13 Flat Out Lies We Were Told Just To Sell A Video Game

Selling a video game to players is an art, a feat of marketing and PR that encompasses so many factors and can go so, so wrong at so many points. As such, developers have often avoided the fair, simple option of releasing an honest trailer and letting the public make up their own minds: instead they've flat-out lied to consumers in an attempt to shift units, and naturally, their approach has been a rousing, disgusting success. There's marketing a video game and then there's intentionally deceiving the player base, which for the most part is what happened in these 13 cases of video games sold to us under one impression and delivering something else that didn't quite measure up. Several of these games are, in fact, pretty good, but they either didn't live up to the hype or simply weren't what fans paid their hard-earned money for, so they're another successful case of video game developers pulling the wool over our eyes. Should developers and publishers be held more accountable for any disparity between trailer footage and the final product? And is the video game press complicit in the hype feeding frenzy? Absolutely, but unless gamers get mad and start pushing back, this practice isn't going away anytime soon.

13. Solid Snake Is The Protagonist Of Metal Gear Solid 2

The Lie: The massively-anticipated Metal Gear Solid sequel would reunite players with their favourite bada**, Solid Snake, for another exhilarating campaign. The Truth: Snake is only playable during the hour-long Tanker mission at the start of the game, and after that he's replaced with the effeminate new recruit, Raiden, much to the outrage of MGS fans everywhere. What made fans even angrier was that Hideo Kojima intentionally deceived them, by not only focusing mainly on the short Tanker portion of the game in trailers, but even replacing Raiden with Snake in scenes from the main Big Shell portion. Though Kojima could argue that the surprise was a necessary conceit, would it really have killed him to tell us ahead of time and let us down a little more gently? Oh, right, nobody would have bought the game if they knew they'd only get to play as Snake for about an hour. The soul-crushing disappointment felt when players realised they'd have to play as Raiden for the next 10-12 hours still stings today.