Dol Wot Jon?
You heard about the Dol Rune Conspiracy? It’s one of the lamest trolling attempts I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a long dippy ghost story of a forum post aiming to convince people that Diablo 3 would be coming out this past Wednesday. Well, it’s Friday, and there’s no Diablo 3, so bang goes that idea.
I mean, it was obviously a really dumb conspiracy troll in the first place. Apparently a bunch of people took that shit seriously, though, which got me thinking about all the other supposed super-secrets buried in video games that you can only find through similarly ridiculous methods. The first thing that came to mind, of course, was the secret cow level from the original Diablo. You see the same combination of bizarre and senseless rituals that reveal the "secret?"
The best example, for my money, was the conspiracy to suppress the fact that Luigi is in Super Mario 64. People were positively convinced that there was some way, some combination of crazy things that you could do, that would unlock Luigi as a playable character. The key to almost all of them was this statue. According to the conspiracy fans, that plaque says “L is real 2401.” The L is taken to mean "Luigi" (probably the sanest part of the entire theory, since any time you see an L all by itself in a Mario game it honestly does probably mean Luigi), and the "is real" is a Paul-is-dead-style hint to set the real fans on the right track (but, seriously, Paul, would you fucking die already?). As for the 2401, well, nobody has the faintest idea what that means. Some people allege it’s the release date of Paper Mario in the US, which, while almost true, is entirely meaningless and not something Nintendo would have known when Mario 64 was in production anyhow. I mean, befitting the Paul-is-dead-ery of the whole thing, you can’t really tell that statue says "L is real 2401" unless somebody tells you it does anyhow, hey?
Every once in a while game developers throw us for a loop and put in one of these things that turns out to be true, though. The Hylian Loach is real. The Insomniac Museum is real (twice!). But most of the time, if you hear a complex explanation of how to access a secret, it’s bullshit. That’s especially true if it involves multiplying together the numerical values of all the bonuses on an item, comparing it to the HP of a boss from an entirely different game, and then converting a hex value into ASCII.
My all time favorite was the “boss code” for the SNES port of Street Fighter 2. Supposedly there was a way to play as Vega, Bison, etc. Just like you could in SF2 Championship Edition (already in arcades). My friends and I played the hell out of the SNES SF2, and we tried so many crazy codes hoping one would be legit.
The best was the claim that you had to open the cartridge and toggle a switch. My friend’s dad had the right hex screwdriver to open them, so we did. Guess what? No switch.
Comment by Stephen | 11 September 2009
I opened a copy of the SNES Mortal Kombat cart once by, erm, dropping it. No switches in there either.
When I was about six years old, I remember my best friend and I used to spend many a recess period coming up with theories about how to "beat" the minus world in Super Mario Bros. We were convinced that if we could just go a little bit faster, there’d be an exit!
And that’s notwithstanding all the time we spent bombing up elevator shafts in Metroid trying to get to the "secret worlds."
Comment by Darien | 11 September 2009