What is it about video games that drives some people to lie? And I mean obvious lies, the kind that can be disproven very easily. It's difficult to prove that your schoolyard pal didn't rack up a score of 78,000 on Pac-Man, but how dense does someone have to be to believe that Luigi becomes a playable character by wiggling the control stick one hundred times while underwater beneath Bowser's submarine before draining the castle moat in Super Mario 64? The gang at the rllmukforum are discussing these kinds of lies and wondering aloud why people tell them.
One kid in primary school insisted on talking at me for what must have been half an hour about how he completed the TMNT arcade game without continuing because of a "bug" which let him pick up Rocksteady's machine gun at the end of the first level. He went on and on with increasingly elaborate descriptions of the later levels of the game despite me telling him flatly that I knew he was lieing the moment he started his story.
A friend of mine around the time I started high school told me at the bus-stop that on the Master System version of Sonic if you left the control pad for long enough Sonic would jump forwards so his face filled the screen and would say in digitised speech "PICK UP THAT CONTROL PAD AND PLAY!". This we both knew to be a lie.
So why do people (particularly children) lie like this? The supposed secret requirements are always frustratingly impossible and allegedly reveal things that developers would never include, such as completing Metroid Prime in only five minutes in order to see Samus Aran fully nude or beating the original Mortal Kombat one hundred times in a row without turning off the game in order to unlock all of the playable fighters from Street Fighter 2. These are obvious lies, and for whatever reason they just keep coming. Teach your children well, PTB readers. Teach them the value of truth in video games lest another generation be duped into believing that the Triforce is a collectible item in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
