9 Crazy Video Game Conspiracy Theories People Actually Believe
Those "weapons of mass destruction" America was after? PS2s.
Credit where credit's due, conspiracy theorists certainly have the uncanny ability to take the mundane and weave it into a grand tale full of surreal twists and turns.
Sure, some may take the fun a little too far and start conjuring connections out of thin air that have no logical grounding in reality (that's what we call a crackpot theory) but sometimes there's just enough doubt, gaps in the story or absence of information that credible theorems start to take shape.
It's those very same fan-fuelled suspicions that have been added to by others over the years in a sort of distorted game of Chinese Whispers that have given birth to the types of outlandish works of fiction you'll see collated here.
If you've ever found yourself wondering if all those shooters have moulded you into a hardened soldier, you're not the only one. Far from it...
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9. EA Rigged The Super Bowl To Promote Madden 15
Pretty staggering, this one.
Back in 2015, EA released a promotional trailer for Super Bowl XLIX, using its engine for Madden 15 to simulate a final score prediction between that year's contenders: the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
EA pegged the result as being 28-24 in the Patriots' favour, a final tally that, by the grace of some cosmic force, turned out to be the exact result of the real match a few weeks later. And as if that wasn't already the literal definition of coincidence, EA even correctly predicted that the Patriots would come back from a 24-14 deficit to be crowned the champions of the 2014 season.
Like clockwork, theories immediately started to emerge that EA had rigged the result of the competition in order to promote Madden 15, such was the nature of the near-impossible prediction.
Sounds feasible (...ish), until you take into account that EA - despite being a successful business - would have had to bribe an awful lot of officials to throw a Super Bowl match, far more than what it would have shelled out as part of a standard advertising budget for a video game.