In fact, such a code never existed, but it didn’t stop the players from trying to find it. Fake codes began to appear on the Web (the year was 1997). As a result, it turned out that these codes did fit, but they didn’t expose Lara, but opened up some other additional bonuses and secrets. Despite the time elapsed since the first mention of such a code, this myth still remains one of the most popular. And although, again, no such code existed, this did not stop the game mod makers, who themselves created the game models of naked Lara and included them in the PC version of the game.
Game mod Hot Coffee for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
The scandal around the already distressful Grand Theft Auto series from the company Rockstar Games has flared up with a new force with the release of the Grand Theft Auto: San San Andreas. A year after the game was released, the entire gaming community began to vividly discuss the new mod called Hot Coffee. Curious modders discovered that in the San Andreas game files there are traces of a scandalous mini-game that did not get into the final version.
The point is this: there is the main character Karl, there are six girls. In the story, Karl can flirt with any of them and, under the best of circumstances, the girls offer him to go "for a cup of coffee." In the original game, the camera at that moment remained hanging in the doorway, but the player could hear unequivocal ahi and sighs. Doubt that Karl is now a big lucky one. A year after the game was released, a third-party mod appeared. The focus is the same: Karl, six girls, go for a cup of coffee, but of course! Only now the camera did not remain in the door, but followed the main character into the bedroom, where the player was no longer an outside listener, but the main character of the hot scene.
After that, the hype rose so strong that it came right up to the US Senate. Rockstar Games started to deny that there was no such mod in the original game. The very same creator of the mod said that he had just swapped a few lines of code, and here it was. After the discovery of scandalous scenes, the game decided to change the age limit, and the Grand Theft Auto: San San Andreas became the first game in the US, which was sold under the “adult-only” rating.
Now the fun part. In fact, initially nobody could actually play this mod. There was no access to it in GTA: SA. He was not part of the game. However, the program code that helped future mod-makers create it was actually available on the disk. True, people could use it only having a modified game. On consoles, this was quite difficult to do, but installing a mod on a PC was easy.
Video games - for children
Kids just love video games. It is a fact. With this you can not argue. Millions of babies around the world love to play for Mario, Sonic and Pikachu. These games are really sold in large editions and are very popular. But the fact is that the children in “Mario” and “Sonic” also played during the ancient prefix Atari. Now these children have grown, but their love for games has not been lost. If you look at the game industry from different angles, it becomes clear that it grew up with the same children who were hacked to Atari. Only now she offers more adult and violent games, like the same Call of Duty or Dead Space.
Statistics for 2011 shows that 53 percent of gamers around the world are people aged 18 to 49 years. And among this age group, the average age of the players is 37 years! Casual games, such as the browser-based Farm Frenzy, as well as Nintendo's console Wii Sports and Wii Fit, opened the door to the gaming world for the older generation. According to statistics, 29 percent of players are people aged 50 years and older.
The data of the Software Manufacturers Association (ESA) show that only 18 percent of players are people under the age of 18. Yes, there are a lot of children playing games, but the average age of the players undoubtedly grows every year.
Video games lead to an asocial lifestyle
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two teenagers who staged a massacre in 1999 at Columbine School (Colorado, USA), were fans of the game Doom. Seventeen-year-old German Tim Krechmer, ten years after the incident in Colorado, killed 15 people, allegedly "inspired" by Counter Strike. When it comes to the cruelty of the younger generation, the tough video games that these young people played before committing a crime automatically become the cause of their aggressive behavior. The logic of psychiatrists here is simple: violent video games make children cruel.
But in practice - at least in the framework of statistical experimental studies - everything is just the opposite. In 2005, a study was conducted among people aged 14 to 68 who were asked to play the Asheron's Call 2 multiplayer game for 56 hours. So, no aggressive behavior or mental change among these players was detected. Scientists also found no differences in behavior between the players and those people who do not play video games at all.
Moreover, some psychologists believe that most studies that attempt to correlate violence in video games and the real world are biased. And while sales of games (including cruel ones) are growing (according to statistics for 1999-2007, from $ 5.5 billion to $ 9.5 billion), crime among young people is falling. For example, in 1999 there were 1,763 crimes among persons under 18 years old in the USA, and by 2007 this figure was already 1063 people.
Girls don't play video games
When in the early 80s of the last century, consoles became a mass means of entertainment, the games for them were universal. Game titles like Frogger, Dig-Dug and Q-Bert were not shared by gender principles - there were no games “for boys only” or “for girls only”. But with the growth and maturation of the gaming industry, it became noticeable that the games began to rely more on the interests of young guys than girls.
Public opinion is such that video games are more suitable for boys. And the lack of interest among the representatives of the fair sex to game titles with obviously “girlish” names would only seem to further strengthen the stereotype. But does it mean that if Metal Gear Solid is sold in far more circulation than any Barbie Adventure, are the girls less or not playing video games at all? Absolutely not.
Statistics from January to August 2008 show that women players aged from 18 to 45 years old are only one percent less than men of the same age group - 37 percent against 38.
On the basis of chips from PlayStation 2, you can build a guided missile system
At the end of 2000, the news headlines were full of reports that, on the orders of the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the military bought more than four thousand PlayStation 2 gaming consoles, whose release took place in the autumn of that year. Everyone wondered, why would the military need seemingly ordinary toys? Soon after, someone suggested that Hussein needed not the consoles themselves, but the chips that they used. It has been suggested that by combining 10–20 consoles, the Iraqi military wanted to create a supercomputer powerful enough so that it could be used to control the missile system.
But reality has put everything but its place. From a technical point of view, it is really possible to combine several PlayStation 2 in order to use their 128-bit processors in the future. But this requires special and very sophisticated software, which would have taken Iraq several years after the release of PS2. In other words, this rumor turned out to be a common myth.
Pong was the first game
The very first version of the machine Pong
This story begins on November 29, 1972 in the Andy Capp's Tavern eatery in the California town of Sunnyvale. It was in this place that the future of the entire gaming industry (with the current world currency turnover of 38 billion dollars) and the fate of Atari and their game Pong, which had just been founded by Ted Debney and Nolan Bushnell, was decided.
The world's first video game was born, which was not. More precisely, that day Pong was really born, only now she was not the first video game for arcade machines, as many now consider. Before him, video games already existed. That is, public opinion that Pong is the first video game in the world is nothing but a myth.
Computer space
Ironically, a year earlier, in the very same eatery Andy Capp's Tavern was presented the truly first arcade video game Computer Space, which, unfortunately, very few people know. In fact, it was a ported version of the Spacewar! The trouble for Computer Space was also that the game simply did not go , and the further rapidly growing popularity of Pong simply did not leave her a chance.
Buried alive
Sometimes some myths sound like they really can be believed. For example, in this case we are talking about three million game cartridges, which in September 1983, Atari took out on 14 trucks and buried in the New Mexico desert near the town of Alamogordo. Thus was born one of the first myths associated with video games.
And what is interesting, the reason why Atari did this has long been revealed. The bottom line is that the fourth quarter of 1982 was very unfortunate for the company. All his income at that time was based on only two games: the console version of Pac-Man and a game based on the fantastic blockbuster ET (in the Soviet box office the movie was titled Alien). Both titles were not as successful as the company and the players themselves expected, and therefore about 5 million copies of each game were returned to Atari. Not finding a better way to do with all these copies, the company decided to bury them in the ground.
Unfortunately, fans and collectors of retro products, who in subsequent years tried to find at least some remnants of history, could not find anything. The fact is that Atari first crushed cartridges with asphalt rollers, and then flooded them with a thick layer of concrete.
The article is based on materials .
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