There's nothing like a good 'ol fashioned video game rumour, and while they tend to have a pretty short shelf-life nowadays thanks to the Internet, who can't remember arguing with their mates in school about whose Uncle knew someone working at Sony and promised you that Mario and Zelda were coming out on the PlayStation? We've all helped spread a gaming rumour or two in our time, whether as sheer attention-seeking behaviour or a genuine belief - and now it's time to run down 10 utterly absurd gaming rumours that were just flat-out lies. Whether the stuff of playground murmurs or more sophisticated pranks that involved a little Photoshopping, these 10 rumours latched onto our collective imaginations and took on lives of their own. If you can't remember any of these rumours, you're probably lying to yourself...
10. The Haunted Cartridge - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Let's get started with one that creeped a Hell of a lot of people out. It's actually a so-called "creepypasta" called "Ben Drowned" that was written sometime in 2010 and went viral, revolving around a college student buying a second-hand copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. As we all know, N64 carts often came with prior save files of previous owners, and this one had a file called "Ben", yet even though the student made a new file, the characters throughout the game still referred to him as only Ben. The extremely lengthy original story includes an account where the student tries to glitch the game, and a Link statue follows him around the world, among other supremely disturbing things. Videos were also posted as evidence, and after people struggled to sleep at night, the author was outed as merely an imaginative fabricator of fiction, though curiously, the idea is now apparently being developed as an actual PC game.