5 Famous Video Game Legends That Turned Out to Be Lies

5 ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Saving Notre Dame

The Story: Notre Dame in Paris suffered a fire in 2019, possibly caused by a cigarette, as befits any structure controlled by the French. Some parts of the sacred building were lost forever. But next would come five years of restoration, and this classic building would receive guidance from a modern source: the video game Assassin’s Creed Unity. The development team at Ubisoft had taken scans of the unburned cathedral to rebuild it virtually for this Revolution-era game. Now, those same scans would be used to rebuild the cathedral for real. 

In Reality: You know who else had detailed info on the construction of Notre Dame Cathedral? The staff of Notre Dame Cathedral, one of the most studied buildings in history. Whatever time Ubisoft scribes spent scouting the building, actual French scholars spent more.

In fact, when people asked them directly, Ubisoft said they’d never taken any “scans” of Notre Dame at all. Instead, to make their virtual cathedral, they’d used blueprints and other previously published material. Ubisoft themselves never spread this story about having the expertise to rebuild Notre Dame after the fire. Instead, they donated funds for the rebuilding effort, and then when reporters asked them if they’d also donate their data, they said, “Sure, we’d be willing to, but we’re not involved in the renovation, no.”

Indeed, if Ubisoft ever released a remaster like this, players would complain about the change in atmosphere:

It’s just as well that the renovation didn’t use any video-game models. Because though Ubisoft used blueprints to make their virtual Notre Dame, they never actually did make a perfect one-to-one 3-D replica. That had never been their goal. Their goal was to make a structure that’s somewhat true to the original but contains plenty of changes so it’s fun to parkour around and jump off.

4 Nuclear Gandhi in ‘Civilization’

The Story: In the original Civilization game from 1991, one leader had an odd tendency to set off lots of nukes. This leader was Gandhi, which is ironic because in real life, he only ever set off one or two nukes at most. 

This feature of the game resulted from a fascinating bug. The game, appropriately, coded Gandhi to be as passive as possible. But that meant that if a few twists in the game sent his aggression even lower, this gave him a negative aggression score. Since the game didn’t support negative traits, it resulted in an integer overflow bug, which looped his aggression value back around all the way to the maximum value that a bit could store. This made him 20 times as aggressive as any other leader. Cue nuclear destruction. 

In Reality: None of what we just said was true. The game had no such bug, and Gandhi set off nukes no more readily than anyone else. Gandhi had the same aggression rating as one-third of the game’s characters, including Abraham Lincoln. It was the lowest rating possible, and nothing in the game could push that value down further. If we imagine that something could, the value still would never wrap around and become huge. That mumbo jumbo in the legend about integer overflows might convince people unfamiliar with the game’s code, but signed integer variables don’t work like that.

People today who run the old game are unable to reproduce the supposed bug. That’s all the proof we need, and the legend has also been debunked by both game designer Brian Reynolds and more definitively by Sid Meier himself (the game is sometimes titled as Sid Meier’s Civilization, after its lead programmer and designer). Meier stuck a whole section in his biography tracking how the legend began with someone editing a wiki and then a bunch of sites repeating the false claim. 

The fascinating part of this legend is that plenty of people do remember playing Civilization, and rather than scoffing at this invented story, they readily believe it. Maybe they’re confusing it with memories of Gandhi nuking stuff in Civilization V, though that game came out 20 years later. Or maybe when Gandhi did use nukes in their Civilization 1 game — less often than other leaders, but he could still nuke sometimes — it struck them as so odd that they remember it happening more often than it did, and they’re happy to believe any explanation for why.

3 Japan Running Out of Coins Over ‘Space Invaders’

The Story: The highest-grossing video games of all-time aren’t those bestsellers of the past decade, whose players spend billions to buy virtual hairdos. Outgrossing those were the very first arcade games. While we don’t have exact numbers for them, since individual arcades raked in coins on their own and reported to no one, unofficial estimates say Pac-Mac took in as much as $25 billion adjusting for inflation, while 1978’s Space Invaders made even more than that.

In Japan, Space Invaders was so popular that the nation ran short of the 100-yen coins that went into the arcade cabinets. The national mint had to triple production of the coins to keep up with demand. 

In Reality: When it comes to urban legends, you might be slightly more forgiven for falling for one that dates back nearly 50 years and comes from Japan. A story like that is hard to verify as right or wrong. But one curious researcher in 2014 went so far as to contact Japan’s central bank, who said there had been no shortage of coins around this time. In fact, they’d stamped out slightly fewer 100-yen coins in the year following Space Invader fever, compared to either the years right before that or the years right after that.  

Anyway, people spending a lot of coins on an arcade wouldn’t cause a national coin shortage. People who want lots of coins get them from the bank, and the arcade who takes in loads of coins deposits those at the bank, so increased spending leads to coins circulating more quickly but not running out. In fact, coins don’t even need to return to the bank to circulate. Surely any arcade that takes in a lot of coins will offer to make change for people’s notes, possibly using a change machine, so a single coin may be spent repeatedly without ever leaving the building. 

Instead, coin shortages occur when people take coins out of circulation. A decade before Space Invaders, Japan’s mint switched away from silver, and people hoarded or melted the old coins rather than spend them, and this possibly led to a shortage. 

Reports of the Space Invaders shortage might have also come from individual reports of places like hotels, who ran out of coins during the day as people came seeking change before heading to the arcade. That’s not a national shortage. That’s just a shortage over at Bob’s desk. 

2 ‘Doom’ Running on A Pregnancy Test

The Story: As increasingly simple devices have attained increasingly complex processors, it’s become a running joke for players to try running the original Doom on stuff never designed for games. People have run Doom on clocks and weighing scales. And then, in 2020, someone got the game working on a pregnancy test!

In Reality: No, Doom isn’t running on that pregnancy test. It isn’t running on the pregnancy test’s CPU, as the ambitious hacker instead hooked up an external one. Perhaps more damningly, it’s also not running on the pregnancy test’s screen. The test came with an LCD screen that alternates between four outputs, so the guy instead hooked up his own CPU to his own 128-by-32-pixel screen and then placed the gutted-out pregnancy test around the screen as a casing. 

We point this out not to ruin the magic but to redirect you to all the actual magic that exists around us. Did you know someone got Doom running in a PDF this year, displaying graphics using characters instead of pixels? No, really, they did. The below video mentions the false story about someone playing Doom on a pregnancy test, but the remainder is true. 

1 ‘E.T.’ Destroying Atari

The Story: The video game industry crashed hard in 1983. The straw that broke the camel’s back was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game that failed so hard that it brought down Atari and brought down the rest of the industry with it. The game sold so poorly that Atari buried millions of unwanted E.T. cartridges in the desert.

That last fact, by the way, was considered an urban legend for years. Then around a decade ago, modern archaeologists found the site, and the legend turned out to be true. 

In Reality: Whatever the game’s faults, E.T. sold a lot of copies. Atari sold some two million of them. Today, when a high-profile game sells that much during the initial window that makes up the bulk of sales, its company might declare that a success. And that’s when a game takes years of development. Atari produced E.T. in just five weeks, from conception to shipping it out. 

E.T. was one of the bestselling games ever released for the Atari 2600. The top two were those megahits Pac-Man and Space Invaders, while E.T. ranks at number eight. And E.T. really sold more than two million units, but many buyers returned their copies, which is part of why we call it a failure, but it hits that number eight ranking even after we subtract the returns. Plus, if we look only at games Atari wrote themselves, rather than porting from arcades, E.T. was the 2600’s second-bestselling game, behind only Pitfall, released that same year. 

The game still qualifies as a failure because the company paid big for the license and because they manufactured more copies of the game than they sold. But by those standards, Atari declared that even their version of Pac-Man was a failure, because it sold five million fewer copies than they printed. That’s more unsold copies than E.T. That famed landfill, which seemingly confirmed everyone’s fantasies, turned out to contain hundreds of E.T. cartridges, not millions, and it contained more copies of other games.

E.T. wasn’t the one thing responsible for Atari’s loss that year, which totaled over half a billion dollars, far more than they’d invested in the game. And E.T. wasn’t responsible for the video game crash. A lot of factors caused the crash, with the strongest being how other developers were flooding the market with games that were far worse than E.T., killing people’s faith in video games overall.

To learn more about the E.T. game, you can read an interview we did with the designer a little while back. Though, you’ll see that he himself seems willing to embrace the game’s bad reputation. That’s just as well. If he were the one angrily defending himself, we might never believe him. 

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