Apologies for the long delay in my posts here. I certainly didn’t mean to sleep through November… I just forgot to set my alarm clock, is all.

In any event, I’m back now, with a new look at some old favorites.

As of this Christmas, video games have been around for well over 35 years in the consumer marketplace. From the Magnavox Odyssey to the PS3, from Pong to Assassin’s Creed II, from simple dials and buttons to Wiimotes and Nunchukus, no one can deny there’s a long and storied history in this field.

And as usually seems to happen, some of that history has already begun to cross the border between reality and legend.

I’m sure you know all about the Telephone Game. In case you don’t, this is how it works: Take a group of people and seat them in a circle. Start with yourself, and whisper a sentence into the ear of the person to your left. That person will then pass it on to the next person in the circle, who will pass it on to the next, and so on until it gets back to you. In 99.97% of all cases, by the time the sentence makes its way around the circle and back to your ears, it will no longer resemble the original sentence you started with. It’s a graphic demonstration of how the human mind works; we all hear what we want to hear, discard what we don’t, and this affects how we communicate.

Now, if you take the Telephone Game and couple it with the famous Big Lie theory (if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it no matter how outrageous a lie it is), that explains how much of the oral history of video games has become distorted over the years. There are some stories out there that can only be described as “urban myth,” that through years of retelling only the most salient aspects of the truth behind the stories have somehow become almost canonized as the Truth.

It’s time to dispel some of these myths.

In this article, I’ll be taking a look at some of my favorite urban legends of gaming, and giving you the truth, as my fairly extensive research on this subject will have it, behind the stories. I don’t have any illusions that this will do anything to stop or slow the progress of the myths themselves, but it’s my hope that having this information out there, collated and collected in one relatively easy-to-find place, will at least add something to the signal/noise ratio out there.

The fun begins on the next page, and continues with one legend per page thereafter. This should be fun…

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If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: Gauntlet (NES)
2. Retro-Active: Deadly Towers
3. Retro-Active: Super Pitfall
4. Retro-Active: Dragon Warrior
5. Retro-Active: Alex Kidd