Every school had a kid whose cousin worked at Nintendo. Most of what that kid told you was invented. Not all of it: one of those stories was reported in The New York Times, and another was written up in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Ten famous video game myths, each checked against the record and given a verdict: real, never real, became real, or half true. Every factual line rests on a source you can open, and where the record runs out the video says so.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Somebody’s cousin
0:22 Nuclear Gandhi
1:24 MissingNo.
2:28 Blowing on the cartridge
3:27 Ermac
4:29 Mew under the truck
5:35 E.T. in the desert
6:39 Polybius
7:55 Luigi in Mario 64
9:02 Herobrine
10:12 The Warcraft plague
11:13 The short version
MAIN SOURCES
Nuclear Gandhi: Sid Meier’s Memoir! (2020), quoted at https://kotaku.com/civilization-creator-shoots-down-our-memories-of-a-nuke-1845006305 ; the 2012 edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20120901052801/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=VideoGame.Civilization&more=t
MissingNo.: Nintendo’s support page, https://web.archive.org/web/20080127200258/http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/gameboy/trouble_specificgame.jsp ; Nintendo Power 120, May 1999
Cartridges: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/54157 ; https://www.ifixit.com/News/97647/ask-ifixit-does-blowing-into-gaming-cartridges-actually-fix-them
Ermac: Ed Boon, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20150706050953/http://gameological.com/2012/10/interview-mortal-kombat-cocreator-ed-boon/ ; EGM 51, October 1993
Mew: Iwata Asks, https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/ds/pokemon/0/0/
E.T.: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/28/business/atari-parts-are-dumped.html ; https://amp.cbc.ca/news/science/atari-games-from-landfill-sold-for-more-than-100-000-us-1.3209532
Polybius: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303224844/http://www.clickto.com/coinop/GamePage/Polybius.html ; https://skeptoid.com/episodes/362
Luigi: IGN, 13 November 1996, https://web.archive.org/web/20071111043502/http://ign64.ign.com/articles/060/060383p1.html ; Miyamoto, 1996, https://shmuplations.com/mario64/
Herobrine: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Herobrine/StreamFAQ ; https://web.archive.org/web/2011/http://notch.tumblr.com/post/6035819427/minecraft-beta-1-6-6
Corrupted Blood: https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm ; Lofgren and Fefferman, Lancet Infect Dis 2007, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17714675/
WHAT THIS VIDEO DOES NOT CLAIM
The 2012 edit is the earliest trace of the Gandhi bug story anyone has found, not proof it was the first telling. Nobody has shown who invented Polybius, or that the 1981 events inspired it. Counts of the cartridges buried and recovered at Alamogordo differ by source. “2401” is a coincidence spotted afterwards.
IMAGES
Licensed photographs and screenshots, via Wikimedia Commons: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, Minister’s Secretariat Personnel Division (CC BY 4.0); Guerric (CC BY-SA 2.0); Official GDC (CC BY 2.0); Daniel Benavides from Austin, TX (CC BY 2.0); Midway Games (CC BY 4.0); Mortal Kombat (CC BY 4.0); Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0); Miguelon756-5303 (CC BY-SA 4.0); taylorhatmaker (CC BY 2.0); DocAtRS (CC BY-SA 3.0); Joho345 (CC BY 4.0); Tedder (CC BY 4.0); Xbox MENA (CC BY 3.0); Xbox México (CC BY 3.0).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: Evan-Amos; Nintendo / Game Freak; Nintendo; Table of Civilization V game data.
Screenshots, box art and pages shown for commentary belong to: Nintendo of America; MicroProse; 2K Games and Firaxis Games; Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak; Midway (now Warner Bros. Games); Atari; Nintendo; Blizzard Entertainment; IGN; Markus Persson (Notch) / Mojang; coinop.org (ClickTo Network).
No fan art is shown as the real thing. The Polybius cabinet is a collector’s mock-up and is labelled as one.
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