MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
We all know the ancient playground bullshit tales of "Mew under the truck" or "You can get Shen Long if you win without getting hit" that were ever so popular, but what about the times that those later became real? Essentially, what is your favorite community in-joke or rumor that became true later? I'm not really talking about examples that were always real like Missingno or the Arwing ship being in Ocarina of Time.
The king of this to me is Mortal Kombat, which make sense. The series in the arcade days took a lot of advantage of having no internet and the arcade culture by constantly teasing shit, having extremely complicated fatalities, and even going as far as to do revisions where inputs changed. Ermac was a rumor in MK2, then became real in MK3. A red Kitana sprite in MK2 was rumored to be a new character, and it took until MK9 for Skarlet to become real. The number of bullshit fatalities people made up for MK1/MK2 were massive, until animalities, babalities and friendships became real. Like a lot of games, people also claimed you could totally unlock this licensed character from this bloody horror movie! Like Predator, Freddy Kreuger, Jason and a Xenomorph! Oh, they totally added those in 9/10 as well.
The most obvious examples outside of Mortal Kombat -
The Secret Cow Level in Diablo II. Perhaps the most famous of these ever, the Cow Level was a long-time Diablo I rumor and repeatedly denied by Blizzard. Come Diablo II, if you combined Wirt's Leg with a Scroll of Town Portal in the Horadric Cube, you could actually go to the Cow Level!
Herobrine in MineCraft. Not technically real but its an in-joke acknowledged by the developers. In a creepypasta-esque story that became popular, a MineCraft player claims to have repeatedly met the ghost of someone named Herobrine, allegedly Notch's dead brother. While not true, the rumor remained popular - and eventually Mojang started to end every patch note listing with the message "Removed Herobrine."
Bigfoot in GTA San Andreas, and to a lesser extent Ratman in GTA IV. While the GTA games are notorious for these kinds of rumors, Bigfoot in SA has to be the most famous. The reason why is obvious - Rockstar totally plays into this. While rumors of Leatherface, Ratman, Bigfoot, Aliens, Killer Clowns and a myriad of other stuff swirled, you had the actual real stuff like the notorious flying ghost cars in San Andreas. But Bigfoot remained the most famous and elusive, and he did eventually surface. In Red Dead Redemption in the Undead Nightmare DLC, and in GTA V as a crazy dude in a suit.
A lot of things in World of WarCraft. This is kinda riding the line of counting or not, but for such a long running game rumors were made, deconfirmed and later reconfirmed multiple times. I think everybody wanted to be able to purify the Corrupted Ashbringer into the regular Ashbringer, but you couldn't. Until over a decade later when they hand Ret Paladins the Ashbringer, and then you have to unlock the Corrupted appearance. You could glitch into Hyjal, but it wasn't an actual zone. Now it is. "I heard that Goblins/Blood Elves/Draenei/Pandaren were going to be a playable race and that Death Knights/Demon Hunters were going to be a new class!" Well that turned out true but I'm not giving anyone points for guessing that.
I'm sure there are more out there in long running, long popular series with lots of entries like Halo, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear.
edit: woops kinda fucked up the title there rewording it, oh well
The king of this to me is Mortal Kombat, which make sense. The series in the arcade days took a lot of advantage of having no internet and the arcade culture by constantly teasing shit, having extremely complicated fatalities, and even going as far as to do revisions where inputs changed. Ermac was a rumor in MK2, then became real in MK3. A red Kitana sprite in MK2 was rumored to be a new character, and it took until MK9 for Skarlet to become real. The number of bullshit fatalities people made up for MK1/MK2 were massive, until animalities, babalities and friendships became real. Like a lot of games, people also claimed you could totally unlock this licensed character from this bloody horror movie! Like Predator, Freddy Kreuger, Jason and a Xenomorph! Oh, they totally added those in 9/10 as well.
The most obvious examples outside of Mortal Kombat -
The Secret Cow Level in Diablo II. Perhaps the most famous of these ever, the Cow Level was a long-time Diablo I rumor and repeatedly denied by Blizzard. Come Diablo II, if you combined Wirt's Leg with a Scroll of Town Portal in the Horadric Cube, you could actually go to the Cow Level!
Herobrine in MineCraft. Not technically real but its an in-joke acknowledged by the developers. In a creepypasta-esque story that became popular, a MineCraft player claims to have repeatedly met the ghost of someone named Herobrine, allegedly Notch's dead brother. While not true, the rumor remained popular - and eventually Mojang started to end every patch note listing with the message "Removed Herobrine."
Bigfoot in GTA San Andreas, and to a lesser extent Ratman in GTA IV. While the GTA games are notorious for these kinds of rumors, Bigfoot in SA has to be the most famous. The reason why is obvious - Rockstar totally plays into this. While rumors of Leatherface, Ratman, Bigfoot, Aliens, Killer Clowns and a myriad of other stuff swirled, you had the actual real stuff like the notorious flying ghost cars in San Andreas. But Bigfoot remained the most famous and elusive, and he did eventually surface. In Red Dead Redemption in the Undead Nightmare DLC, and in GTA V as a crazy dude in a suit.
A lot of things in World of WarCraft. This is kinda riding the line of counting or not, but for such a long running game rumors were made, deconfirmed and later reconfirmed multiple times. I think everybody wanted to be able to purify the Corrupted Ashbringer into the regular Ashbringer, but you couldn't. Until over a decade later when they hand Ret Paladins the Ashbringer, and then you have to unlock the Corrupted appearance. You could glitch into Hyjal, but it wasn't an actual zone. Now it is. "I heard that Goblins/Blood Elves/Draenei/Pandaren were going to be a playable race and that Death Knights/Demon Hunters were going to be a new class!" Well that turned out true but I'm not giving anyone points for guessing that.
I'm sure there are more out there in long running, long popular series with lots of entries like Halo, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear.
edit: woops kinda fucked up the title there rewording it, oh well
