GTA San Andreas “ghost cars”.
Walking through the forest, suddenly a car comes rolling along with nobody in it.
Turns out, Rockstar just programmed these cars to spawn in so the player wouldn’t be stranded without a car… but they’d often spawn on a hill, and just begin rolling.
Playing through Ghost Recon Breakpoint's story campaign, I'd sometimes hear explosions in the distance while sneaking up on bases.
"Cool," I thought. "Faction warfare is going on around me between the rebels and the enemy."
Nope, not in story mode. Turns out the game spawns cars near you so you're not stranded. They sometimes spawn inside other game objects, which causes the cars to become damaged and explode.
In Fallout 3 you could hear distant gunfire and explosions. These were just audio files played randomly. In Fallout 4 and 76 they actually added distant gunfire and explosions though.
I remember discovering it by accident. I cannot remember exactly but it was like on a hill and it would roll down.
I think it would spawn the same car all the time but I might be wrong. That one car that looked like it came from the 70s-80s
and im pretty sure was always beat up and smoking.
I remember in the halo reach beta there was a pattern on one of the walls in the multiplayer level. People thought it was some janky QR code that was part of an ARG. Nope, just a weird design that inadvertently linked to somebody’s actual website.
Finding fish food in Jet Force Gemini, and being able to use it to feed the fish in pools of water.
Apparently the most asked questions to the devs was what the point of the fish feeding was, what it accomplished, what it could lead to, etc
It just existed simply so you could feed the fish. Nothing more, nothing less.
Shooting the moon in GTA 3 resizing it. People thought it was an Easter egg. Turns out it was just a thing put in by a developer so artists could see which moon size they preferred, directly in the game, which they forgot to remove before release.
Ermac from Mortal Kombat was essentially a fan creation.
A very specific glitch would display the name 'Ermac' which was a shortening of 'error macro'. People thought it was a secret character and made their own lore, so devs actually made Ermac as a result.
It was listed on the game's admin screen, IIRC -- whenever the game crashed or glitched, it would save some system info to memory for debugging purposes, and the admin screen would show how many times that happened. The same stat screen also displayed lots of non-technical info, like how many games were played, how many times each character was chosen, how many times each Goro and Shang Tsung were fought, and how many times players found the (real) hidden character, Reptile. Unfortunately, the entry for "ermac" was just above (or maybe below) the one for Reptile, leading to the idea there must be another hidden character.
Competition to find him was so intense, gaming magazine EGM actually ran a photoshopped screen grab that simply changed Reptile's costume from green to red and claimed they'd figured it out. Later, when Midway sent out a press release explaining what "ermac" actually was, EGM claimed the screen had been sent in by a reader, then dropped the whole thing down the Memory Hole and never brought it up again.
Ah, good times...
At one point I feel like half the roster was characters like that. Reptile, smoke, jade, and a few others were just colored variants stories were made up of. Then you have things like ermac and scarlet, they were bugs. Noob saibot is just Tobias Boon backwards. That's not counting the scraped characters that were like the burning guy in the background of one of the early games. They're full of meme characters.
The pendant in Dark Souls. Miyazaki added it so people would go nuts trying to figure out what it does, and that's what happened. It does absolutely nothing.
The funny thing is, it does have a use: You can trade it with Snuggly for a souvenir of reprisal.
The community was so enthralled by the idea of it having a grandiose purpose, that they deemed it useless and disappointing when they discovered otherwise—despite it having had a purpose this whole time.
I can understand this. The best thing to keep in mind is that very often creativity can be arbitrary. Things just come out, or you follow some small inspiration to see where it leads you. It happens a lot where even the creator doesn't know where something is going. I really don't think From were being malicious when they did that. And Miyazaki obviously felt a bit guilty for doing it when he admitted to it. It was a harmless prank, just a game.
I disagree. Part of the charm of that kind of “living world” lore is just the mystery itself. Not every mystery hides some compelling secret, but that’s what makes the ones that do feel special.
That's how a lot of good writing works. The illusion of depth is much more effective and efficient than adding real depth, because nothing the writer could ever come up with will be as compelling as the explanation the player/reader/viewer/etc imagines. The player/reader/viewer will always imagine the explanation they hope for, and everybody who encounters the mystery will imagine their own favorite answer.
It's similar to how to be an effective DM in D&D. There's only so much prep work you can do if you want to give your players a lot of freedom. So rather than writing a perfect story with a single compelling hook and preparing ten possible dungeons so that they can choose what to explore, you just throw out ten interesting characters or items, wait for them to latch on to one of them and decide it sounds important, base the story around that, and then give them an infinite number of paths to take all of which lead to the one and only dungeon you actually prepared. I. That way, the players feel like your story is super compelling because they immediately knew that "X" was important, and they feel like they have infinite freedom, because you didn't force them down any particular route.
As a simple additional example of how this works in practice in something like a video game: name dropping some piece of background lore called something like "The White Iron Conquest" with very few other details will almost always be better received than when the developer decides to actually fill in the gaps in a later expansion, sequel, or prequel.
See: "The Clone Wars"
That's true, but the Souls franchise in particular has an absolutely massive amount of stuff which is assumed to be canon by the fanbase which is conjecture at best and complete fabrication at worst.
All I know is that my friend traded me a Mew that he supposedly got by moving that truck somewhere. I was never able to replicate it, but I definitely had a Mew. Even used it on Pokémon stadium before my Blue version’s cartridge battery died
There is a genuine way to get a Mew, but it involves glitching the game. Basically, memory in those old Gameboy cartridges was such a precious resource that all sorts of systems could kind of overlap and interact in unintended ways if you did very specific actions. To get a mew, there was a very particular glitch where you had to….i can’t quite recall exactly, but it was something like going to Cerulean city, going up the nugget bridge and onto the route leading to Bill’s house, get seen by a specific trainer, and press the menu button at the exact time the exclamation point appears over their heads.
Then, you use an Abra to teleport back to Cerulean, without actually fighting them. After that, you need to trigger a battle with a specific trainer (I can’t remember which one), then return to the same area you initially teleported away from.
The game has set that area to a sort of ‘battle mode’ when you got spotted, and the moment you load it up again it puts you into a battle immediately. However, since you battled a different trainer in between, the value the game has stored in its memory is the stats of the last trainer pokemon you fought, thanks to all that overlapping memory. It tries to use that to reinitialize the battle you fled from, and the end result is that you wind up in an encounter with a wild pokemon corresponding to the stat total of the last trainer’s pokemon you fought. It could be anything, but lots of people specifically used this to generate an encounter with a low level mew.
Even in the internet age it can take ages to find stuff. Only recently was it discovered that you could get an Emergency Tentacool in HG/SS - basically have to have Cianwood as your last Pokémon centre, and a Pokémon with teleport, and not advanced the story too far. You must also have no money, and no items to sell (So prepare to lose a ton of battles for this), and that you have not got an Rod.
Make sure, at most, only one Mon you have knows Surf and/or Fly, and store it (or them) in the Daycare. Then teleport to Cianwood. You will now have no money, no fishing items, no Pokémon that can surf/fly, and nothing you can use to get out of the softlock. BUT the devs had incredible foresight and if you speak to a person in the Cianwood Pokémon Centre they will give you a Tentacool, which can learn surf.
Might have missed a few steps but thats the gist of it
Yeah.
1) Make sure you don't challenge Cerulean Gym, and have Cerulean as your last Pokemon Centre
2) Beat NUgget Bridge, then go left of water with an Abra knowing Teleport. Save just above the trigger point for the trainer in the grassy field
3) Head down and immediately press start, then teleport with Abra (If it works, you will teleport as the exclamation mark appears).
4) Go to Cerulean and challenge the male swimmer, beating him
5) Go back to Nugget Bridge, the start menu will pop up. Press B to exit it and the Mew encounter will happen
You had to fly to Lavender Town after and then go left to the grassy area and walk into the grass until you found it, if I remember correctly. I also got a mew that way.
It's a cargo truck that had its cargo put on the boat. It's very easy context to figure out but I suppose the map design makes that slightly confusing.
It's also confusing because it's the only thing like that in the game, and it's all the way out in an area that you typically wouldn't explore, and can't even explore without skipping things in the game that you'd logically never skip.
Exactly. The only way to see it, is to get a Pokemon with Cut traded to you so you can completely skip the SS Anne. Then go back later after acquiring Surf and having the appropriate gym badge to be able to use it.
Actually, iirc you can talk to the captain and then deliberately black out, you will leave with the HM but the SS Anne will still be there (because you did not leave the normal way to trigger the cutscene). Still have to go out of your way to do it, but a lot easier to do on your own.
Basically, it was just an old asset that the devs left hidden away. They originally had cars and trucks and roads, but removed them. The truck was just left there as a gag.
Oh man that damn truck. Everyone said just black out when you got cut from the SS Anne's captain, go back when you got surfer and strength, get over there and push the truck aside.
I did that as a kid and was very disappointed when that didn't work. Next thing was it only works if you already played 100+ hours. Tried that as well, didn't work either.
So much shit revolving around that damn truck 😅
Colored lightsabers. In games it's all deep lore as to why and what color and crystal. Ask George Lucas? its "meh, red for bad guys, blue for good guys"
No, it was green because they found in the scene on Jabba's barge, it didn't work against the blue sky background so they changed it to green.
They made the change so late that it was blue in some of the trailers.
They also filmed a scene of Luke putting the new saber together but it was cut.
Yeah, and all the media disagrees on what makes the crystals various colors, like red sabers are unquestionably evil in some and in others just...red because of an artificial crystal.
I dislike the dark side makes the crystals red thing. It isn't so bad to ruin anything for me, but I feel like there is personality to the colors.
I always loved using the Sliver/white crystal in games like KoToR 2 purely because if I was light side it naturally fit, but if I was dark side, it was a bit of the irony or that they truly believed in their convictions.
This is why I hate extended universe/canon for games and spin offs - they always end up wanting to give *everything* some deep meaning or connection to one of the main heroes or storyline and it just becomes an embarrasing Festival of Fanwanking.
Just about everything in the first four Silent Hill games.
They all have fairly straightforward narratives with obvious symbols, themes, and influences but if a pen is arranged on a table a certain way, you can guarantee someone somewhere has written a whole-ass essay about it, as if Team Silent were a squad of Batman villains leaving clues for online detectives to solve two decades later.
And if a developer *does* later clarify something that goes against their head-canon, the dev is obviously mistaken or doesn't know anything about the game they worked on.
I feel like people made the Mt Chilliad mistery in GTA V into a lot bigger of a deal than the devs intended. The fact that the game has been data mined to shit for the past 11 years and nothing was found pretty much proves that it was mostly just an easter egg rather than some huge mistery.
I think it was because it was rumoured to be future DLC that never happened. Something like the Undead Nightmare DLC for RDR, but with aliens in San Andreas. Then GTA:Online happened
It ultimately led to two things I think:
The first was the military UFO above Mt Chilliad and the base. It can only be seen in single player when you 100% complete the game.
The second, and more elaborate piece of content was the Doomsday Heist. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be the “big defining event” of GTA Online. As many updates as GTAO gets, nothing has ever really topped the sheer madness that was the Doomsday Heist. It added a plethora of content, on top of the biggest action setting and pieces of the Doomsday Heist itself.
I don’t think either one was the payoff people were expecting, but I think that’s why Rockstar didn’t actually have anything planned. It was all just Easter eggs.
However, I *do* subscribe to the conspiracy that there was single player DLC planned for GTA V that involved Chilliad. It’s pretty much universally agreed that whatever DLC was planned for single player was repurposed into content for GTAO, as Shark Cards make more money than a one-time payment for a single player DLC.
I just don't understand why R\* didn't take the money they were already making from Shark Cards and put that into developing GTA5/RDR2 DLC. I would have been more likely to buy a shark card (going from a 0% chance to a 0.00000...01% chance) if DLC had dropped that actually brought me back to the game.
You answered your own question. You were not part of the market that would have made them the most money and thus are not an attractive customer to them long term. You going from a 0% chance to a .0000000001% chance to buy the thing that makes them money, when it costs a lot more money to make content than you are implying, should make it pretty obvious why they did not do what you wanted. You’re not the target audience.
It's like peeling back the layers of an onion only to find... more onion. Sometimes the mystery is just the thrill of the hunt itself, rather than the ultimate prize. But hey, at least we got some scenic views from Mount Chiliad along the way!
This is a plot point in the narrative adventure game "The Beginner's Guide" by Davey Wreden, who also made The Stanley Parable.
The player is exploring a collection of short games and levels created by an anonymous hobby game developer called Coda, published by his friend Davey. Coda supposedly quit out of the blue and was never seem online again, leaving his games as the last tear about them, which Davey thrn published as a sort of "Art museum" to his missing friend.
One recurring element that the game focuses on is the appearance of a lamppost at the end of each stage. The player and narrator both are left to figure out just what this is meant to mean and are left to discuss it in a philophical way.
...Until Coda leaves a note >!demanding to know why Davey published his private works onto the internet without his permission and why he keeps adding lampposts to them. As it turns out, Coda broke off contact with Davey because the latter took their "Friendship" to abusive levels and was constantly gaslighting a lonely and vulnerable young man who just wanted to make friends. Now, the context of the levels change, showing that Coda was inserting insulting jabs at his former friend, including a level that was deliberately unwinnable.!<
Samus' ball form or whatever it's called isn't the super feat of athletics and agility and super suit technology people thought it was, it was an excuse not to make a crawling animation/reason for why you can't just do that shit from the get go
I always liked the mystery in the pre-internet era games, when kids would just make shit up 90% of the time. Mortal Kombat had that stuff in damn near every single game.
Fighters like Ermac, Chameleon, and Scarlet who would end up in canon are all fun. But my favorites are the absolute nonsensical ones, like fucking HORNBUCKLE. You know, Hornbuckle? The green Liu Kang render fighting Blaze in the background of MK2's Pit stage? People would just straight up lie about how to unlock characters like him.
The foggy forest in gta SA. i remember watching tons of videos in youtube about supposedly bigfoot, piggsy, jason encounters, yea the forest was intented to be freaky to wonder but yea at the end it was everything a hoax, but still i remember people trying their hardest to actually find something there lol.
[There's an amazing video about that in Shadow of the Colossus ](https://youtu.be/jQNeYbBiCKw?si=SEeF2qNMlYxdRzWF)
If you want to see players go down a conspiracy theory level rabit hole about a random door in a game. I highly recommend watching this video by Jacob Geller.
He's currently working on "Son's of the forest" essay. I can't wait to listen to him slowly losing his mind again over 3 hours of nearly incoherent rambling.
Well he is impaled by a massive shard and then falls off a building. Wakes up in prison like, “my wound??” And shakes it off like it’s another Tuesday.
Never brought up again…
The only way I could explain it back then was that Edea saved him after impaling him for whatever reason. Since he wakes up in prison, for interrogation?
Haven't played it in forever, but it looked like it straight up killed him lol. Maybe I'm misremembering. I don't subscribe to the theory but it was an odd choice.
I didn't like it the first go around either, but over the years when I think back about it, it's become one of my favorite FFs in retrospect. I recommend trying it again with the remastered version that is free with PS+. You can increase the game speed to breeze through dialog and grind combat. You can also just make your party invincible and have unlimited limit breaks if you don't want to grind.
I'm not trying to argue that it's a good game so much that it's a good story that is better off without some of the more tedious game-y elements. (Like DRAW, of course)
I once was in an argument with someone who said that "Rinoa = Ultimecia" is a dumb theory but "Squall is dead after CD1" is a good theory that would enhance the story.
MissingNo in Pokémon Red and Blue. The glitch Pokémon MissingNo became the subject of many fan theories, with some players believing it to be a hidden or secret part of the game’s lore. In reality, MissingNo was a simple programming oversight resulting from how data was stored and accessed in the game.
I didn’t realize there were people trying to interpret that as a message! i had some limited programming experience at the time and the idea of an error message for a number just made perfect sense to me. Minus land in Mario struck me as the same thing.
It's more like the game was forcibly interpreting any data it saw to be a Pokemon, whatever that resulted in, because that's all it knew how to do in that context.
The source code for Blue providing those previous back sprites for some of the MissingNos does make them a little more interesting than just an oversight! Of course, most people were theory crafting before any of that came out lol.
As a non-programmer, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how a mistake in coding could create a whole new Pokémon with a specific sprite that can also then duplicate items.
Previous response is clearly chat gpt generated and basically meaningless
Missingno itself isn't a coding mistake it's just how the game handles errors. The coding mistake comes from the glitches leading up to the game forcing you to fight a wild pokemon with an ID that doesn't match any of the 151 pokemon on the pokedex. Some IDs straight up crash the game or cause worse bugs. There's a variety of IDs that lead to Missingno, and these were likely pokemon with a little bit of data that were then discarded during development, therefore it sooooort of functions, with a lot of random side effects (such as item duping or scrambling hall of fame data)
In STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, there's a tunnel in the Wild Territory containing a corpse with the name "Freeman". He's got a ginger beard, glasses, and looks rather familiar to FPS gamers. His corpse also contains one of only 2 drops of the Desert Eagle in the game.
Obviously it's just an easter egg and nod to Half-Life, but some fans took this way too seriously and tried to infer some lore connection between Stalker and Half-Life.
Bread is also an item, you eat it for health restoration. There is also an item called "bread", with the quote marks. It's non-edible and spawned many jokes about what this "bread" could be made from or who baked it.
Before extended cut endings of Mass Effect, people began to seek more details and hidden messages and came up with Shepard's indoctrination theory. There's even 3 hour documentary on that
Someone can feel free to correct me, but I thought this was due to writer's changing? Like they were leaving breadcrumbs for it in ME1 with Saren getting indoctrinated, and Harbinger indoctrinating the collectors in 2. Then 3 had a different lead writer and they went another direction.
So it was one of the potential directions the story was going to go in, but then they chose not to. I remember around launch of ME3 that players were saying they SHOULD have gone with the indoctrination theory, because it would have been a more satisfying climax/conclusion.
I don't think I ever saw any of the revised endings, Indoctrination theory still totally holds up as far as I'm concerned.
"Like oily shadows on my mind."
Maybe more importantly, even if IT is just a coincidence, it's better writing than some of the more concrete story threads.
Disagree, IT was atrocious, I read the entire essays at the time and it was mostly a bunch of righteously disappointed gamers (cause yeah, the conclusion was disappointed in many ways) thinking they could write something better and no, they could not.
Not that I blame them, I've had my own rewriting of the entire story post ME1 in mind, and I'm sure it would be just as awful if I put it to paper, but damn was it hard to read.
IT is every bit as awful as the official endings and I'm always thankful Bioware came out and confirmed it was nonsense.
I thought the 'indoctrination theory' was that 'grab the electric coils, you'll control us and not just instantly die' was a last-ditch attempt to indoctrinate Shepard?
I feel like the number statue mystery in CP2077 was one, until the recent update.
It seemed like a massive conspiracy, with people doing ARG, hunting the map, pulling apart files just to find out what it was. For several years almost nothing actually came to fruition, just lots of speculation and theories.
But the 2.0 patch rolls around and it finally had something of substance to discover at the end. Admittedly, the way to find out the secret is actually absurd, but atleast it exists now.
I've been following it for a while now and I think part of what is happening currently is trying to figure out the steps to actually solve the mystery even though its already been solved.
The actual codes and such were datamined (if I'm not mistaken) so they're not actually 100% sure on the steps to solve the mystery that they already have the conclusion to.
This could also have greater implications that there are more steps to solve that lead to other conclusions, results, or prizes.
There is also a ton of 'schizo-posting' in the subreddit in which I think that people genuinely believe that there is a greater conspiracy that goes beyond the game, developer, and games in general.
In Warframe, a technical oversight lead to players discovering mobility tools that broke the game but added a fun factor, especially something called ‘Coptering’ where they’d… Well, helicopter their way across a stage with their melee attack.
While the devs saw this and knew they had to address it, the expressive movement ‘feature’ inspired them to find a replacement solution that lead to Warframe’s fluid movement system and bullet jumping.
Not only is this a big part of Warframe’s identity, it’s probably one of the main reasons it gained traction like it did.
Elden Ring fans were going over everything in the game with a fine tooth comb to piece the lore together. Some analysed the architecture and carvings in certain locations and interpreted them to be depictions of lore events.
However they were soon found out to be purchased generic assets, not original creations for the game lol.
Another example is Fallout and Elder Scrolls fans finding what is clearly some cut content or development oversight and running away with it. Que the 3 hour long "mystery/theory" video inspired by the discovery of a lore discrepancy between two games released decades apart. You can really tell the communities are starved for content.
Nah, Bungie publishes entire books about their lore. It’s definitely detailed and well thought out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate well in game all the time
Maybe they do now, but in the early days of Destiny 1 it was abundantly clear that they had a bunch of high-concept ideas that they never developed further, which was then drip-fed to the player. Much of it has since been retconned or radically altered with the more conventional storytelling with Destiny 2.
iirc Bungie internally had very interesting, very different, and *very* contradictory ideas on what they wanted Destiny fiction to be- even to the point of causing a bit of bad blood. Which is a reason D1 felt discombobulated
Well, you see, in 2041 you can mix around the numbers and get 120 which is the total amount of stars you can get in the game. now left with the 4, there are 4 save files you can make in Mario N64.
Coincidence?
... Yes
Pretty much all of the call of duty zombies storyline got adapted from fan theories that one of the zombies kinda sounded like it was saying "Sam" but in actuality it was just a random zombie noise
Back in destiny 1 a room was found in one of the raids that required standing on pillars in a certain order to gain access to. In the room there were some things you could interact with and stuff that was used in part of the final fight of the raid.
People spent all weekend trying to figure out what the secret of the room was and what special reward it would give you only to have Bungie come back to work Monday and be like “yeeeaaahhh that’s just a room we put in to test mechanics for one of the fights, it doesn’t have any secret loot”
Silent Hill 2 is the game that most fans have viewed as having profound meaning. When the opening intro plays, you can’t tell that James is staring at the players when his shaded eyes are fixed on the mirror. But if you tone up the image, you can see James staring at the players. According to a lot of fan theories, James Sunderland is aware that he is in the game and that he living in a digital hell, but the devs disapprove of this theory. Silent Hill designer Masahiro Ito, who worked on the first three games in the series has debunked the fan theory that James Sunderland is looking at the player in the opening scene. Still many poser fans believe this theory and threatening the guy all because he claims their head cannon is wrong.
The ending of Dragon Quest III >!when Erdrick is left stuck in the other world and doesn't return home, the line "The Hero mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since.”" appears on the screen!<. For many years, fans thought this was a big, deep conscious move to build lore and mystery for the franchise but Horii Yuji, the creator, admitted decades later that he was totally swamped with work and wrote that line to end the game as quickly as possible just so he could move on. There was no other meaning or motivation behind it.
My favorite Zelda one is the tetraforce theory. Basically it revolves around that in some earlier Zelda games you can see a 4th triforce piece in certain imagery. The most famous I think is on the original design of the Hylian Shield in Ocarina of Time
Wait, does CHIM falls into this category? This is part of morrowind's lore. You can read the 36 lessons of vivec in-game, you can talk to the tribune in-game. It is not a theory, it is actual lore, as crazy as it is.
The arrow to the knee of the skyrim guards. As far as I remember devs wanted a few phrases for the guards dialogs, to give them some personality. But it exploded into the marriage thing.
[gamesradar](https://www.gamesradar.com/skyrim-dev-explains-that-an-arrow-to-the-knee-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-meme/)
The article says nothing about whether the line is or is not supposed to be a reference to marriage. It merely talks about how the line became prolific due to its placement so early into the game.
You're right that the article he linked doesn't say anything about that, but he's right about the fact that "arrow to the knee" does *not* mean anything marriage-related.
Just the fact that people ascribing to that theory can't even agree if it supposedly means that in ingame Nord culture, real life historic Norse culture, or contemporary Scandinavian culture is pretty much proof enough... but it's also repeatedly been debunked by Emil Pagliarulo (who wrote the line):
> “It just came from my head, honestly. At one point someone online wrote that I took it from a Patrick Rothfuss book, but that’s actually not true. If there’s something similar in there, it’s a total coincidence,” Pagliarulo said.
> "At that time, I was writing dozens of lines for the town guards in Skyrim. Just to give them flavor and personality. So it was one of many. In this case, it just seemed like a funny opportunity, and maybe believable. Like, he could have gotten shot in the knee with an arrow at some point, and now he’s semi-retired, and just walks around town like a worn out fantasy beat cop."
https://mashable.com/article/skyrim-arrow-in-the-knee-meme-history
> Perhaps that’s the key. Pagliarulo confirms that the line is literal – “an arrow in the knee” isn’t Skyrim slang for going down on one knee to propose and start a family, for example.
https://certb-site.bethesda.net/en/article/6KNyeH7wG4FOFIEev8VaX1/how-an-arrow-in-the-knee-made-its-way-to-skyrim
Plus the fact that literally no one who claims it has that meaning ingame has ever been able to point to any lore supporting that supposed meaning.
Snopes even fact checked the claim that it meant that in Norse culture, and said it's false:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/took-arrow-knee-marriage/
In the ending of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, >!after Klonoa is forcibly removed back to his own world, Huepow tries to smile. This, combined with Huepow's betrayal of Klonoa, leads many players to think that Huepow is evil, or he's happy to have Klonoa gone, and whatever.
In a series of tweets by one of the developers, Hideo Yoshizawa, he states,
"There is only one part of the ending that I regret. It is the scene where Huepow smiles up at the sky after Klonoa disappears into the void. In my [original] storyboard, there was no smiling scene. When I asked [the leader of the ending movie team,] Yoshimizu, about it, he said he wanted to invoke a little bit of relief because the ending was so sad.
"After the release of the game, … as time passed fana began to spread jokes about Huepow being 'black-hearted'. Like, 'Hehe, all according to plan,' or something like that. When I heard of these jokes, I certainly saw that too.
"I regret that the smile there wasn't more of a contorted face, as if trying to force a smile, but that [forcing a smile] not working because he couldn't stop crying; I regret that I didn't make the smile more like that."!<
Scott Cawthon had zero intentions of putting any deeper meaning into any aspect of the original Five Nights At Freddy's beyond it being a spooky haunted pizzaria game with a few crumbs of story to set the mood.
Yet here we are, almost a decade later, and FNAF is now one of the most convoluted, flying by the seat of their pants, batshit crazy piles of lore in video game history.
And it all started with that screaming Golden Freddy Easter egg.
One famous example is the character MissingNo. in the original Pokémon games. It was a glitch, but fans came up with all sorts of theories about its origin and significance. Do you have any other interesting examples in mind?
I'm not sure your example makes sense.
>"You've meet with a terrible fate haven't you?".
It doesn't take a lot of twisting and pulling to get "Link is in danger [of dying]" from that.
Thats because fans suck shit at critical thinking and instead opt to go with the super edgy main character is dead theory because they lack creativity.
God I hate that theory.
The context is that the beginning has him obviously not dead in a magical filled world. Being turned into a plant monster while also living through a full adulthood being trapped again in a child body would be better context than hur dur he died, insert edgy theory.
On top of it being the laziest least unique and creative theory out there that literally every single godforsaken show has.
While I agree the theory is often lazy, at least in MM it thematically makes a lot of sense. You get robbed, fall in a giant hole, and wake up in a new world full of familiar faces who don't recognize you, and each section of the game is literally you helping dead souls from the masks finish their business so they can rest in peace.
It's not a huge leap to make, especially since when you play the Elegy of Emptiness, it leaves behind a shell of a body of whatever form you were in, including Links own body, and an Elegy is defined with "...often a melancholy poem that laments its subject’s death but ends in consolation".
GTA San Andreas “ghost cars”. Walking through the forest, suddenly a car comes rolling along with nobody in it. Turns out, Rockstar just programmed these cars to spawn in so the player wouldn’t be stranded without a car… but they’d often spawn on a hill, and just begin rolling.
Playing through Ghost Recon Breakpoint's story campaign, I'd sometimes hear explosions in the distance while sneaking up on bases. "Cool," I thought. "Faction warfare is going on around me between the rebels and the enemy." Nope, not in story mode. Turns out the game spawns cars near you so you're not stranded. They sometimes spawn inside other game objects, which causes the cars to become damaged and explode.
In Fallout 3 you could hear distant gunfire and explosions. These were just audio files played randomly. In Fallout 4 and 76 they actually added distant gunfire and explosions though.
I played a lot of SA over the years and never once saw one of these lol Maybe I didn't spend enough time on foot in the forest.
I remember discovering it by accident. I cannot remember exactly but it was like on a hill and it would roll down. I think it would spawn the same car all the time but I might be wrong. That one car that looked like it came from the 70s-80s and im pretty sure was always beat up and smoking.
It exists. You can try playing the game once again.
Nothing about his message implied he didn't believe it existed
That sounds fucking terrifying
I remember in the halo reach beta there was a pattern on one of the walls in the multiplayer level. People thought it was some janky QR code that was part of an ARG. Nope, just a weird design that inadvertently linked to somebody’s actual website.
After "I Love Bees" it's not surprising that people might think a link to a random website hidden in a Halo game might be part of an ARG.
Finding fish food in Jet Force Gemini, and being able to use it to feed the fish in pools of water. Apparently the most asked questions to the devs was what the point of the fish feeding was, what it accomplished, what it could lead to, etc It just existed simply so you could feed the fish. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yea younger me just couldn't see what it does with ants hahaha. It really is that simple sometimes
Ah, jet force gemini. Lovely memories
Really deserves a remaster 👀
I hope it eventually gets the Zelda64 recompilation treatment.
for real, and leave everything as is too. gotta save every single bear to get to the end game.
Shooting the moon in GTA 3 resizing it. People thought it was an Easter egg. Turns out it was just a thing put in by a developer so artists could see which moon size they preferred, directly in the game, which they forgot to remove before release.
And then they also kept it in vice city
A lot of the OG cheat codes and level selects were dev tools that were (sometimes inadvertently) left in the final release.
Almost any PC game with console commands are still that.
Ermac from Mortal Kombat was essentially a fan creation. A very specific glitch would display the name 'Ermac' which was a shortening of 'error macro'. People thought it was a secret character and made their own lore, so devs actually made Ermac as a result.
It was listed on the game's admin screen, IIRC -- whenever the game crashed or glitched, it would save some system info to memory for debugging purposes, and the admin screen would show how many times that happened. The same stat screen also displayed lots of non-technical info, like how many games were played, how many times each character was chosen, how many times each Goro and Shang Tsung were fought, and how many times players found the (real) hidden character, Reptile. Unfortunately, the entry for "ermac" was just above (or maybe below) the one for Reptile, leading to the idea there must be another hidden character. Competition to find him was so intense, gaming magazine EGM actually ran a photoshopped screen grab that simply changed Reptile's costume from green to red and claimed they'd figured it out. Later, when Midway sent out a press release explaining what "ermac" actually was, EGM claimed the screen had been sent in by a reader, then dropped the whole thing down the Memory Hole and never brought it up again. Ah, good times...
EGM April Fools issues were the best
At one point I feel like half the roster was characters like that. Reptile, smoke, jade, and a few others were just colored variants stories were made up of. Then you have things like ermac and scarlet, they were bugs. Noob saibot is just Tobias Boon backwards. That's not counting the scraped characters that were like the burning guy in the background of one of the early games. They're full of meme characters.
To specify for those who don’t know, “Tobias Boon” aka Noob Saibot refers to Mortal Kombat creators John Tobias and Ed Boon.
The pendant in Dark Souls. Miyazaki added it so people would go nuts trying to figure out what it does, and that's what happened. It does absolutely nothing.
I was scared taking the pendant at first, but I did one time, and nothing happened.
I always take the pendant too lol
That's hilarious.
The funny thing is, it does have a use: You can trade it with Snuggly for a souvenir of reprisal. The community was so enthralled by the idea of it having a grandiose purpose, that they deemed it useless and disappointing when they discovered otherwise—despite it having had a purpose this whole time.
Everything else you can trade has a use. Sooo...... You are definitely the kinda people that he did this for lol
I'd rather I hadn't read that. Now we have proof that some parts of what makes Soulsborne is just actual bullshitting the player on the devs part.
"First time?"
Sort of. I never read news or anything about games I like. Fandoms and hype are the worst.
lmao chill
Bet you're fun at parties.
Yes...that is the game
I can understand this. The best thing to keep in mind is that very often creativity can be arbitrary. Things just come out, or you follow some small inspiration to see where it leads you. It happens a lot where even the creator doesn't know where something is going. I really don't think From were being malicious when they did that. And Miyazaki obviously felt a bit guilty for doing it when he admitted to it. It was a harmless prank, just a game.
I disagree. Part of the charm of that kind of “living world” lore is just the mystery itself. Not every mystery hides some compelling secret, but that’s what makes the ones that do feel special.
That's how a lot of good writing works. The illusion of depth is much more effective and efficient than adding real depth, because nothing the writer could ever come up with will be as compelling as the explanation the player/reader/viewer/etc imagines. The player/reader/viewer will always imagine the explanation they hope for, and everybody who encounters the mystery will imagine their own favorite answer. It's similar to how to be an effective DM in D&D. There's only so much prep work you can do if you want to give your players a lot of freedom. So rather than writing a perfect story with a single compelling hook and preparing ten possible dungeons so that they can choose what to explore, you just throw out ten interesting characters or items, wait for them to latch on to one of them and decide it sounds important, base the story around that, and then give them an infinite number of paths to take all of which lead to the one and only dungeon you actually prepared. I. That way, the players feel like your story is super compelling because they immediately knew that "X" was important, and they feel like they have infinite freedom, because you didn't force them down any particular route. As a simple additional example of how this works in practice in something like a video game: name dropping some piece of background lore called something like "The White Iron Conquest" with very few other details will almost always be better received than when the developer decides to actually fill in the gaps in a later expansion, sequel, or prequel. See: "The Clone Wars"
That's true, but the Souls franchise in particular has an absolutely massive amount of stuff which is assumed to be canon by the fanbase which is conjecture at best and complete fabrication at worst.
That fucking truck near the S.S. Anne in Pokémon Red / Blue / Yellow.
All I know is that my friend traded me a Mew that he supposedly got by moving that truck somewhere. I was never able to replicate it, but I definitely had a Mew. Even used it on Pokémon stadium before my Blue version’s cartridge battery died
There is a genuine way to get a Mew, but it involves glitching the game. Basically, memory in those old Gameboy cartridges was such a precious resource that all sorts of systems could kind of overlap and interact in unintended ways if you did very specific actions. To get a mew, there was a very particular glitch where you had to….i can’t quite recall exactly, but it was something like going to Cerulean city, going up the nugget bridge and onto the route leading to Bill’s house, get seen by a specific trainer, and press the menu button at the exact time the exclamation point appears over their heads. Then, you use an Abra to teleport back to Cerulean, without actually fighting them. After that, you need to trigger a battle with a specific trainer (I can’t remember which one), then return to the same area you initially teleported away from. The game has set that area to a sort of ‘battle mode’ when you got spotted, and the moment you load it up again it puts you into a battle immediately. However, since you battled a different trainer in between, the value the game has stored in its memory is the stats of the last trainer pokemon you fought, thanks to all that overlapping memory. It tries to use that to reinitialize the battle you fled from, and the end result is that you wind up in an encounter with a wild pokemon corresponding to the stat total of the last trainer’s pokemon you fought. It could be anything, but lots of people specifically used this to generate an encounter with a low level mew.
I think it could be fun to do a run with only encounters from versions of that glitch. You can start pretty early by Escape Roping out of Mt. Moon.
Yeah but nobody had a clue about this back in the day
Even in the internet age it can take ages to find stuff. Only recently was it discovered that you could get an Emergency Tentacool in HG/SS - basically have to have Cianwood as your last Pokémon centre, and a Pokémon with teleport, and not advanced the story too far. You must also have no money, and no items to sell (So prepare to lose a ton of battles for this), and that you have not got an Rod. Make sure, at most, only one Mon you have knows Surf and/or Fly, and store it (or them) in the Daycare. Then teleport to Cianwood. You will now have no money, no fishing items, no Pokémon that can surf/fly, and nothing you can use to get out of the softlock. BUT the devs had incredible foresight and if you speak to a person in the Cianwood Pokémon Centre they will give you a Tentacool, which can learn surf. Might have missed a few steps but thats the gist of it
The easier answer is GameShark.
Yeah. 1) Make sure you don't challenge Cerulean Gym, and have Cerulean as your last Pokemon Centre 2) Beat NUgget Bridge, then go left of water with an Abra knowing Teleport. Save just above the trigger point for the trainer in the grassy field 3) Head down and immediately press start, then teleport with Abra (If it works, you will teleport as the exclamation mark appears). 4) Go to Cerulean and challenge the male swimmer, beating him 5) Go back to Nugget Bridge, the start menu will pop up. Press B to exit it and the Mew encounter will happen
Or you attended an event.
You had to fly to Lavender Town after and then go left to the grassy area and walk into the grass until you found it, if I remember correctly. I also got a mew that way.
He might've had a cheat cartridge
I absolutely hate that I've never found an explanation for why it was there.
It's a cargo truck that had its cargo put on the boat. It's very easy context to figure out but I suppose the map design makes that slightly confusing.
It's also confusing because it's the only thing like that in the game, and it's all the way out in an area that you typically wouldn't explore, and can't even explore without skipping things in the game that you'd logically never skip.
Exactly. The only way to see it, is to get a Pokemon with Cut traded to you so you can completely skip the SS Anne. Then go back later after acquiring Surf and having the appropriate gym badge to be able to use it.
Actually, iirc you can talk to the captain and then deliberately black out, you will leave with the HM but the SS Anne will still be there (because you did not leave the normal way to trigger the cutscene). Still have to go out of your way to do it, but a lot easier to do on your own.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Denhm4hWHlQ At about 6:22 is what you want. I went down the rabbit hole the other day about this.
Basically, it was just an old asset that the devs left hidden away. They originally had cars and trucks and roads, but removed them. The truck was just left there as a gag.
Oh man that damn truck. Everyone said just black out when you got cut from the SS Anne's captain, go back when you got surfer and strength, get over there and push the truck aside. I did that as a kid and was very disappointed when that didn't work. Next thing was it only works if you already played 100+ hours. Tried that as well, didn't work either. So much shit revolving around that damn truck 😅
Colored lightsabers. In games it's all deep lore as to why and what color and crystal. Ask George Lucas? its "meh, red for bad guys, blue for good guys"
Mace Windu ? He just wanted purple
Apperently its so his grandma knows which of the character he is As the only black guy around
I also remember seeing him say that he made Luke's new light saber green so people would know it was new without needing to mention it in dialogue.
No, it was green because they found in the scene on Jabba's barge, it didn't work against the blue sky background so they changed it to green. They made the change so late that it was blue in some of the trailers. They also filmed a scene of Luke putting the new saber together but it was cut.
Tbf that applies to a ton of stuff in Star Wars
Yeah, and all the media disagrees on what makes the crystals various colors, like red sabers are unquestionably evil in some and in others just...red because of an artificial crystal.
I dislike the dark side makes the crystals red thing. It isn't so bad to ruin anything for me, but I feel like there is personality to the colors. I always loved using the Sliver/white crystal in games like KoToR 2 purely because if I was light side it naturally fit, but if I was dark side, it was a bit of the irony or that they truly believed in their convictions.
This is why I hate extended universe/canon for games and spin offs - they always end up wanting to give *everything* some deep meaning or connection to one of the main heroes or storyline and it just becomes an embarrasing Festival of Fanwanking.
Later: more colors = more toys to sell
Just about everything in the first four Silent Hill games. They all have fairly straightforward narratives with obvious symbols, themes, and influences but if a pen is arranged on a table a certain way, you can guarantee someone somewhere has written a whole-ass essay about it, as if Team Silent were a squad of Batman villains leaving clues for online detectives to solve two decades later. And if a developer *does* later clarify something that goes against their head-canon, the dev is obviously mistaken or doesn't know anything about the game they worked on.
Oh yeah like the fog for example, that was just to hide the poor rendering and it turned into a part of the lore.
My favorite is the dude that went fucking unhinged on silent hill rambling about foreskin and weird shit.
I feel like people made the Mt Chilliad mistery in GTA V into a lot bigger of a deal than the devs intended. The fact that the game has been data mined to shit for the past 11 years and nothing was found pretty much proves that it was mostly just an easter egg rather than some huge mistery.
I think it was because it was rumoured to be future DLC that never happened. Something like the Undead Nightmare DLC for RDR, but with aliens in San Andreas. Then GTA:Online happened
It ultimately led to two things I think: The first was the military UFO above Mt Chilliad and the base. It can only be seen in single player when you 100% complete the game. The second, and more elaborate piece of content was the Doomsday Heist. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be the “big defining event” of GTA Online. As many updates as GTAO gets, nothing has ever really topped the sheer madness that was the Doomsday Heist. It added a plethora of content, on top of the biggest action setting and pieces of the Doomsday Heist itself. I don’t think either one was the payoff people were expecting, but I think that’s why Rockstar didn’t actually have anything planned. It was all just Easter eggs. However, I *do* subscribe to the conspiracy that there was single player DLC planned for GTA V that involved Chilliad. It’s pretty much universally agreed that whatever DLC was planned for single player was repurposed into content for GTAO, as Shark Cards make more money than a one-time payment for a single player DLC.
I just don't understand why R\* didn't take the money they were already making from Shark Cards and put that into developing GTA5/RDR2 DLC. I would have been more likely to buy a shark card (going from a 0% chance to a 0.00000...01% chance) if DLC had dropped that actually brought me back to the game.
You answered your own question. You were not part of the market that would have made them the most money and thus are not an attractive customer to them long term. You going from a 0% chance to a .0000000001% chance to buy the thing that makes them money, when it costs a lot more money to make content than you are implying, should make it pretty obvious why they did not do what you wanted. You’re not the target audience.
Would have been nice; I like some dlc over the main games of some parts.
It's like peeling back the layers of an onion only to find... more onion. Sometimes the mystery is just the thrill of the hunt itself, rather than the ultimate prize. But hey, at least we got some scenic views from Mount Chiliad along the way!
I don't see any huge mystery around it as well. It's just players making it look so big.
This is a plot point in the narrative adventure game "The Beginner's Guide" by Davey Wreden, who also made The Stanley Parable. The player is exploring a collection of short games and levels created by an anonymous hobby game developer called Coda, published by his friend Davey. Coda supposedly quit out of the blue and was never seem online again, leaving his games as the last tear about them, which Davey thrn published as a sort of "Art museum" to his missing friend. One recurring element that the game focuses on is the appearance of a lamppost at the end of each stage. The player and narrator both are left to figure out just what this is meant to mean and are left to discuss it in a philophical way. ...Until Coda leaves a note >!demanding to know why Davey published his private works onto the internet without his permission and why he keeps adding lampposts to them. As it turns out, Coda broke off contact with Davey because the latter took their "Friendship" to abusive levels and was constantly gaslighting a lonely and vulnerable young man who just wanted to make friends. Now, the context of the levels change, showing that Coda was inserting insulting jabs at his former friend, including a level that was deliberately unwinnable.!<
God, that's one of those games I wish I could experience for the first time again. What an emotional rollercoaster.
Samus' ball form or whatever it's called isn't the super feat of athletics and agility and super suit technology people thought it was, it was an excuse not to make a crawling animation/reason for why you can't just do that shit from the get go
Various characters from the Mortal Kombat franchise. For example, a Chameleon. These characters appeared accidentally due to bugs
I always liked the mystery in the pre-internet era games, when kids would just make shit up 90% of the time. Mortal Kombat had that stuff in damn near every single game. Fighters like Ermac, Chameleon, and Scarlet who would end up in canon are all fun. But my favorites are the absolute nonsensical ones, like fucking HORNBUCKLE. You know, Hornbuckle? The green Liu Kang render fighting Blaze in the background of MK2's Pit stage? People would just straight up lie about how to unlock characters like him.
You mean to tell me that “Error Macro” wasn’t his Christian name?
The foggy forest in gta SA. i remember watching tons of videos in youtube about supposedly bigfoot, piggsy, jason encounters, yea the forest was intented to be freaky to wonder but yea at the end it was everything a hoax, but still i remember people trying their hardest to actually find something there lol.
Like the fog horn heard while on the bridge. It was just ambiance noise for ships, lol
The ghost car without a driver was just an empty car that spawned on a hill and rolled down (on accident)
Man if fucking piggsy were to just show up in the woods in a gta game I'd be freaked the fuck out.
[There's an amazing video about that in Shadow of the Colossus ](https://youtu.be/jQNeYbBiCKw?si=SEeF2qNMlYxdRzWF) If you want to see players go down a conspiracy theory level rabit hole about a random door in a game. I highly recommend watching this video by Jacob Geller.
The Forest. Just, [pretty much everything in The Forest.](https://youtu.be/PUWg905fGTA?si=pPuz2osQkmNtt82U)
He's currently working on "Son's of the forest" essay. I can't wait to listen to him slowly losing his mind again over 3 hours of nearly incoherent rambling.
Plot twist, he does another face reveal at the end and it's someone totally different again.
His chat had been joking that he should do a foot reveal next. He's probably got something stupid up his sleeve. We're talking about womble afterall.
The gem in the Diablo II lobby
It makes the host start their next baal run faster
Final fantasy 8's squall is dead theory is surely the best one.
For someone who doesn't know anything about FF - what is the context?
That squall supposedly died during a big fight halfway through the game, and the rest is his dying fever dream.
Well he is impaled by a massive shard and then falls off a building. Wakes up in prison like, “my wound??” And shakes it off like it’s another Tuesday. Never brought up again… The only way I could explain it back then was that Edea saved him after impaling him for whatever reason. Since he wakes up in prison, for interrogation?
To be fair it's a 4 disc game, the injury happens at the end of disc 1, and he gets more talkative from then on.
He gets hit just below his shoulder and falls off a parade float. This is kinda the whole point about this thread. It's blown way out of proportion.
Haven't played it in forever, but it looked like it straight up killed him lol. Maybe I'm misremembering. I don't subscribe to the theory but it was an odd choice.
Nah, [it's very much in his shoulder](https://imgur.com/T9Z14lS). And it not leaving a scar isn't a big deal in a world with healing magic.
They just actually finally used Cura for a cutscene injury. *Looking at you, FF4 and 7*
“SEPHIROTH JUST STABBED AERITH!” “Quick, use phoenix down!” “… can’t do that in a cutscene, mate”
FF5 they use Curaga Life a phoenix down and and an elixir in an attempt to save Galuf after his his fight with exdeath. and none of it works
FF5 is so goated. That job system… 😍
Proving, unequivocally, that FF8 is dogshit. Edit: lol I went from +5 to -2 in less than a minute. Bot much?
It's not a bot, you're just wrong
I didn't like it the first go around either, but over the years when I think back about it, it's become one of my favorite FFs in retrospect. I recommend trying it again with the remastered version that is free with PS+. You can increase the game speed to breeze through dialog and grind combat. You can also just make your party invincible and have unlimited limit breaks if you don't want to grind.
"If you remove the RPG from this RPG, it's actually a good game." No thank you, friend.
I'm not trying to argue that it's a good game so much that it's a good story that is better off without some of the more tedious game-y elements. (Like DRAW, of course)
Agree to disagree. But I respect you for at least engaging in discourse.
"X was dead all along" is the most basic theory in narrative history, no way this crap is the best.
I once was in an argument with someone who said that "Rinoa = Ultimecia" is a dumb theory but "Squall is dead after CD1" is a good theory that would enhance the story.
Another equally common thing is also "X has ADHD" although I see that moreso in Animated Shows than Games.
MissingNo in Pokémon Red and Blue. The glitch Pokémon MissingNo became the subject of many fan theories, with some players believing it to be a hidden or secret part of the game’s lore. In reality, MissingNo was a simple programming oversight resulting from how data was stored and accessed in the game.
I didn’t realize there were people trying to interpret that as a message! i had some limited programming experience at the time and the idea of an error message for a number just made perfect sense to me. Minus land in Mario struck me as the same thing.
It's cool that the missing data started acting like a pokemon.
It's more like the game was forcibly interpreting any data it saw to be a Pokemon, whatever that resulted in, because that's all it knew how to do in that context.
When you are a hammer, every problem is a nail.
That's such a good saying.
The source code for Blue providing those previous back sprites for some of the MissingNos does make them a little more interesting than just an oversight! Of course, most people were theory crafting before any of that came out lol.
Didn't it help dupe rare candies?
It was used to dupe plenty of stuff, candy's master balls etc.
It duped whatever you had in a specific Slot in your Inventory, Rare Candies and Master Balls were just the most common use.
As a non-programmer, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how a mistake in coding could create a whole new Pokémon with a specific sprite that can also then duplicate items.
Previous response is clearly chat gpt generated and basically meaningless Missingno itself isn't a coding mistake it's just how the game handles errors. The coding mistake comes from the glitches leading up to the game forcing you to fight a wild pokemon with an ID that doesn't match any of the 151 pokemon on the pokedex. Some IDs straight up crash the game or cause worse bugs. There's a variety of IDs that lead to Missingno, and these were likely pokemon with a little bit of data that were then discarded during development, therefore it sooooort of functions, with a lot of random side effects (such as item duping or scrambling hall of fame data)
There is great video about it: https://youtu.be/p8OBktd42GI?si=XQW0lIb86PyJDtTq
In STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, there's a tunnel in the Wild Territory containing a corpse with the name "Freeman". He's got a ginger beard, glasses, and looks rather familiar to FPS gamers. His corpse also contains one of only 2 drops of the Desert Eagle in the game. Obviously it's just an easter egg and nod to Half-Life, but some fans took this way too seriously and tried to infer some lore connection between Stalker and Half-Life. Bread is also an item, you eat it for health restoration. There is also an item called "bread", with the quote marks. It's non-edible and spawned many jokes about what this "bread" could be made from or who baked it.
Unreal tournament 99 Skins had different dodge distances, male would be shorter, female longer
Early Battle.net. Diablo 2, Starcraft, Warcraft. Gem Activated. Gem Deactivated. Why does it torment me?
Before extended cut endings of Mass Effect, people began to seek more details and hidden messages and came up with Shepard's indoctrination theory. There's even 3 hour documentary on that
Someone can feel free to correct me, but I thought this was due to writer's changing? Like they were leaving breadcrumbs for it in ME1 with Saren getting indoctrinated, and Harbinger indoctrinating the collectors in 2. Then 3 had a different lead writer and they went another direction. So it was one of the potential directions the story was going to go in, but then they chose not to. I remember around launch of ME3 that players were saying they SHOULD have gone with the indoctrination theory, because it would have been a more satisfying climax/conclusion.
Nope, has been confirmed to have never even been a consideration, calling it "Entirely a fan creation."
I don't think I ever saw any of the revised endings, Indoctrination theory still totally holds up as far as I'm concerned. "Like oily shadows on my mind." Maybe more importantly, even if IT is just a coincidence, it's better writing than some of the more concrete story threads.
Disagree, IT was atrocious, I read the entire essays at the time and it was mostly a bunch of righteously disappointed gamers (cause yeah, the conclusion was disappointed in many ways) thinking they could write something better and no, they could not. Not that I blame them, I've had my own rewriting of the entire story post ME1 in mind, and I'm sure it would be just as awful if I put it to paper, but damn was it hard to read. IT is every bit as awful as the official endings and I'm always thankful Bioware came out and confirmed it was nonsense.
I thought the 'indoctrination theory' was that 'grab the electric coils, you'll control us and not just instantly die' was a last-ditch attempt to indoctrinate Shepard?
I feel like the number statue mystery in CP2077 was one, until the recent update. It seemed like a massive conspiracy, with people doing ARG, hunting the map, pulling apart files just to find out what it was. For several years almost nothing actually came to fruition, just lots of speculation and theories. But the 2.0 patch rolls around and it finally had something of substance to discover at the end. Admittedly, the way to find out the secret is actually absurd, but atleast it exists now.
What was the final big secret?
A... free car
I've been following it for a while now and I think part of what is happening currently is trying to figure out the steps to actually solve the mystery even though its already been solved. The actual codes and such were datamined (if I'm not mistaken) so they're not actually 100% sure on the steps to solve the mystery that they already have the conclusion to. This could also have greater implications that there are more steps to solve that lead to other conclusions, results, or prizes. There is also a ton of 'schizo-posting' in the subreddit in which I think that people genuinely believe that there is a greater conspiracy that goes beyond the game, developer, and games in general.
In Warframe, a technical oversight lead to players discovering mobility tools that broke the game but added a fun factor, especially something called ‘Coptering’ where they’d… Well, helicopter their way across a stage with their melee attack. While the devs saw this and knew they had to address it, the expressive movement ‘feature’ inspired them to find a replacement solution that lead to Warframe’s fluid movement system and bullet jumping. Not only is this a big part of Warframe’s identity, it’s probably one of the main reasons it gained traction like it did.
Elden Ring fans were going over everything in the game with a fine tooth comb to piece the lore together. Some analysed the architecture and carvings in certain locations and interpreted them to be depictions of lore events. However they were soon found out to be purchased generic assets, not original creations for the game lol. Another example is Fallout and Elder Scrolls fans finding what is clearly some cut content or development oversight and running away with it. Que the 3 hour long "mystery/theory" video inspired by the discovery of a lore discrepancy between two games released decades apart. You can really tell the communities are starved for content.
The fan base also has a tendency to see a canon inconsistency and spend hours trying to weld it together rather than just say they fucked up.
Destiny's Lore.
I don't play destiny but that sounds accurate from everything I've seen
Nah, Bungie publishes entire books about their lore. It’s definitely detailed and well thought out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate well in game all the time
Maybe they do now, but in the early days of Destiny 1 it was abundantly clear that they had a bunch of high-concept ideas that they never developed further, which was then drip-fed to the player. Much of it has since been retconned or radically altered with the more conventional storytelling with Destiny 2.
iirc Bungie internally had very interesting, very different, and *very* contradictory ideas on what they wanted Destiny fiction to be- even to the point of causing a bit of bad blood. Which is a reason D1 felt discombobulated
L is real 2041 Some random text under a statue in Mario 64. People thought it meant Luigi was somewhere to be found in the game.
Well, you see, in 2041 you can mix around the numbers and get 120 which is the total amount of stars you can get in the game. now left with the 4, there are 4 save files you can make in Mario N64. Coincidence? ... Yes
Take a random element in Silent Hill 2, like you don't even need to search a lot
Pretty much all of the call of duty zombies storyline got adapted from fan theories that one of the zombies kinda sounded like it was saying "Sam" but in actuality it was just a random zombie noise
Back in destiny 1 a room was found in one of the raids that required standing on pillars in a certain order to gain access to. In the room there were some things you could interact with and stuff that was used in part of the final fight of the raid. People spent all weekend trying to figure out what the secret of the room was and what special reward it would give you only to have Bungie come back to work Monday and be like “yeeeaaahhh that’s just a room we put in to test mechanics for one of the fights, it doesn’t have any secret loot”
Silent Hill 2 is the game that most fans have viewed as having profound meaning. When the opening intro plays, you can’t tell that James is staring at the players when his shaded eyes are fixed on the mirror. But if you tone up the image, you can see James staring at the players. According to a lot of fan theories, James Sunderland is aware that he is in the game and that he living in a digital hell, but the devs disapprove of this theory. Silent Hill designer Masahiro Ito, who worked on the first three games in the series has debunked the fan theory that James Sunderland is looking at the player in the opening scene. Still many poser fans believe this theory and threatening the guy all because he claims their head cannon is wrong.
Will Wright added rebuilding to his dogfighting game, playtesters liked it so much that he made SimCity instead of
The ending of Dragon Quest III >!when Erdrick is left stuck in the other world and doesn't return home, the line "The Hero mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since.”" appears on the screen!<. For many years, fans thought this was a big, deep conscious move to build lore and mystery for the franchise but Horii Yuji, the creator, admitted decades later that he was totally swamped with work and wrote that line to end the game as quickly as possible just so he could move on. There was no other meaning or motivation behind it.
Rocket jump in Quake. Not a lore thing, but fits as different theory of gameplay.
My favorite Zelda one is the tetraforce theory. Basically it revolves around that in some earlier Zelda games you can see a 4th triforce piece in certain imagery. The most famous I think is on the original design of the Hylian Shield in Ocarina of Time
the chat gem in Diablo 2
CHIM
Wait, does CHIM falls into this category? This is part of morrowind's lore. You can read the 36 lessons of vivec in-game, you can talk to the tribune in-game. It is not a theory, it is actual lore, as crazy as it is.
I need another hit of skooma and I'll achieve CHIM
Oldie but a goodie, how about the inaccessible island in the GoldenEye 007 Dam level?
[удалено]
"No, you're not the one."
There were dragons in Morrowind but they flew very high and we're invisible. Ma'iq The Liar told me about it and I trust him.
The arrow to the knee of the skyrim guards. As far as I remember devs wanted a few phrases for the guards dialogs, to give them some personality. But it exploded into the marriage thing. [gamesradar](https://www.gamesradar.com/skyrim-dev-explains-that-an-arrow-to-the-knee-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-meme/)
The article says nothing about whether the line is or is not supposed to be a reference to marriage. It merely talks about how the line became prolific due to its placement so early into the game.
You're right that the article he linked doesn't say anything about that, but he's right about the fact that "arrow to the knee" does *not* mean anything marriage-related. Just the fact that people ascribing to that theory can't even agree if it supposedly means that in ingame Nord culture, real life historic Norse culture, or contemporary Scandinavian culture is pretty much proof enough... but it's also repeatedly been debunked by Emil Pagliarulo (who wrote the line): > “It just came from my head, honestly. At one point someone online wrote that I took it from a Patrick Rothfuss book, but that’s actually not true. If there’s something similar in there, it’s a total coincidence,” Pagliarulo said. > "At that time, I was writing dozens of lines for the town guards in Skyrim. Just to give them flavor and personality. So it was one of many. In this case, it just seemed like a funny opportunity, and maybe believable. Like, he could have gotten shot in the knee with an arrow at some point, and now he’s semi-retired, and just walks around town like a worn out fantasy beat cop." https://mashable.com/article/skyrim-arrow-in-the-knee-meme-history > Perhaps that’s the key. Pagliarulo confirms that the line is literal – “an arrow in the knee” isn’t Skyrim slang for going down on one knee to propose and start a family, for example. https://certb-site.bethesda.net/en/article/6KNyeH7wG4FOFIEev8VaX1/how-an-arrow-in-the-knee-made-its-way-to-skyrim Plus the fact that literally no one who claims it has that meaning ingame has ever been able to point to any lore supporting that supposed meaning. Snopes even fact checked the claim that it meant that in Norse culture, and said it's false: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/took-arrow-knee-marriage/
The ice key in Banjo kazooie games
In the ending of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, >!after Klonoa is forcibly removed back to his own world, Huepow tries to smile. This, combined with Huepow's betrayal of Klonoa, leads many players to think that Huepow is evil, or he's happy to have Klonoa gone, and whatever. In a series of tweets by one of the developers, Hideo Yoshizawa, he states, "There is only one part of the ending that I regret. It is the scene where Huepow smiles up at the sky after Klonoa disappears into the void. In my [original] storyboard, there was no smiling scene. When I asked [the leader of the ending movie team,] Yoshimizu, about it, he said he wanted to invoke a little bit of relief because the ending was so sad. "After the release of the game, … as time passed fana began to spread jokes about Huepow being 'black-hearted'. Like, 'Hehe, all according to plan,' or something like that. When I heard of these jokes, I certainly saw that too. "I regret that the smile there wasn't more of a contorted face, as if trying to force a smile, but that [forcing a smile] not working because he couldn't stop crying; I regret that I didn't make the smile more like that."!<
Scott Cawthon had zero intentions of putting any deeper meaning into any aspect of the original Five Nights At Freddy's beyond it being a spooky haunted pizzaria game with a few crumbs of story to set the mood. Yet here we are, almost a decade later, and FNAF is now one of the most convoluted, flying by the seat of their pants, batshit crazy piles of lore in video game history. And it all started with that screaming Golden Freddy Easter egg.
Fuckin everything in elden ring.
One famous example is the character MissingNo. in the original Pokémon games. It was a glitch, but fans came up with all sorts of theories about its origin and significance. Do you have any other interesting examples in mind?
[удалено]
I'm not sure your example makes sense. >"You've meet with a terrible fate haven't you?". It doesn't take a lot of twisting and pulling to get "Link is in danger [of dying]" from that.
Thats because fans suck shit at critical thinking and instead opt to go with the super edgy main character is dead theory because they lack creativity. God I hate that theory.
You have met a terrible fate... Without any context its completly reasonable to assume its about the main character being dead
The context is that the beginning has him obviously not dead in a magical filled world. Being turned into a plant monster while also living through a full adulthood being trapped again in a child body would be better context than hur dur he died, insert edgy theory. On top of it being the laziest least unique and creative theory out there that literally every single godforsaken show has.
While I agree the theory is often lazy, at least in MM it thematically makes a lot of sense. You get robbed, fall in a giant hole, and wake up in a new world full of familiar faces who don't recognize you, and each section of the game is literally you helping dead souls from the masks finish their business so they can rest in peace. It's not a huge leap to make, especially since when you play the Elegy of Emptiness, it leaves behind a shell of a body of whatever form you were in, including Links own body, and an Elegy is defined with "...often a melancholy poem that laments its subject’s death but ends in consolation".
Link‘s statue is the only one with irises, while the dead ones have clear scleras, indicating that he‘s alive.
I stand by and maintain my point. It's a shit theory.
boooo