Are Video Game Urban Legends Really Dead?

if i ask you to think about a video game myth or urban legend i can almost certainly predict where your mind is heading maybe you're thinking about super mario 64 gta san andreas pokemon red or blue halo 3 minecraft goldeneye or something else along those lines however what you probably wouldn't tell me would be something like battlefield 2042 or eldon ring in fact you probably wouldn't even think of a game made within the last decade why might that be it seems that as we've progressed into a more modern era of gaming the days of rumors myths and urban legends about video games stemming from forums the playground or even game guides might be behind us but is that truly the case look at a series like 3d mario titles for example where it seems like with every entry there have been less and less myths about the game if you ask a lot of people they might say that the last big video game urban legend was herobrine i definitely think there's a perception that video game urban legends have gone the way of the dodo but i want to examine this situation and decide objectively if this really is true in this video essay i will examine eight different reasons as to why the video game mythology scene is perceived as different today and by the end of the video i'll make a determination as to whether or not this perception is reality video game myths are something truly special and gaming as a medium produces myths unlike books or movies or really any other art form because of how interactive and puzzling these games can be if we really have lost the gaming urban legend it would be tragic but today i invite you to join me as i attempt to answer the question are video game urban legends really dead but before we get into this video i want to ask you that if you find yourself enjoying this content and you want to give me a quick thank you the best way that you can do that is by liking this video hitting the subscribe button and commenting down below your favorite video game myth or secret your interaction with this video helps my small channel tremendously and with your support the seed butter channel can grow thank you for sticking around and with that said let's begin i think the best way to tackle this subject is to first define what a video game urban legend is this might seem pretty easy but it's actually a pretty steep challenge mainly because there's lots more than just urban legends floating around here people in the gaming community tend to use the phrases urban legend easter egg secret and myth interchangeably it would be easy for me to make this video exclusively about urban legends but there's some things that i just don't like about that approach for example what happens when an urban legend is proven true this actually happens a lot where dedicated gamers discover easter eggs or other little details about a game years after it was released take gta san andreas for example it was long rumored that sharks were in the game but they weren't documented or really truly discovered until 2014 10 years after the game's launch so does that mean that this urban legend just didn't count since it's been solved well i don't think so also take a look at the da vinci code easter egg in the halo 3 map sand trap is this item a secret or is it an easter egg or since it's speculated that it's a code for something is it an ongoing urban legend these are pretty complicated distinctions to make that's why in this video while i'll use the term urban legend i could be talking about easter eggs secrets and mysteries all in one the key here isn't really what the item is but whether or not it sparks fun discussion amongst gamers trying to unearth the secrets of the game so to be abundantly clear i'll state that my definition of a video game urban legend is a quote conspiracy secret theory mystery proven unproven or disproven fan-made content or easter egg that sparks significant discussion and intrigue within the game's community now that i've set a definition for what we're talking about i'll begin to examine eight potential factors that have created a perception that video game urban legends are less prevalent nowadays than they were in the 90s and early 2000s let's begin the first thing that i want to jump into immediately that could be a reason for the perceived decline in video game urban legends is graphical and performance improvements this might seem strange at first but hear me out why would graphical and performance improvements make video game urban legends harder to come by well oddly enough many video game urban legends have spawned due to or partially due to graphical limitations in games or bugs let's look at some cases the first one i'll talk about here is super mario 64. take a look specifically at the l is real urban legend for anyone that doesn't know about this extremely popular video game urban legend it essentially suggests that this sign in the courtyard of princess peach's castle states l isreal 2401 which led people to think that it meant luigi was playable in the game if some condition related to the number 2401 was met now unfortunately this myth has been thoroughly disproven and it's generally accepted that the sign means nothing it's just a texture made to look like a generic plot but allowed an urban legend to spawn in games nowadays you can typically read every bit of text though there are some exceptions the point i'm making here is that in general the graphics of games have improved which has actually tightened up the possibility for the type of fun creative thinking that gives birth to video game urban legends in some select situations let's look at another example playing as the master hand in super smash bros melee from the game's launch in 2001 it was heavily rumored that you could play as the master hand the final boss of the game who was in fact unplayable that was of course until 2008 when it was discovered that you could in fact execute a complex glitch to place him though the gameplay itself was rough the fact that you could actually control the final boss was incredible nowadays if a game company didn't want you to play as a boss they could absolutely make sure it was impossible a third and final example of this phenomenon is the popular pokemon legend of missingno missing no or basically missing number is speculated to be data from leftover pokemon that were removed from the game that you could encounter as a glitch again this long-standing legend only exists because of glitches glitches that you probably wouldn't encounter in a pokemon game today i could continue listing examples like these but the point is clear bugs can heavily contribute to a video game urban legend and they have done so with some of the most important ones out there let's look at the next argument the second factor contributing to the perceived decline in video game urban legends is patching glorious post launch patching a big problem with video games nowadays is how companies can release garbage on day one hoping to turn it into a masterpiece via updates later on while some games like star wars battlefront 2 end up succeeding in the end with this model many games don't and even if games do become good from updates there is no substitute for an amazing game released on day one however patches can actually be very detrimental to video game urban legends specifically this is because as you might know many easter eggs and games are put in by developers without the permission of the studio as a whole furthermore interesting bugs and glitches that could create urban legends might be squashed out by the studio who wants to cover up their mistakes post-launch let's look at a couple of examples we'll start with far cry 5 there's a mysterious location in this game called the saint francis veterans center it's a former veterans hospital where a few missions take place but you can't get into this building during normal free roam gameplay as you approach the building you'll pass out from the effects of bliss a drug in the game that serves as a major plot device you'll wake up at the border of the hospital again without any way to get back into the building that was at first until someone discovered a way to get into the building as gamers always do however for some reason this exploit was patched soon after being discovered and put onto youtube why on earth would a company patch this it was a fun little challenge that didn't break the game or harm the plot whatsoever however what it did do was expose a failure on behalf of the devs and instead of letting it be they had to take it out at the expense of fun this secret mysterious location could have been the setting of a good urban legend but any hope for that was stomped out with this patch a second example that i'll mention is an easter egg from horizon zero dawn there was a secret area in this game that once explored led to an easter egg involving the dead body of what looks to be a giant now you can go to this popular odd header video for more details but this easter egg had a fairly inappropriate joke involved with it which is definitely why it got patched out but regardless in a patch the body was removed and the ledge to get to the secret area was also taken out the issue here isn't revolving an inappropriate joke that i can understand but the dead body of a giant could have spawned some sort of crazy urban legend about giants in the game or something like that but because it was patched out this didn't go that far our final examples today come from halo infinite so secret weapons and halo are actually a pretty established thing in fact in halo 2 you could find a secret weapon called the scarab gun which lets you shoot what looked to be a normal plasma rifle but fired rounds from the scarab cannon which was extremely overpowered and a fun addition to the game that has remained one of halo's most popular urban legends something similar to this was created in halo infinite called the tank gun very soon after the game came out players discovered this secret weapon which lets you shoot an invisible gun that had the power of the scorpion tank it was starting to become one of halo's coolest easter eggs that everyone was talking about it was being used by speedrunners and casual players alike but 343 decided to patch the gun out players were extremely furious and 343 actually ended up backing down from this stupid decision which is awesome but if the backlash hadn't been so strong there's a good chance that the gun would have been removed and the urban legend killed off i throw this example on here because even though the community rallied behind keeping this gun in the game we certainly could have lost it and interestingly there was a similar glitch in the game that didn't receive the same mercy as the tank gun did it was actually once possible to fly pelican and halo infinite but much to the similar dismay of fans 343 patched it out and this time it was for good now flying a pelican probably wasn't as popular as using the tank gun was but the issue is clear if any unwanted easter egg or cool glitch makes it through the development cycle undetected rest assured that it will be patched after launch like i said this can be undoubtedly detrimental to the life cycle of some urban myths in gaming earlier in this video i mentioned that video game myths tended to spread on the playground in game guides and magazines and on forums the thing is this doesn't happen so much anymore physical game guides and magazines that often help spread these legends aren't that popular anymore take the april 1998 egm magazine which as an april fool's joke spread the rumor that there was some way to play as every james bond actor in goldeneye 007 now while this is false it was later discovered that the faces of other james bond actors were actually in the game's code so there was more to this hoax than meets the eye this all bonds hoax was a huge urban legend in gaming and it's undoubtable that the egm magazine helped contribute to its popularity another fun example of this phenomenon was a rumor about being able to unlock ninja mario in super mario 64 which was spread in an edition of the nintendo power magazine now while lots of old gaming magazines are still available and active online they're certainly less popular than they were in the late 90s and early 2000s game magazines like this just aren't a big part of the gaming community anymore and thus a valuable vector for spreading video game urban legends doesn't exist it's the same deal for forums too i would say that reddit is probably the most popular site for sharing things about games especially because most games have their own communities in the form of subreddits however the thing about reddit is that it has its own built-in bs detector in the form of upvoting and downvoting if you spew out garbage rumors on reddit you'll be downvoted assuming you care about your karma people are incentivized not to spread rumors or talk about things they've seen without proof because if they say something and can't back it up perfectly they could be downvoted into oblivion losing that sweet sweet karma while i'm sure some forums back in the day had similar voting systems people care about their reddit accounts much more than people cared about their accounts on now defunct forums given this i think it's fair to say that it's harder for game rumors to spread online anymore in recent years game and video creation and editing tools have become a lot more accessible which is without a doubt a fantastic thing this has led to people creating legendary video game creepypastas and urban legends going so far as to fully fake gameplay of a game and the style of the console it could have come out on two prominent examples of what i'm talking about in the gaming community include petscop and catastrophe crow two series that if you don't already know about somehow you should definitely check out after watching this video while these series are so freaking cool they're totally fake but if you had uploaded footage of petscop to the internet in 2005 i can guarantee you that people would believe it to be real 100 it's the same thing with catastrophe crow both of these were done so well that it's almost believable that what you're seeing right here is playstation or n64 gameplay however nowadays people have just come to expect faking content like this as an art form it's just much more common and with so many talented creators out there it's easy for people to assume that things are faked art projects right off the bat i am absolutely not criticizing any of these projects in any way i'm just saying that it's very easy to animate anything you want about a video game have people discover it to be fake and thus make them be more and more skeptical about what they see in the future it's a lot easier to fake content like this nowadays than it was 20 years ago which has led people to be so much more skeptical a simple doctored image of your game doesn't fly anymore data mining data mining is another one of those tools that are certainly cool to have at our disposal but it's one that unfortunately might spoil some surprises for players looking forward to a nice gaming urban legend basically the issue here is that data mining can give us the answers too quickly and without the allure of the hunt or the feeling of triumph when the community discovers something years later people might just decide that something that could have turned into a gaming urban legend was a simple cut and dry answer take eldenrang for instance there's a location in the game where you can see the outside of a grand but inaccessible coliseum outside is an npc who will joke about how he wants to go inside and fight in it it was instantly thought up by community members that this could have been a cut pvp area or better yet an area that would be used as future dlc data miners went through the files to uncover the mysteries of this area and they were actually able to completely reconstruct the building and move through it using a model viewer furthermore the data of two enemies were discovered as well now this move essentially confirmed that the area was either a cut area or one that will come in the future it's certainly not just a piece of decoration since there are real enemies inside but it was discovered only a couple months after the game's release denying a mystery the chance to truly flourish now this is of course a double-edged sword there are instances where a data mine is the only possible way to discover the truth about a gaming urban legend the l's real mystery was only solved once data miners were able to find luigi in the files of super mario 64. without doing that we absolutely never could have proven that luigi was in the game it seems like data mining just has strange effects on the longevity of gaming myths and it really depends on the situation sometimes they can ruin a mystery or sometimes they can close the book after years and years however some might say that in general the spoilers provided by data mining ruin the fun of gaming myths let's examine the next reason that gamers have perceived a decline in video game urban legends this is quite simply video proof up until the seventh generation of consoles there wasn't really a way to record your gameplay right from the machine therefore it was very plausible for somebody to see something crazy in a game and not have the chance to go grab a camera and record it or have a capture card that they could have used that's why there's a ton of urban legends that were only proven years later after a game's release during streams or similar recorded events however the xbox one and ps4 brought with them the very cool ability to record your gameplay while this is awesome and fun it essentially means that there's no excuse for spreading a rumor about a game without video proof people nowadays have the understandable expectation that claims require evidence when you make them which makes it harder for video game urban legends to spread a short but still powerful argument that can be made in favor of the idea that the community thinks there are less urban legends in gaming nowadays than there were in the past or more accurately that there are more video game legends about older games than newer games is that for some games it takes years for the urban legend to develop let's look at super mario 64 a game that has possibly the most urban legends of any game period the wario apparition the personalization theory the wet dry world negative aura the castle internal plexus parallel universes and the half a press are all urban legends about the game that surfaced more than 20 years after the game came out it's very typical for games to take decades to create urban legends which can be a factor in making us believe that games today are less capable of doing so there are games out right now that will spawn urban legends in 10 years or so but we just don't know it yet the eighth argument that i'll propose today for a potential decline in the prevalence of gaming urban legends is that some easter eggs and other clues and details hidden within games nowadays can be extremely difficult to find don't get me wrong there have always been easter eggs that have taken an excruciatingly long amount of time to find like the punch-out easter egg in the form of a flashing light that tells you precisely when to throw a punch that was discovered 29 years after the game's release but with games that come out now we're seeing an increasingly large number of easter eggs that take a ridiculously huge amount of inputs to achieve so much so that some easter eggs like this recently discovered room and titanfall 2 are only discovered because the developers reveal them years after a game's release the argument that i'm trying to make here is that with easter eggs potentially taking so freaking long to achieve and in general people realizing that a game's easter eggs aren't always just revealed right after the game comes out any legends that these easter eggs might have sparked won't be realized till years later and for many games that time simply hasn't come yet i can guarantee you right now that you are playing some game that has an easter egg within it that you don't know about yet or no one knows about for that matter so where do we go from here i've laid out some various different factors that many people cite when they suggest the video game urban legend is dead however it's now time to look at each and every one of these reasons and see if they actually mean anything let's get into the graphics argument here's the thing with this one it is irrefutable that sometimes graphical issues or bugs can create uncanny environments with potential for huge numbers of urban legends super mario 64 gta san andreas and goldeneye are perfect examples of this without mario 64's low poly environments would it really create a good backdrop for some of the numerous conspiracies and mysteries about it it's been 26 years since this game released and people are still talking about how crazy it is graphics definitely had something to do with this and i would concede to the statement that graphics during the fifth and sixth generations of consoles have been the best to create in gaming urban legends however unimpressive graphics alone does not an urban legend make let's consider the fact that better graphics comes with a greater potential to hide more hidden details in the game take batman arkham city a 2011 game for example in this game there's an easter egg where you could find a positive pregnancy test used by harley quinn however in the dlc harley quinn's revenge other tests can be found these ones being negative this has led to a quite dark urban legend in the batman arkham community suggesting that harley might have lost her baby during a fight with batman now regardless of what you think about this legend the point here is that this detail was only visible because graphics and games have progressed to the point where you could hide a subtle detail in a game like this without drawing attention to it you probably couldn't do that as well 25 years ago urban legends have lots of ingredients creative storytelling a touch of rumors and maybe even some outright false information and details that are hard to fully understand or even discover graphics don't affect any of these things while performance issues can certainly lead to bugs which in turn lead to mysterious or spooky things happening in your game [Music] whoa what the i would honestly say that ton of games still ship out broken nowadays and there are still enough glitches in games to potentially creep you out also there are tons of games such as indie games that have an art style like older games take baldi's basics in education and learning for example a game that took the world by storm and has many urban legends surrounding it such as the one that there is a secret way to solve the unsolvable math problem this is a game that has a spooky atmosphere due in part to its bad graphics but simultaneously the urban legend here has nothing to do with the graphics at all regardless it makes sense how some urban legends were supported by the buggy environments of certain games though i don't think this is enough to outright say that better graphics killed urban legends in games next up is patching this one can kind of go both ways when something gets patched even if the effect can be replicated by mods it means that for 99 of people they will never get to experience the patched thing in question however this could actually help the mystery imagine a secret area being patched out of the game doesn't that make you think that the developers were trying to hide something maybe even something sinister i personally think that patches alone don't really affect urban legends for the worst that much rather it only hampers their accessibility to a general audience if you can watch the thing on youtube done with a mod the urban legend can still exist in some people's minds yes it is detrimental to video game urban legends but this doesn't happen enough to say that video game urban legends are dead because of it as far as certain forums not being popular anymore goes i don't really know if this matters so much even though there are some community-based safeguards that can shoot down misinformation online the internet can be a breeding ground for fake things in the gaming world that take on their own video game myths take this guy for example this is scribulus fengor a totally made-up character spread online by cut video game they spread rumors about this character in 2021 saying that images and data about him were left in the files of new super mario bros going so far as to say that when miyamoto was asked a question about this character he got visibly upset i commend the creators of this urban legend because this is an awesome and believable myth however it's completely bogus without the internet though and twitter specifically it wouldn't have been possible to create this urban legend and spread it so much so i would say that all in all modern social media websites like reddit and twitter have made it easier to post and share video game urban legends though it is also harder to pass them off as legit people don't just believe everything they read on the internet anymore so simply saying you saw something in your game isn't enough to convince people to believe you but if you put some basic effort into photoshop and whip something up that looks halfway convincing you'll get millions to think it's real i would say that maybe it's a bit harder to outright lie about things you saw in video games than it used to be back in the day but people still fall for hoaxes game magazines aren't that popular sure but in the grand scheme of things they didn't really have a huge effect on these rumors so again i don't think that the way these rumors spread has changed to the detriment of video game urban legends forming i also made the point that with intentionally faked content being easier to make some people are less likely to believe in video game myths and while that's true there's always been fake content made to support video game urban legends basically any video game urban legend that you can think of has been turned into a mod so i honestly can't say that the prevalence of fake creepypastas and urban legends makes people believe in other urban legends any more or less also with regard to faking content there's a trend that i absolutely have to bring up and that's the recent trend of creating fake anti-piracy screens just mentioning this trend should be enough to prove to you that video game urban legends still exist even though people know most of this content is fake it was still somewhat believable because of the existence of true creepy piracy screens and drm that was actually real this is an example of people making fake content that absolutely made urban legends spread just like the old days being able to create a realistic but fake piece of content revolving around a game absolutely doesn't devalue the concept of the urban legend and it can in fact make it a quite interesting one data mining is a complicated factor when it comes to video game urban legends i actually believe that beta mining helps video game urban legends spread mainly because data mining doesn't tell us the full story it only reveals assets themselves and small bits of text that can give us some clues on the journey they're ambiguous data mining a game to help reveal the truth about an urban legend isn't cheating nor does it even give you the full answer for example people have been struggling to understand the use of this new structure in the deep dark in minecraft given that portals to other dimensions are a pretty popular motif in minecraft people have speculated that this structure is a portal a theory suggested by a little bit of text you can find by data mining the game small portal statue does this mean that we've confirmed this as a portal well no absolutely not on the contrary this little piece of evidence has sparked more and more discussion on the subject fueling the longevity of this urban legend this is just one example sure but the point remains data mining doesn't reveal the entire story and things obtained from data mining alone certainly can't ruin an urban legend or even slow its spread video proof is an interesting argument i do maintain that in general people expect video proof when you go online and claim that you found something strange in a game however that doesn't necessarily mean that video proof is required to make the story interesting and honestly there's a number of reasons why you wouldn't upload video proof of a strange mysterious sighting in a game for example if you recorded something on your xbox even though you have that video you have to go to the xbox app on your phone or computer download the clip and then put it online instead of just maybe writing a response in a reddit thread now you might be thinking what i just described isn't that hard and i agree with you but it still takes five minutes or so if you just want to contribute to a conversation and get on with your day you might not back up every single claim you make with video proof and i think a lot of people understand that so when you hop on a thread and talk about some mystery about a game not everybody is going to be prepared with video proof of whatever they saw and that's a good thing sometimes it's just fun to talk the time argument i made earlier shows how people might think video game legends aren't coming out when in reality we just need to keep in mind how video game legends take time to develop and mature there are lots of legends about old games not because those games were better at making legends but because they've had more time to be discussed online in due time contemporary games will have more urban legends made about them these stories don't necessarily come out at release or even a few years after release there are plenty of games right now that i think have easter eggs or environments that are extremely ripe for the production of urban legends in fact i'll throw out a couple random predictions i think that 20 years from now a bunch of quote-unquote modern games will have more urban legends that will be just as popular as mario 64. the stanley parable just cause 3 and mario kart wii are some random examples but they're all games filled with either uncanny environments or huge amounts of easter eggs and mysteries that can and will certainly spawn urban legends in the near future the final point i brought up is that easter eggs are extremely difficult to activate with the rise of easter eggs being near impossible to activate you might say that people are missing out on things that could fuel an urban legend in gaming but to be honest i disagree knowing that there are still easter eggs that haven't been discovered in a game whether from data mining or from a developer pointing it out can absolutely fuel urban legends not only that but the race to be the first one to discover a complicated easter egg can push community engagement and discussion which only makes the legend better i hope that my presentation and subsequent refutation of these eight arguments have made you understand why i think that video game urban legends might seem dead but in reality are as strong as they ever have been it's very very easy to hold the perception that the video game urban legend is done for but i simply cannot accept that as true to be quite honest i went into this video with that opinion so there is definitely some bias in my thinking but i do truly believe in what i'm saying with creative artists making projects and stories about games new trends coming out about games and nearly every game released nowadays being stuffed to the brim with easter eggs in some form there is so much potential for gaming urban legends to shine like they always have what do you guys think do you agree with my reasoning do me a favor and comment down below what your favorite modern or ongoing video game urban legend is so that we can all have fun things to look into after watching this video thank you so much for joining me on the seed butter channel today i encourage you to like this video and subscribe to me to help my small channel grow if you enjoyed anything today and i hope you have a great one peace out guys

Channel: SeedButter

Views: 1,800

Keywords: gaming myths, gaming urban legends, herobrine

Id: bfJ_lIJpzFM

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022