Introduction:
When game developers announce things, say things, and show us things, we sometimes have healthy skepticism because sometimes stuff isn't delivered on time. Generally, we think they're trying to say something real, right? Well, not always. Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram, and today on Gamix, 10 times developers fooled their entire fan base.
1. No Plans for Elden Ring DLC or Elden Ring 2:
On May 2nd last year, it was reported in an interview with a Chinese publication called Z with the head honcho from software, HIIT taka Miyazaki. He says Shadow of the Earth Tree is the first and last DLC; we have no plans to add more content to Elden Ring. A little further prior to that, back in March, Miyazaki gave another interview at IGN saying he hadn't made any decisions regarding a potential sequel, just that they don't want to say this is the end of Elden Ring for now. Taken together, it sounded like there wasn't going to be any more Elden Ring for a while: no DLC plans, no sequels, blah blah blah. Then at the Game Awards, they revealed Night Rain and blew all our freaking minds.
Obviously, all this time they were working on something Elden Ring related, but that old scamp Miyazaki was trying to make everybody think they weren't. The funny thing is technically they didn't lie; Night Rain is neither DLC nor a sequel. It's more like a standalone spin-off game with something completely different from what we've come to expect from them. Just about the last kind of game anybody expected from these guys: a run-based cooperative multiplayer game. There's a crazy reveal, and it still kind of feels like it's a hoax or something. It's so weird it's even happening. It looks cool though.
2. Moby Dick Studio - Hideo Kojima:
Hideo Kojima is the master and commander of fooling his fans. He's pulled some pretty elaborate tricks in the past, but he saved his greatest trick for the lead-up towards Metal Gear Solid 5. It's important to keep in mind that by 2012, people were getting wise to his tricks. He attempted rug pulls in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. So this time folks were looking for it, and they, I mean, it didn't necessarily fool everybody, but it did fool more people than you might think. So what did he do? He created an entire fake game studio and debuted a completely fabricated game at the 2012 Spike Game Awards. The game was called The Phantom Pain, and the studio was supposed to be a new Swedish studio called Moby Dick Studio. They even made up a game director named Waim Mrran. The funny thing about all this is it had already been announced.
Metal Gear Solid 5 had already been announced. People knew it was already happening, which either made the ruse appear more convincing or more obvious. Either way, what they were showing seemed like a pretty serious departure from your average Metal Gear game. So even though the protagonist looked suspiciously familiar, the whole thing was just elaborate enough to throw people off. That's not to say nobody figured it out. There were plenty of clues in the trailer to suggest it was a secret teaser for Metal Gear Solid 5. But unless you're real deep in the Phantom, the whole viral marketing stunt mostly left people kind of confused. It's the most elaborate trick Kojima has ever pulled but not necessarily the most infamous. I'll get into that later, actually.
3. When the Abandoned Devs Pretended It Was the Next Silent Hill:
Hard to call anyone a fan of Abandoned. In this case, it's not the game's fandom that was fooled but the entire Silent Hill fandom. If you've ever heard stories of fans that are coping and seething so hard they come up with insane conspiracy theories to explain something, like when the Sherlock TV show got so bad, fans started seriously believing some random BBC show was actually secretly a fifth episode or even series because the previous season sucked so bad. Or look at the bizarre death cult that spiraled around owning stock in GameStop. Yes, some people made out like absolute bandits, and I am not trying to take anything from them, but get enough people together, and they can and will become unglued, especially when they're desperately trying to work backwards to justify something they want to happen. That's the only explanation for why Abandoned got the attention it did. Silent Hills got canned, and fans of the series wanted to grasp at whatever straws they could.
And that's when Abandoned got featured on an official Playstation blog post. The thing about the Playstation blog is that just about anything can appear on there regardless of quality. Appearing on official channels doesn't make something legit, but for many, that was enough to build this entire convoluted conspiracy theory around the meme saying it was secretly the next Silent Hills. Kojima had pulled the fake game stunt with Metal Gear Solid 5; why not do it again here? What was their proof? Well, the game's director Kahan has the same initials as Hideo Kojima, and Kahan actually translates to Hideo. For his part, the game's mysterious director didn't exactly try to cool everyone down. Yes, they released a statement saying they were not Konami or Kojima, but then they turned around and released mysterious tweets that implied there is a connection between the game and Silent Hills. Honestly, in terms of going as far as they legally can, it makes perfect sense why they did that.
After a disastrous launch of a real-time experience app for the game, which is its own whole thing, the game was indefinitely delayed, and now it's probably done. I'm not even sure if this thing was ever even a game. Everything about it sounds like a desperate marketing ploy to intentionally capture Silent Hills fans, and the developer's history paints them as a pretty shady outfit as well. The whole debacle ended up being a big waste of time for everyone involved, and well, it wasn't Silent Hills. Quick note: Konami, just contract Kojima Productions to make Silent Hills. I'm tired of talking about how we can't download PT anymore. I'm tired of it. It sucks that we can't download PT anymore. Just hire him. There's no reason. You guys want to revitalize the Silent Hill name, right? So revitalize the Silent Hill name in the biggest possible way. There you go.
4. Nobody Explicitly Said That Was Link:
This is a fun one. Sometimes all it takes is a single vague message to drive the fan base completely crazy. After debuting the first trailer for Breath of the Wild, an interview asked the game's director, Eiji Aonuma, about Link's appearance. His response was, "No one explicitly said that was Link," implying the character you'd be playing as in Breath of the Wild might be someone other than Link, the character that's been the protagonist of every single other Legend of Zelda game up to that point. Outside of the two CDI games starring Zelda, and those aren't real games, they are abominations. So fans of the series went crazy with speculation about who this new character might be. Was it Zelda, a female Link, or a new hero entirely?
For whatever reason, people were obsessed with the fact that the character in the trailer "looked feminine," although I don't necessarily agree with that. It might have been the little ponytail, but Link has always been depicted with long, flowing hair. That didn't necessarily send me off into directions that might cause one to question things. Once the fan base got to the logical point of drawing sexy fan art, I guess Aonuma was thinking about where things might go as well, and it didn't take very long, just a day, to come back and be like, "No, it's Link. It's Link. Don't do what fans do." He said the statement he made previously was just him having a little bit of fun, and such is the power of legendary developers like him. All it takes is a vaguely worded statement, and he's got his fans believing just about anything.
5. The Delta Rune Reveal:
This entry is not so much a long-term trick as it is one of the all-time greatest bait and switches. See, in 2018, Undertale was already in the rearview mirror. People didn't know what the game's creator, Toby Fox, was going to do next. On October 31st, he tweeted out a download link for a mysterious survey program that was intended to gauge interest in whatever he was planning to do next. He made it sound like nothing was set in stone, and whatever was coming was a long way off, but fans still downloaded the program. The link even went through suspicious warnings. So it starts up, and what the hell is this, some kind of teaser for his next game?
And then it keeps going and keeps going until you expect it to stop at some point, but it doesn't. There's new game mechanics, an entire cast of characters, and a story. What everyone actually got was the first full chapter of the game for free, hidden in an .exe just downloaded out of the blue. For fans of the previous game, this was a pretty mind-blowing event, especially if you were one of the few people who were there day one, minute one, who had no idea what to expect from this thing. Of course, Toby eventually started advertising that it was a game and started releasing it on other platforms, but hey, what a smart marketing campaign, right?
6. The Pendant from Dark Souls:
I don't know what's in the air over in Japan, but for some reason, game devs just really love to troll their fans. Sometimes I wonder why our developers aren't so enterprising in the trolling arena because sometimes it's a lot of fun. I've already mentioned Miyazaki, Mr. Soulsborne himself, but if you're talking about times game devs have tricked their fans, you kind of have to talk about the pendant in Dark Souls. In the first Dark Souls game, there are a few items you can select when creating your character that make the game easier. You can get a full-life restore, a powerful bomb, a set of keys that can open certain doors earlier, and some things that have useful passive effects. Basically, they all serve some kind of function, and then there's the pendant. The in-game description says this trinket has no effect but fond memories comfort travelers. It explicitly says it doesn't do anything, so of course people are going to believe the exact opposite.
Players spent years trying to figure out the secret purpose of this pendant—some way to activate it so it has some kind of special effect or maybe it can open a secret path. It had to be used for something, right? They wouldn't just put in a starting item that doesn't do anything, right? Miyazaki only added fuel to the fire, suggesting there was some kind of secret to the pendant that nobody managed to figure out. In a game full of secrets, this was the biggest mystery of them all—just what did the pendant do? It turns out it really was nothing. Years later, in an interview with IGN Japan, the man himself admitted the truth: the pendant doesn't do anything. He just put it there to intentionally rile up mystery hunters. He just thought people might think this thing serves some kind of secret function. I know I fell for it the first time I played. Like many other people, I assumed the pendant would just have some use like in the game. Of course, they're telling me it has no use—the other things have uses. It would be a classic gaming misdirect, and it was, but just not that kind of misdirect.
7. The Clumsy Robot Eating a Baloney Sandwich:
This one goes all the way back to 1994 when the internet was still far from ubiquitous. Back then, games would just blatantly lie to you, and nobody would ever know. Now when stuff like the sprint speed in Dragon Age: Inquisition is exactly the same as your regular run or the health upgrades don't actually work in Dante's Inferno, we know about it, but this one went unknown for many, many years before anyone saw through it. In Earthbound, a SNES RPG, there's a boss called the clumsy robot. It was tough; it would do high damage with each attack, and worst of all, it could completely restore its health by eating a baloney sandwich—at least that's what the game says is happening.
But now, three decades later, we know the truth: nothing happened. The boss doesn't actually heal itself; it's just lying to try to stress you out. If this was any normal boss, the trick would be pretty obvious, but it's a special encounter you can't actually beat through normal means, so its health values are a little more obscure. I don't know when it was discovered that nothing was actually happening, but years and years later, it's pretty clear now. All I can do is wonder what other games have been lying to us in that way and we just never noticed it. It's probably a lot.
8. Hellblade's Permadeath:
Near the start of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, your player character dies in a scripted moment meant to reveal one of the central gimmicks of the game: permadeath. Every time you die, the black rot—something going on with Senua's arm, maybe gangrene, maybe something else, I don't know—goes higher and higher. Every time you die, if it reaches her head, the game warns it's game over. Your save gets erased, and you have to start over from the beginning. So you really, really don't want to die because who wants to lose all their progress? Seeing that message completely changes how you interact with the rest of the game.
You play more cautiously; every encounter feels intense and scary. But it's a big lie. The black rot never reaches her head until the very end of the game, and it's scripted to happen there. There is no permadeath. The entire thing is made up, and it puts you in a paranoid headspace that's meant to mirror the title character's. Looking into it, they didn't wait too long to announce the truth. They revealed their trick in August of 2017, the same month the game came out, so it wasn't long after. The trick only really applies to day-one players or just people who weren't that keyed into gaming news.
9. The Mega Man 9 Easter Egg:
Still have no clue what this is about. A long time ago, the official community manager went on the official Capcom forums and revealed there was a secret Easter egg nobody found in the game's endless mode. It sounds like one of the schoolyard rumors or stuff that would appear in EGM's old April Fool's issues. Apparently, to find this secret, you had to play through over 14,000 screens in endless attack, and that would trigger some kind of a secret. People spent years trying to figure out what it was about. They data-mined the game to hell and back and cheated to reach the mythical 14,000 rooms, and they found nothing. Maybe they did something wrong; maybe you have to play through it a special way or the secret's even deeper in endless mode.
People wanted to find it. You can't just tease something like that and expect a portion of your fanbase not to relentlessly try to figure it out. But years went by, and nothing was ever found. The community manager eventually revealed they made it all up. But even that wasn't enough to deter some people. They were too deep in their sunk cost fallacy. They were saying things like maybe they're just trying to throw people off the scent. But as more and more people looked into it, it became obvious there was no secret Easter egg. It was a lie meant to, I don't know, get people to waste their time or something. I really can't tell you, but they succeeded if that was the goal. All those Easter egg hunters wasted their time, and now I'm wasting your time by talking about it, right? Right, right.
10. The Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Trailer:
This is where it all started: the trailer that fooled the world. The year was 2001. The hype for Metal Gear Solid 2 was off the charts. Fans got their hands on the game, and they were loving it. They beat the tanker section of the game and got to the meat of it: the big shell. But who the hell is this? In a move that still has some old heads fuming, the real protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 2 was a new character, Raiden, and not Solid Snake. No one saw it coming because the trailers were intentionally designed to make it look like Snake was the main character. How they created the trailers was absolutely brilliant. They only used gameplay from the tanker section of the game where you play as Snake, and any shots they used of Raiden had him in a full diving suit mode, so it just looked like Snake in a new costume. The deception goes deeper than that.
They didn't just use selective editing to make it look like Snake was the main character; they even swapped Raiden and Snake in certain scenes. The big shell is a trick The Last of Us Part II trailers used later, swapping out a different character for Joel to make it look like he was in later parts of the game, and he's absolutely not. For obvious reasons, this kind of deceptive marketing is great for a surprise, but often your audience is not happy. There's a reason a segment of the fan base still hates Raiden, and it's not because of his pretty-boy looks or long-winded conversations with his girlfriend. I mean, it might be partly that, but it was because they were promised Snake, and they got him instead. It's an A+ deception. I actually really loved it when it happened. I was like, "Oh my God!" I like it when creative people trick us, but not everybody does.
Conclusion:
And there you have it, folks: 10 times game developers fooled their entire fan base. From elaborate hoaxes and misleading statements to outright lies and clever marketing, these instances show just how far developers will go to create buzz and excitement for their games. While some of these tricks might have left fans feeling deceived, others were clever and entertaining enough to be appreciated in hindsight. What do you think? Leave us a comment and let us know. As always, we thank you very much for reading this article. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time, right here on Gamix.
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