5 – Slavery: The Game,
- A trailer popped up on the internet a few years ago advertising a game by Creative Assembly where you manage slaves with upgrades of various torture tools and things like that.
- The amount of backlash the video received was enormous, with claims that the game promoted the heinous practice of slavery.
- But then it was proved fake when Creative Assembly said that they had no involvement with the creation of the video.
- Later on it was revealed that the trailer was created by a Dutch filmmaker who was making a documentary about slavery in the Netherlands.
4 – Mothers against Videogame Addiction and Violence (MAVAV),
- Another controversial hoax, but not in the same way, MAVAV.org appeared on the internet in 2006 with various completely rational articles demonising video games much in the same vein that Fox News tends to.
- However, later on it was revealed to be a parody site and the vitriol calmed down, this is just another example of Poe’s Law and why we clearly need to kill all mothers to stop another happening of this level.
3 – Karvina Corporation and KILLSWITCH,
- An urban legend as well as a hoax about a video game that supposedly couldn’t be copied and deleted itself after beating the game, even though such technologies didn’t exist back in 1981.
- Apparently someone named Yamamoto got his hands on the game in 2005 and he said he was going to document the game in its entirety, but supposedly the only video released was only a minute and forty-five seconds video of Yamamoto crying and looking ‘haggard’ near his computer.
2 – Polybius,
- Possibly the earliest hoax about a video game, Polybius is allegedly an arcade game made by the American government in order to experiment on people.
- Polybius was supposed to have inflicted various psychological effects on people such as amnesia, night terrors and caused people to swear off of video games for good.
- According to the story the cabinet disappeared a month after it came out in 1981, who knows? Maybe Polybius really did exist and it was the true reason for the video game crash of ’83.
1 – Nintendo ON
- Both prescient and impressive, this hoax showed off the Nintendo Revolution as a VR helmet style console.
- The video was released after people had heard of the Nintendo Revolution, but weren’t sure what it was going to be.
- The video was so well done that people were convinced it was true, since very few people had access to programs like Adobe After Effects at the time of the release.
- The Revolution, of course, turned out to be the Nintendo Wii, which wasn’t nearly as impressive as a football helmet with a disc slot.