Key Takeaways
- Lavender Town Syndrome: A spooky Pokemon myth about the music that made kids ill and led to suicide.
- San Andreas Sasquatch: Players searched for Bigfoot in GTA but Rockstar had to debunk it.
- Herobrine: An urban legend in Minecraft about a ghostly player named Herobrine that Notch denied.
When you’re young and innocent, you have no idea what is or isn’t possible in the world of video games. If you grew up before anything and everything was available to look up on the internet, all you had for help or advice on your favorite games was what you heard on the playground. Maybe, if you were lucky, you could buy an official strategy guide. For the most part, though, any game information came from that one friend whose uncle totally worked for Nintendo.
Video game urban legends managed to spread across the country (maybe even the globe) without the help of the internet. Everyone knew at least one kid who swore they entered some code, found some secret area, or something else in a game that we now think back on and shake our heads at our past selves for believing. These urban legends haven’t died down, either. Thanks to the power of the internet, spreading fake footage and information is easier than ever, but also easier to debunk. These are the best video game urban legends we fully admit to have fallen for.
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1 Lavender Town Syndrome
Don’t stop in Lavender Town
Pokemon may have the most urban legends of any single video game series, so narrowing it down to one was tough. Mew hidden under the truck is a classic, but too well known, and Pikablue ended up solving itself eventually. As morbid as it is, my favorite has always been the myth of Lavender Town Syndrome. For anyone who never played Red or Blue, each main town you visit has a color-themed name, i.e. Cerulean City, Fuchsia City, Saffron City, and so on. Lavender Town was already a spooky location since it is the only place in the game with a Pokemon graveyard, but also has an eerie tune very different from the typical upbeat soundtrack.
The legend is that there was something in the Lavender Town music that would make kids feel ill and eventually commit suicide. It got so specific as to state it used a special frequency that only kids could hear, which is why it didn’t affect adults. Naturally, there’s no truth to this and you can safely listen to this music all day if you want.
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2 The San Andreas Sasquatch
I want to believe
Right around the PS2 era was a magical time for video game hoaxes and legends. Technology was just good enough to start recording and sharing blurry pictures and videos, but also to the point where someone talented enough to make some very convincing fakes. Just like real-life photos of the cryptid, footage and images of supposed bigfoot sightings inside GTA San Andreas started showing up in all their blurry glory. Players would share footage of gameplay running through the misty woods of the game and catching glimpses of the hairy beast. Some went so far as to make videos of them shooting and killing the bigfoot, but those felt far too staged and fake.
The legend persisted for so long that Rockstar went so far as to include actual bigfoot in both the Undead Nightmare DLC for Red Dead Redemption and a fake one in GTA V to try and put this entire thing to rest once and for all.
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3 Herobrine
Removed Herobrine
I was torn between choosing Herobrine or The Ghost of Lockout here, but the former had a much bigger impact and deeper lore to it that makes it more fun to talk about. This urban legend started back during Minecraft’s alpha days when the game was just starting to gain popularity. Players started reporting seeing this other player character (Steve) while playing in a game by themselves. Dubbed Herobrine, they looked exactly like the default Minecraft character, save for the blank white eyes. He would tend to stand on the edge of the game’s draw distance so you couldn’t get a clear view, and was responsible for any mysterious caves or changes to your world that happened with no explanation.
The legend gets spooky when people started trying to uncover what or who this ghostly player was, eventually claiming it was the deceased brother of Minecraft creator, Notch. From there, sightings, reports, and videos went viral. While Notch has specifically denied everything about Herobrine, the team at Mojang included “Removed Herobrine” in the game’s patch notes for years to keep the spirit of the legend going.
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4 L is Real
Luigi 64
One easy way to make a video game urban legend believable is to pick a game that already has a ton of secrets. Mario 64 is a perfect example, and the fact that Yoshi is really hidden on the roof of the castle and will give you 100 lives makes any other hidden guest appearance all the more believable. In this case, people crafted a very compelling myth about Luigi being present as well. The rumor all came from some blurry text on a plaque in the back of the castle. Below a statue of a star, this text could be interpreted as saying “L is real 2401.” People interpreted the L as starnding for Luigi and the way to unlock Mario’s brother was to collect 2401 coins exactly and bring them to the statue. Meanwhile, some others said you could unlock Luigi by running 2401 laps around the statue.
Either way, these were both complete wastes of time and Luigi is not in the original Mario 64 in any way. You can play as him in the DS remake, though.
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5 PS2 supercomputer
Plays DVDs and launches nukes
This urban legend was so widespread that even a few mainstream news outlets fell for the rumors at the time. Hot on the heels of the big YSK conspiracy, a rumor began later in 2000 that the then-president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was stockpiling thousands of PS2 consoles. And he wasn’t doing this because he was really into Kingdom Hearts, either. The legend went that he was buying up so many consoles to somehow link them all together to create some supercomputer for military purposes, such as missile guidance.
It goes without saying that no part of this story is true, but it would’ve been a good explanation for why the PS2 ended up selling so many units.
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