20 Video Game Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Urban Legends to Celebrate Halloween

Mind control? Check. The hand of Satan? Check. Enough conspiracy theories for an entire season of X-Files? Check.

From haunted arcade cabinets that may have actually been thought control devices funded by the U.S. Government to a cartridge graveyard in the middle of the New Mexico desert, urban legends surrounding video games are about as old as the medium itself. Remember all those NES cartridges you blew into like you were auditioning to be the lead fluffer on the XXX remake of Game of Thrones (Game of Bones, last we checked), turns out you spent years actually ruining those old copies of Duck Hunt.

Nightmares, epilepsy, missing children, and visists from actual men in black all form some of the most enduring and pervassive urban legends surrounding video games. Here are 20 Video Game Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Urban Legends to Celebrate Halloween.

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Of course we can thank 4Chan for the origin story behind the legend of the haunted Majora's Mask cartridge.

One 4Chan user posted a story about how he came into possession of a blank N64 cartridge with Majora's Mask written across it in sharpie. The same user then posted photos and YouTube footage corroborating his story. Viewers discovered a completely fucked up version of the beloved Zelda title thanks to the above footage.

A save file simply titled "Ben" was already on the cartridge even though the user had never played the title before. That's easy enough to fake, but here's where it gets weird. Ignoring the save file, the user started a new game. No sooner had he begun his adventure when he noticed that all of the NPCs would refer to him as Ben. Weird, but nothing as definitive as being a 'haunted' title. Probably just a glitch.

The user deleted the "Ben" file and began a new save file. The haunted cartridge decided 'fuck that' and began behaving like something straight out of the X-Files. The game began acting erratic. Music would play backwards for no reason and his character was followed by a statue of the game's main character.

Somehow the "Ben" file was mysteriously restored with a second, more pants-shittingly ominous save file. The second file was simply titled "drowned." Now there were two save files the user didn't create and every time he played after their appearance, his character would simply die and the messages "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" would appear on-screen. GTFO.

Pokemon is a title that seems to be steeped in historical conspiracies.

Pokemon Red and Blue was a massive success for Nintendo, but between training your Charizard, did anyone bother to ask, where the hell are the adults in this game? As Ash, you travel across Kanto with deadly, barely controllable wild animals crammed into questionable living conditions.

The larger question of where all the male adults have disappeared to lends credence to the theory that Pokemon actually takes place at the end of, a large scale, global war. which has forced several changes in the world of the Pokemon society. One of the biggest clues to support this theory is that both Ash, and his rival, Gary, have no male parent figure throughout the game.

The trainers, who send their winnings back home, are all children, or very young. Cops and nurses are all female, and any men you encounter are criminally minded "Team Rocket". Another large clue is in the Vermillion city Gym Leader, Lt Surge, a clearly damaged veteran.

Adding more legitimacy to this theory, right before you battle Surge, Surge states "you won't live long in combat" and "my electric Pokemon saved me during the war", alluding both to a past conflict, and possibly a current war Ash may be forced to participate in.

Final Fantasy VII and VIII were two of the most formative titles people of a certain age can point to as the reason modern FF titles may fall short in terms of characterization and narrative.

Squall was the hugely popular protagonist of FFVIII and one prevailing conspiratorial myth is that Squall is actually a ghost. At the end of disc one, Squall is impaled by a shard of ice while fighting a main boss, Edea. Squall comes to at the beginning of disc two with no wounds and not a single other character brings up the fact that he was, ya'know, killed. Up untill this point, the title is a fantast game rooted in some bedrock of realism, and that shit goes right out of the window after Squall gets gutted and magically resurrected.

Some hold to the theory that Squall actually dies from his wounds at the end of disc one. The entire remainder of the game is Squall's dream as he passes away.This would explain why the game has such an increased fantasy tone after Squall's battle. A 'life-flashing-before-his-eyes' montage reveals the above image of Squall minus a face which reinforces the hypothesis that Squall didn't survive and the rest of the game is either a playable coma, or, a loop of Squall's last moments of fantasy before death.

Back in 1996 Pokemon Red and Green was slotted in nearly everyone's Gameboy around the world

Ironically enough, the Japanese weren't a part of that statistic. When the game first dropped in Japan it was supposedly linked to a massive spike in child suicides and illness. Children from the ages of 7 to 12 were either falling sick or taking their own lives outright.

The most bizarre thing about the incident was the children did not fall ill or commit suicide until they reached Lavender Town. Many think the town's score was the cause of the ailments. The town specific music caused nausea and eventually suicidal tendencies in children. The music was eventually changed before it was shipped abroad. The above YouTube clip is the original score from the Japanese version of the game was shipped overseas. The above clip is taken from the original suicide-inducing version of the game.

Braid is deceptively simple in its narrative: Boy sees girl, boy tries to rescue girl, boy wears a private school uniform the entire time.

The twist comes at the end when we're not so sure that he's such a great guy, and the bad guy the girl is running away from might just be you. For some, Braid ends with the player catching the girl, who, just as they finally meet, sets off a bomb a la Terminator 2. The screen goes bright and most believe that this is an anti-nuclear war message. Off screen, a voice intones: "Now we are all sons of bitches."

A quote that can be directly tied to Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the heads of the Trinity atomic bomb tests.

Killswitch is a game that was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989.

We say supposedly because extremely limited copies of the game were ever produced. While gamers in the States were playing Mega Man 2, Russians were playing one of the earliest iterations of a survival horror title. You were given the choice between a young girl or an invisible demon as playable characters. Players were meant to navigate a coalmine, but here was the rub: upon beating the game the entire thing would self delete on your hard drive.

An intact copy of the game turned up on Ebay where it fetched $733,000 by a Japanese man named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi wanted to document his play-through of the game on YouTube, but the only video Ryuchi posted was of his gentle weeping while staring at his computer screen.

When The Legend of Zelda dropped in 1986 it found itself mired in controversy thanks to the inclusion of the third dungeon map.

Go ahead and take a look. Looks pretty familiar, right? The map was shaped like a swastika. Oops. Parents demanded the game be pulled. While the dungeon is shaped like a swastika, it's not the Nazi one. This swastika faces to the right and is actually an ancient symbol of peace in Hindu mythology. The makers of Zelda were, it turns out, only wishing players good luck.

While the instruction booklet that came with every NES title explicitly instructed against blowing into your game cartridge, that didn't stop the collective youth market of the 80s from blasting the connector pins like a fluffer auditioning for the XXX remake of Gravity.

Kids around the world swore that this was the only to fix a cartridge that was behaving like a lazy Speak and Spell. The reason behind all of the huffing and puffing had to do with the front-loading design of the NES console and connector pins from console to cartridge not lining up. Blowing in your console usually came with an excess of moisture from all that spit in your mouth. The moisture enabled the pins to align, and thus, your spitty copy of Duck Hunt ended up working. It was a short-sighted win though. Over the years 'blow damage' degraded games and the whole thing got sorted out with the Super Nintendo's top loading design.

Way back in 1981, 19 year old Jeff Dailey died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berzerk. One year later, 18 year old Peter Burkowski also died of a heart attack moments after cracking the Berzerk top-ten high score list twice in fifteen minutes. Coincidence?

Some point to the mark of the beast, 666, being in the score must be proof that Satan had a hand in the demise of the two teenagers.

Bethesda's Fallout 3 was a marvelous post-apocalyptic RPG, but was it also capable of telling the future?

Throughout the game players pick up radio signals in the wasteland of former Washington D.C.. The function of the radio serves as a means of broadcasting old pop-songs, updating missions, and generally working to build a fuller game world.

The device also predicts the future. Occasionally, a series of numbers, which sounds like Morse code will be broadcast through your pep-boy. The story goes that the code predicted the Deepwater Horizon oilrig disaster right down to the day and hour.

One of the most prevailing urban legends surrounding video games was the famously non-existent Lara Croft nude code.

Rumors began circulating that a Tomb Raider nude code existed when the first title dropped waaay back on the PlayStation 1. You can imagine that legions of pre-pubescent boys were scouring every source known to man to find out if there was any truth to the rumors. The internet was flooded with fake codes, but that's all they were: fake.

No official nude code exists, but head over to 4Chan and search 'Lara Croft Nude' and see what you get. There are endless mods to get Lara into her birthday suit.

In September of 1983, about 10 million unwanted Atari game cartridges showed up at the Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico.

The reason behind the video game mass grave? It's historical record that in 1982 Atari's earnings in the fourth quarter were, well, abysmal. Atari had banked on two massive blockbusters to deliver them out of the red: a home version of Pac-Man and the infamous E.T. movie adaptation.

5 million copies of each title were returned to Atari by disgruntled fans. And what else are you supposed to do with 10 millions unwanted game cartridges? Get a steamroller to crush the cartridges and then pave the whole thing over with concrete.

Have you ever gotten a good look at GLaDOS? Initially she looks like a vacuum cleaner flipped upside down, just a bunch of cables and gears, but if you look closer 'she' kind of looks like a human being flipped upside down.

Jeremy Bennett, the game's art director, says that was intentional,

"Eventually, we settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS' raw power and her femininity."

Some people think she looks more like a woman who has been bound and gagged. Take a look at the image above and tell us GlaDOS doesn't look bizarrely similar to the woman on the right.

Maybe you've stumbled across the whokilledlenorajohnson.com website in Grand Theft Auto V.

The site is filled with fake newspaper stories and a trail of breadcrumbs that lead players to an in-game murder mystery. The murder surrounding Lenora Johnson, a fictional actress killed during the golden age of Vinewood cinema, is based on the very real and very famous Black Dahlia case in 1940s Hollywood.

On one page of the site, players are directed to another murder in Los Santos. The murder of Jolene Cranley Evans is strewn with clues on where to find Evans' ghost on Mount Gordo. At 11pm, players will find a ghost in the distance and she looks like that terrifying ghoul up there. She disappears just after midnight.

The Karazhan Crypts was a dungeon that was cut from developers, but it was never removed from the game.

The abandoned level was, in the early days of WoW, still accessible through an in-game glitch. The easiest way to access the dungeon was die on one side of the door that walled of the level, and resurrect on the other side.

What players found was equal parts creepy and just down right fucked up.

As you made your way down hallways filled with decomposing corpses, you come across a flooded portion of the prison. As you dived beneath the surface, you get your first glimpse of them. Dozens of corpses chained to the ceiling. A dungeon full of prisoners sentenced to death by drowning with their hands and feet cut off. Yeah, we weren't prepared for that either. Take a look at the image above and imagine finding that in a supposedly walled off section of the game.

The dungeon was scrapped by developers because they were concerned that the dungeon would give them an M instead of a T rating. After The Burning Crusade expansion, Blizzard built an invisible wall around the door of the dungeon. The creepiest part? They never actually took it out. It's still just sitting there inside the game.

While Super Mario Galaxy 2 has been out for the better part of three years, that doesn't make it any less devoid of extra creepy shit hidden in the game.

In the level Shiverburn Galaxy, you can catch three figures on the ridge of a mountain looking down at you. Anywhere on that level, if you look up and to the left, you will find the same three hollow eyed figures watching you. Curious gamers began digging in the game files of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and discovered that the sky art for that area is called "BeyondHellValley."

Super Mario Galaxy 2 has no level named Hell Valley and as for the figures themselves, the game files refer to them as 'Hell Valley Trees'. Take a look at the above video; those don't look like any trees we know the name of.

In late 2000, reports emerged that formerly not dead Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was stockpiling PlayStation 2 consoles.

The PS2 had been released earlier that Fall, and a huge number of consoles had made their way to Iraq. More than 4,000 consoles had made their way overseas in a few scant months. The systems seemed harmless, but then reports surfaced that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling the consoles for their CPU chips.

The reason? The myth has something to do with making the chips work together as a strung together missile guidance system. After the initial freak out, people realized that, yes, you could marry all those 128-bit processors together, but the software needed for something like a missile guidance system was so far beyond anything Iraq was capable of developing that it was better to just let him, um, get invaded.

When Electronic Arts began featuring NFL stars as their cover athletes in the early 2000s, star players were lining up to get a slice of that free advertising.

That is, of course, until featured cover players started getting injured. For the next several years every player that was feastured on the cover got injured the following season. Sure, football is an inherently violent sport. And maybe we can leave it at that, but most NFL players are more superstitious than gypsies at a swap meet and they'd probably be quicker agreeing with the curse than most.

Another one from Blizzard and World of Warcraft, this is one of the more overt displays of Satan flavored weirdness found in a recent game.

After starting a human character, the first town you will enter is a small place called Goldhsire. In a small, normally empty house players can find six little kids that appear at 7 a.m. on the game's server clock. Stranger still is the six little kids will stand in the shape of a pentagram as they move from Goldshire to Stormwind. WoW players have even reported hearing high-pitched wails screaming 'you will die' to music that isn't found anywhere else in the game.

Watch the video above as the six kids make their way to Stormwind in a perfectly centered pentagram.

Polybius was an arcade cabinet was released in incredibly limited numbers in the early 80s.

While that's not strange on its own, what was bizarre was how the game was only released in a few neighborhoods in the surrounding areas of suburban Portland, Oregon. Polybius would cause players to suffer vivid nightmares and, in some cases, suicidal tendencies.

Thanks to a violently powerful strobe effect in the cabinet, players would also find themselves fighting epileptic seizures. Polybius vanished and has retired to the realm of conspiracy. Some believe the cabinet was released by DARPA (the same government agency behind MK-Ultra and those killer robot videos you see all over YouTube) to test response to psychoactive machines. Even stranger are reports that once a week men dressed in black would come through and collect the data stored on the game's memory.

You can watch the video above to see what Polybius looks like with some of the command options available to arcade owners/government agents.