To the ignorant outsider, video games may just look like toys made by passionate geeks and developers who spend their whole lives in dark rooms, coding and creating the things that they love. But beneath this endearing facade, video games are an industry that at the worst of times, is just as crooked and corrupt as Nicholas Cage in the Bad Lieutenant, or FIFA. Most of the time, video game scandals rise up not because of the developers themselves; publishers deceive gamers by passing glossy pre-release footage off as the finished game, only for it to be far inferior upon release, websites give suspiciously high scores to awful games, and gamers themselves have degenerated into tribal frenzies of abuse and cyber-bullying that seemingly shook all of society. As the industry has grown in prominence, the scale and number of scandals has increased exponentially, and its no coincidence that the biggest ones have come in recent years. In a weird way, it's a mark of progress to see that gaming is seen as important enough to actually warrant everyone screaming 'scandal!' about in the first place. Yes, the gaming industry can be a truly terrible place, and that means it's been filled with plenty of events over the years that are truly worthy of that overused '-gate' suffix, which I intend to use with shameless and irritating excess throughout this list.