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Video game "folklore".
I think it's kind of amazing when the community surrounding a game makes up something about it that, while plausible, isn't necessarily true.
This thought hit me while thinking about Dark Souls, and its famous pendant. At character creation, you're allowed to select a "gift", which is a special kind of item you begin the game with. Some of these are rare consumables that you can find elsewhere in the game, others are items with very particular and narrow uses and one exists almost entirely for the sake of sequence breaking. But the pendant is the odd one out, because it doesn't appear to have a function. That would probably be the end of it if the game's director didn't say in interviews that he recommends the pendant as a starting gift for narrative reasons, implying that it holds a secret function. He also says that he intends to take the secret of the pendant to his grave.
Given that so much of the narrative in Dark Souls is interpretive, this has had the game's community speculating about the item for months. It probably doesn't do anything; I think the director of Dark Souls was invoking "gamer folklore" to ensure that Dark Souls always feels a little incomplete, so there's always the sense that not all of its content has been experienced and that any player might be the first to witness something unique. Most of the in-game lore is built around vagueness, with just enough information to inflame the imagination but not nearly enough to draw clear conclusions.
It reminds me very much of Pokemon Red, Blue and Green (if you played the Japanese versions) back in the day. I think all of us were under the impression that Down + B helped us catch Pokemon. And do you recall the endless rumours about catching Mew on Western release versions? That turned out to be impossible outside of promotional events. But the folklore about that game was fun, and reinforced by the many glitches the game had. Item multiplication, Missingno, all that good stuff.
I think games in general could do more to invoke that kind of thing, because it means that any given game might have just a little more over the next horizon. And as much as I love the discovery aspect of video games, I feel that's taken away when I absolutely know I've experienced 100% of the content. But if I believe there's more, even if there isn't? A game can be endlessly engrossing on a psychological level, because its essential question of "what if?" never runs dry.
Comments
It was always A around here, actually. I still do that just from force of habit.I think the self-aware nature of gaming with easter eggs and shout outs limits that now.
I remember when I was like six thinking it was the coolest thing that you could find the Batmobile in Dracula's castle in King's Quest 2 but these days, something like this is par for the course.
It's less about easter eggs and more about potentially game-altering content, though, whether that alters how you play the game or how you understand it. Another example would be the speculation that the Triforce could be acquired in Ocarina of Time, which would have massive implications if it were true.
I actually learned of that shortly after making this thread.
My mind is now shattered and I have much to reflect upon.
It wasn't actually discovered until years and years after the games came out though. So when your friend said he knew how to catch Mew, he was still lying.
Wheat Sword.
I remember that!
you mean this
Yes, that. It was originally a "guide" on GameFAQs.
FFVII Cheese Weapon
The funny thing is that the Mew glitch doesn't sound any more plausible than the rumors.
Also, reviving you-know-who from Final Fantasy VII.
Seriously? You found a way to revive Jessie?! HOLY SHI oh wait it's just Aeris.
^^ If anything, the actual Mew glitch sounds even MORE ridiculous
And the Celebi Egg glitch is even worse!
Interesting note: way back in my elementary school when I first heard about item duplication, the person explaining it referred to Missingno as "a guy who looks like a newspaper". And so Missingno was Newspaper Guy to me for years. (I never actually did the glitch in my own copy because I was worried it would mess up my game.)
this kind of stuff
can't someone just like
check the code of the game to see if it's real or not
I mean gaming communities tend to be pretty big
so finding a programmer or computer scientist or something in one shouldn't be that unlikely...right?
Only if the stuff is intentional. Things like the Mew Glitch require you to do more than just look at the code to understand why it happens or if it can even happen alone, as the actual process to do it requires manipulating the game's data in a way that was not intentional or supported by the game's coding.
Alex,
If you like the Mew myths, I think you might find this breakdown of fan theories about the "Pokegods" pretty interesting too. It makes an effort to elaborate on how and why those myths came to be by talking about the structure of early internet communities helping to encourage the rumors and other stuff like that.
On the topic of mysterious things in games, I also feel like Stop 'n' Swop deserves a mention, especially since Banjo-Kazooie alludes to it in the ending credits without really giving you any idea how it works.
^^oh right
sorry, I was focusing more on things like that pendant in the first post
though I guess that the programmer of the game to start with could have used misleading code for that too to try to keep people away from thinking it's actually useless or something
More than that, the effect could be buried under lines of miscellaneous code, requiring people cracking the game to go through it with a fine tooth comb. And even then, they may not actually know what they are looking for.
Thanks for the link, Louie. That was a very interesting and nostalgic read. I remember a lot of that mythology from my own playgrounds, but much of it was new to me as well.
Does Half-Life 2 count? There's maybe at least a couple things that are leftover from the beta in the final game.
Man, I remember when San Andreas came out and pretty much every kid in high school spent their time exploring the San Andreas island trying to find cool shit.
As much as I love GTAIV and RDR, I think no other game in Rockstar's history has managed to create that feeling of looking for shit up and exploring. Mostly because GTAIV's city doesn't feel like a sandbox to explore but like a city to live in. RDR's story is too compelling to go exploring, imo. But that may be just me.
The difference between the Mew/Celebi urban legends and how you exploit glitches to do them is typically pretty easy to recognize if you have a few months' experience as a programmer, because by then you'd be familiar with what happens with pointer errors and half-saved data.
Like, the Cinnabar thing makes total sense when you realize it's a strip of land with no encounter table coded in.
I always always under the impression that if you shut your eyes and begged to God that you'd catch Pokemon.
Seriously: I am a HUGE fan of Fable, and the first Fable game is filled with stuff like this: The signing sword, the Sandgoose and there's others.
Oh, man.
Back in third grade, every single kid from my school played Vice City. At one point, we made some sort of a competition, where the first one to finds all 100 of those green Aztec statues wins. I didn't have internet or know about the existence of sites like GameFAQs, so I spent an entire month looking for the statues, only to get stuck at 99. I don't think anybody even managed to do it.
And yes, we played GTA when we were nine years old. We're as collectively messed up as you expect us to be.
For what it's worth, various social pressures ensured that many children at my school were playing similarly violent games at a similar age. Then again, once you've played Mortal Kombat...
I thought that this thread was about the game Folklore.