8 Video Games That Accidentally Included Things You Weren't Supposed To See

4. The Celebi Shrine (Pokémon Gold & Silver)

Pokemon Gold And Silver Ilex Shrine
Nintendo

Players who explored Pokémon Gold and Silver on the Game Boy Color had hundreds of the titular creatures to seek out and capture, but contrary to popular belief, one Pokémon that couldn't be found in the games was the mysterious Celebi.

When the games first came out, rumours began to circulate that a shrine in the Ilex Forest (pictured) would allow players to summon Celebi by performing a specific action. After all, Celebi was known as the guardian of this forest, and its data was hidden within the game's files - so the rumour did make sense.

However... nothing happened at the shrine. It was just there, for an unknown reason. You can understand how confusing this might've been for Gold and Silver players, and hilariously, it was also confusing for the developers at Game Freak - because they never intended to put this shrine in the game in the first place.

In fact, when the designers first heard the rumours about this catchable Celebi, they were utterly baffled, because they knew that it wasn't true.

As it turns out, the shrine had been unintentionally added when the developers used sprites to "spruce up" the forest area, and just to make this story even more weird, nobody among the original staff remembers what the shrine's sprite was for.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!