A universe as vast and creative as the world of video games is full of theories, myths, and legends that spread among fans as if they were true.

In this post, we'll be looking at 7 of these myths that many believed to be true, but in the end, they were nothing more than hoaxes.



7. Luigi in Super Mario 64


One myth that became very popular around Super Mario 64 was that you could play with Luigi. That all started when some players noticed something written on a sign under a statue in Castle Courtyard.

Due to the graphic limitations and low resolution of games at that time, two interpretations of what was written surfaced: "Eternal Star" and "L is real 2041". As you can imagine, the second was the one that most caught people's attention.

As a result, several rumors emerged saying that "L" stood for Luigi and that "2041" was the number of laps that the player should do around the statue to unlock Luigi, as well as other theories like finishing the game without dying or taking damage to unlock Mario's brother. But unfortunately, it was all just a hoax.

Nowadays, though, playing with Luigi in Super Mario 64 is possible through mods and emulators.



6. Pokémon War Theory


Pokémon is known by many as one of the best RPGs ever created, but even this franchise has its mysteries and theories.

Something that has always been noticed, being more noticeable in old titles, is the lack of adults in cities and that almost all Pokémon battles are fought between children.

For a while, there were assumptions that the storyline was set in a post-war world where most adults would have died, leaving only a few individuals, such as nurses, police officers, gym leaders, and the Pokémon professors.

However, in Pokémon's story, nothing indicates that such an event ever happened. A gym leader named "Lt. Surge," who is clearly a military officer, is the only hint of the existence of some military organization.

In the end, Pokémon is nothing more than child's play, but with its serious moments, such as the presence of leagues, significant events, and, of course, the eternal glory of being the big winner of the Pokémon League.



5. 17th Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus


Shadow of the Colossus is surely one of the single-player games with the biggest community that shares their sorrows to this day with a game for being so good but so short.

However, data miners found codes that indicated that the game would have not only 16 colossi but rather approximately 40 colossi. Thus, the legend of the 17th Colossus was born.

The game's devs later confirmed that Shadow of the Colossus was indeed supposed to have more colossi, but this was not possible due to the limitations of the PlayStation 2.

But even so, several players continued the search using different methods, from completing challenges in various ways to using bugs and glitches, but unfortunately, none of these worked.

However, to the delight of Shadow of the Colossus fans, two non-profit fan-made games in the making aim to bring back most of the removed colossi, and they are Tribute to Shadow of the Colossus and Beyond the Forbidden Lands. There are some videos on Youtube about these two projects. You should definitely take a look.



4. Bigfoot in GTA San Andreas


At the end of 2004, the world would be in awe of the arrival of GTA San Andreas, an open-world game that offered a multitude of things to do.

Due to the diversification of content in the game, some users at GTA SA Forums reported seeing a creature in the forests of San Andreas that resembled a Bigfoot and said that to find it, you just had to explore any forest in the game, in particular, that of Mount Chiliad.

Many people searched for Bigfoot for days, months, and even years, but he was never found. It was just a creepypasta that got out of hand. 
Later on, some people would even post videos on Youtube showcasing "real" appearances of Bigfoot in GTA San Andreas, but these would be quickly debunked as being the result of a horror mod called Misterix that adds some fictional and supernatural creatures like Leatherface, the ghost of CJ's mother, Bigfoot, and others.



3. Polybius 


While arcades were at an all-time high back in the 80s, a mysterious game called Polybius supposedly arrived in the city of Portland, and people lined up in huge lines and even fought to play the new game.

The story got more bizarre when people started reporting that men in black were routinely removing files from these machines that allegedly contained records of the psychoactivity of the people who played Polybius on them.

Anyone who played Polybius ended up suffering from various bizarre side effects, such as amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and some even say that a case of suicide happened too. And to complete the urban legend, the game even had subliminal messages that influenced people.

However, none of this was real. The game was actually a demo version of a game called Tempest that ended up disappearing because it caused severe problems in players like epilepsy, photosensitivity, nausea, and vertigo.



2. Herobrine in Minecraft


Coming up, we have one of the most well-known myths in the world of games, the famous Herobrine, the ghost of the supposed deceased brother of the creator of Minecraft, Notch, a ghost that haunted players' worlds, causing havoc and destruction.

Legend says that to summon Herobrine in-game, the player would need 200 hours of gameplay on the same map in survival mode on hard difficulty, so after 200 hours, bizarre things would start to happen in the game.

Players who allegedly found Herobrine reported it on the game's official forum, but according to them, their threads were always deleted. They also received messages from someone strange, telling them to stop what they were trying to do. These players then began exchanging emails with each other to try to unravel this mystery, but to no avail.

Sometime later, Mojang released a major update to the game, and it contained "Removed Herobrine," thus drawing more attention to the subject and the game itself.

But at the end of the day, it was all just a creepypasta. But even so, in a great marketing move, Mojang ended up putting the "Removed Herobrine" Easter Egg in several updates released after Beta 1.6.6, further increasing the relevance of Minecraft, a game that even before that event was on the rise for being an innovative game.



1. KillSwitch 


In 1989, Karvina Corporation released a few copies of a game that would leave many people intrigued to this day: KillSwitch, a mine escape survival horror game. It is worth saying that this game was only for PC.

The legend around the game says that when you die, the game will delete itself, and you will never be able to play it again. And according to Karvina Corporation, the idea of the game was precisely to make you go through the same experience as life is. If you make a mistake once, there is no turning back. To further increase the hype around this game, they made only 5,000 copies.

Some say that there are still copies of this game around and that, sometimes, one or another ends up appearing on eBay pages. Too bad the terror of the game today would be the price to pay for it and not so much the game.

But in reality, it was all just a creepypasta created based on a short story written by author Catherynne M. Valente. With that in mind, everything said before has been proven to be a hoax, from the existence of Karvina Corporation to the game itself, so if you see someone selling a copy of KillSwitch on eBay, it's a scam.