Super Tecmo Bowl (NES)- Both my friend and I were playing the ‘season’ game and trying to see who could get the better record. Both of us were very good at the game (we could both get an undefeated season against the computer without resetting/cheating). We were also super-competitive against each other, and our games were very close. It got to where we were using mind games against each other to try to ‘psych out’ the other player. One day, I just made up some story about how I found an exploit in the game that allowed a tackler to injure another player 100% of the time. I said I could blitz and knock out the other team’s star quarterback 3 seconds into the game 
My friend was rather skeptical, and I claimed I would destroy him next time we played. So we are playing, and when he gets possession of the ball, my guy tackles one of his wide receivers and injures him, taking him out of the game. This happened as a total fluke, but my friend looked like he just shit a brick :eek:, shut the game off and refused to play against me, saying I had descended into being a ‘dirty cheater’ because I was afraid he might be better than me (we were psycho about this game for a good year I might add)
One of my friends started a rumor about Diablo 2 about how you could gain…gemstones, I believe…by squashing all the bugs in Duriel’s lair at the end of Act 2. I think that was it–I’m too lazy to look it up right now, though: It’s listed somewhere on the false rumor list on Diabloii.net.
Yep, he’s a bastard. Yep, we still laugh ourselves sick about it thinking of all those kids running around on Battlenet squashing bugs for treasure…
Is anybody else waiting for someone to waltz in and say they created the “Triforce in Ocarina of Time” rumor?
Well, I haven’t started any myself, but two that I’ll never forget for as long as I live:
The Sheng Long debacle
The story is that for whatever bizarro demented freakish reason, Capcom USA didn’t use “shoryuken” or “rising dragon fist” in Ryu’s win quote, the result being that he claimed that you had to “defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance”. That’s right, they used a freaking INCORRECT CHINESE TRANSLATION! (“Sheng Long” is actually a character from Dragonball Z but has no connection to Street Fighter whatsoever.)
Needless to say, maybe four people in the country understood what defeating Sheng Long meant, with the rest of us assuming that this was an acutal person that’d we might be facing at some point.
Had the VG mags simply printed a clarification (which they may as well have, as they were devoting about forty flippin’ pages to this game every issue), that would’ve been the end of it. But one particular publication…EGM? I don’t remember…put, in their April issue (and I remind you that April is an entire month which has a number of notable events, including Easter), an article not only claming Sheng Long was real, but providing instructions on how to get him!
Even worse, they provided a plausible-looking image of the guy in a screenshot, and a method of getting him (seriously, an entire freaking month) that, while insanely difficult, was at least theoretically possible.
I swear, when I first got Internet access, I ran into testimonals from people who still thought he existed.
The secrets of Mortal Kombat 2
I heard them all. Kintaro morphs. Sonya and Kano playable. Goro in there somewhere. Animalities. Nudalities. Hidden fatalities. Stage fatality in the tower. About 10 hidden opponents. A Shao Kahn ending. All kinds of rewards if you did enough fatalities or won enough matches in a row.
Here’s a grand total of all the secrets that actually existed.
- Three hidden opponents, with a different way to get to each.
…
I swear, the Gobbledy Gooker wasn’t this much of an anticlimax.