Even if it does or does not exist.Īs an aside, this trope's name could be a "Before & After" puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.Ĭompare Wild Mass Guessing and Gannon Banned. Please do not confuse this trope for an Urban Fantasy edition of The Legend of Zelda. It's worth noting that the explosion of Internet access has allowed for both rapid debunking and rapid propagation of such digital legends, resulting in people being no better or worse informed about them than before. FWAK stands for " False Wisdom and Knowledge". The most infamous of these is undoubtedly Eggnog's hidden character FWAK for Final Fantasy VI. This can culminate in the creation of a "FWAK", a parody Walkthrough containing intentionally fake "secrets". Occasionally, this will reach the point where the rumors take on a life of their own. For instance, when a cameo appearance of Cut Man in Mega Man 7 led to a rumor that he was in the game as a secret boss, Capcom added him as a secret boss in the Saturn port of 8 (he also appears as a secret boss in Mega Man X 8, probably an in-joke reference to this). Sometimes, the game's creators will include a character or a feature in the sequel because of these rumors. If this sort of thing is so popular that developers find it doable, it may evolve into Ascended Fanon or Ascended Meme. Other sources include mistranslated lines, aspects of the game being Dummied Out, and Missing Secrets. After all, if it's in print, it must be true!. Yet no matter how much evidence is eventually against it, the rumor just won't die.Ī common source of these is April Fool's issues of popular gaming magazines. It's not hard to believe them, since the games often have real secrets and glitches that are so bizarre that they sound made-up (such as the Sailor Moon and Star Wars parodies you can unlock in Silent Hill 3, or the fact that Iggy Koopa's fireballs in Super Mario World will turn into glitchy blobs if you slide into them). We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeard after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again.įound english strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game.Every popular game has a rumor around it that elevates into near urban legend, and perhaps due to an oversight or hanging plot thread it seems just plausible. The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti videogame crusader or something. They're not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played. The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares.Īccording to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. The history of this game is cloudy, there were all kinds of strange stories about how kids who played it got amnesia afterwards, couldn't remember their name or where they lived, etc. This game had a very limited release, one or two backwater arcades in a suburb of Portland.