If we had a dollar for every urban legend that's cropped up over one of Rockstar's open world games, we'd not have quite as much as if we'd just put a cheat code in, but we'd still be reasonably well off. There have been hoaxes ever since the Grand Theft Auto series jumped into three dimensions, with the vast expanse of San Andreas being particularly conducive to people making up stories of coming across bigfoot in the mountains or Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre chasing after them in the desert. Which, again, people spent a lot of time looking for. When they could've been volunteering at a homeless shelter, or something. Rockstar themselves haven't done much to encourage these rumours, but they don't do much to dispel them, either. There's plenty of real hidden stuff in all of their games, which just fuels players' desire to seek out the things nobody else has found. And when they realise that everything has been found, they just make things up. In Red Dead Redemption there was the story that a werewolf could be found somewhere in the woods, at night, so long as the mist was at just the right level. People spent so many hours looking for the fictional lycanthrope that the developers actually had to put one in the Undead Nightmare DLC. The sasquatch rumours got a next-gen edition when Grand Theft Auto IV was released, as stories of a Ratman - half rat, half man - stalking Niko Bellic through the sewers beneath Liberty City began to spread. Ratman was said to live in the subway, usually near the station in Chinatown, where he would run freakishly fast and attack players in "unusual ways". People even made fake photos of the Ratman's victims, dismembered and covered in acidic bile amongst the tunnels. All false. Not that this is just the preserve of these big open world games, as the meticulously structured and narrative-driven LA Noire got in on the action, too. With probably the stupidest video game hoax that anybody has believed - and yet people did. Rumour has it that, like the Ratman, wandering around the underground tunnels of Hollywood will sometimes result in you hearing the animalistic call of Tarzan. Yeah, that Tarzan. Sometimes you turn around and he's left a shrunken head behind you! Except he hasn't, because he isn't real, because why would Tarzan be in LA Noire? Still, people believed it. They always do.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
