10 Biggest Video Game Hoaxes

6. Goldeneye Has All The Bonds, Secret Levels

The story of Goldeneye 007's development is pretty nutty, especially when you consider it winded up being, like, the best multiplayer first person shooter of all time. Or at least on the Nintendo 64. The team of ten featured eight people who had never worked on a video game before, it was originally supposed to be a 2D side-scrolling platformer for the SNES, the multiplayer mode was added at the very end of production "as an afterthought", and the game ended up being released a good two years after the film, not long before Pierce Brosnan's second Bond film was due to be released. There's a reason we're still talking about Goldeneye instead of Tomorrow Never Dies, though. One of which is the number of legends, hearsay and hoaxes that have surrounded the game since it came out. One of our favourites is the mythical 24th cheat, an unlockable (legit) cheat code that appeared to be missing from the official menu. Many speculated this would unlock the All Bonds Mode, allowing you to play as any of the actors who had played the character up until that point. In fact this was included in an early build of the film, but developers Rare couldn't swing the cost of licensing Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Sean Connery's faces. We're assuming George Lazenby didn't ask for much. Beggars can't be choosers and all that. So that one was half-true, although you couldn't actually unlock all the Bonds without hacking the cartridge. There was also the rumour that there was a bunch of secret levels hidden inside the game, including an island you can see if you peek through your rifle scope in the Dam area, and either a Citadel or Casino which appear as data strings in the game's debug menu. The island is just a bit of texture left over from beta testing, as were the Citadel and Casino. Didn't stop people from wasting days of their lives trying to find them.