8 Great Gaming Urban Legends You Probably Missed

By Darragh O'Connor / June 22, 2013

3. Hidden Beat 'Em Up Characters

One of the more popular April Fools jokes floating around back in the day was to screw around with gamers, and hint at hidden character in a fighting game series that didn't exist. This promised prize then could only be unlocked through an overly complicated process that few could ever actually finish. This has even hit Sonic and Mario fans, as Sonic and Tails were rumoured to be in Smash Bros Melee. But the two most common series affected by these rumours/Urban Legends are Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. As discussed previously in another article, Sheng Long in Street Fighter II - claimed to be Ryu's master - was said to be unlockable in Street Fighter II. It was also said that you would unlock Long if you played through the game without taking any damage as Ryu. When you reach M. Bison, the trick was to neither inflict nor take damage until match time runs out,earning you a draw, which needs to be repeated ten times. At that stage, Sheng Long will supposedly enter, toss out Bison, freeze the time at 99 seconds and fight you to the death. This was canonised via an April Fool's joke published by EGM in a 1992 editorial, but it is false, and always was. Sheng Long, as a character, was actually a misunderstanding of the phrase "If you cannot overcome the Rising Dragon Punch, you cannot win!" found in the original arcade game. In the home port, fans were told "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance." They took this to be a new character.

Mortal Kombat fans will be no strangers to rumoured characters also, having seen the likes of Blaze, Hornbuckle, Ermac etc hinted at. A lot of these were characters that showed up in the backgrounds of levels and were given names by fans and codes soon popped up for how to unlock these guys. Of course none of these were real, but the inclusion of Reptile fanned the flames, and encouraged the rumour mill, and many initially rumoured characters are now legitimate parts of the series, such as Ermac. In the first few arcade versions of Mortal Kombat, there was a listing in the audit menu for "ERMACS, " and in Revision 3.0, it was actually listed directly underneath "Reptile Battles" giving the appearance that they were grouped together. It was believed to reference a character the same way "Reptile Battles" does, which led people to believe that Ermac was also a secret character. The Ermac listing is actually just a contraction of the term "Error Macro," but one thing led to another, and Ermac became a character in MK.