Six of the Scariest Urban Legends in Gaming

From hidden background scares to ghosts allegedly lurking in mainstream comedy films, the most memorable frights usually come from encountering something spooky in the place that you least expect it. And if there’s one artform that seems tailor made for creepy easter eggs, it has to be the world of video games.

Whether it’s the result of developers adding eerie elements to non-horror games or enthusiastic players overanalyzing innocuous details (not to mention the occasional mean-spirited hoaxer), there’s a long history of modern-day folklore surrounding video games. With that in mind, we’ve decided to come up with a list celebrating six of the spookiest urban legends in gaming!

For the purposes of this list, we’ll only be discussing legends based on existing titles, so we won’t be including stories about fictional releases like Polybius, Killswitch or their modern-day Creepypasta equivalents. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite gaming legends if you think we missed a particularly scary one.

With that out of the way, onto the list…

6. Leatherface in GTA: San Andreas

Open world games are a perfect playground for devious developers to conceal sinister Easter Eggs, so it’s no surprise that a sandbox as large as San Andreas had multiple legends about the strange characters that inhabit it. And while I always enjoyed the (sadly false) rumors about Bigfoot lurking in the title’s simulated wilderness, it’s the stories about a certain chainsaw-wielding cannibal that freaked me out the most.

You see, in the Red County region of the map, players could encounter an ominous wheelchair sitting at the end of a dock. And with the game releasing a year after Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, some players believed the chair to be a reference to the film’s Old Monty (though veteran horror fans suggested that it could also be a nod to the original film’s Franklin). It didn’t take long for this tiny easter egg to somehow become irrefutable proof that Leatherface could be summoned in-game by following a specific set of instructions, with modders even creating a few convincing hoaxes back in the early days of YouTube.

5. World of Warcraft’s Children of Goldshire

Also referred to as “the Creepy Goldshire Children,” this World of Warcraft legend began when players noticed strange NPC behavior during certain hours. Every day at 7 AM, a group of children would embark on a seemingly pointless journey before returning to the second floor of the empty house where they originally spawned. Once there, the kids appear to form a pentagram while the game played sinister soundbites until the group de-spawned. Naturally, fans soon began to speculate that this was a bizarre reference to some real-life crime related to the Satanic Panic, though others suggested that WoW might actually be haunted by the spirits of the kids who died while playing it.

Of course, like most of the legends on this list, the Goldshire Children have a less-than-supernatural origin. Rather than a reference to satanic sacrifices, this easter egg was placed in the game by Exterior Level designers as a friendly jest about their “evil rivals” in Blizzard’s Dungeon Department, with each child corresponding to a specific developer in real life. The pentagram was also a fluke, as the Exterior Level team intended for the formation to be more of a circle.

4. Lavender Town Syndrome

There’s nothing quite like the first time you enter Pokémon‘s unexpectedly freaky Lavender Town, but it was an especially eerie experience for me because my extremely religious parents had fallen for another popular urban legend at the time which claimed that the Pokémon games contained blasphemous dark magic meant to corrupt the minds of children. That’s why I’d only play my borrowed copy of Red under the covers at night, using a flashlight to circumvent the Gameboy Color’s lack of a backlit screen. Naturally, this made the ghostly atmosphere of Lavender Town hit that much harder.

Years later, I was shocked to discover online rumors surrounding the area’s haunting soundtrack and its seemingly preternatural ability to induce madness in children through sound alone, with some severe cases supposedly ending in suicide. While I desperately wanted to believe that my gut feeling about the place had always been correct, this popular legend turned out to be an easily dismissed fabrication likely inspired by the Porygon seizure fiasco of the original Pokémon anime.

3. Minecraft‘s Herobrine

I was already a little too old to be thrilled by the virtual block-building of Minecraft when the game was first released, but I always respected the impact that this one-man indie title had on the industry. And with randomly generated worlds offering countless RNG-powered opportunities for (usually) unintentional scares, it was only a matter of time before fans started to share spooky Minecraft stories around the digital campfire that is the internet.

First appearing in an anonymous 4chan post, Herobrine was described as a warped version of the game’s protagonist, with this empty-eyed figure supposedly being controlled by the deceased brother of the game’s creator, Notch. While it may seem like a silly idea now, kids at the time ate this story up, with some of them even embarking on virtual cryptid hunts and adding to the legend as they posted videos about the secretive character on YouTube.

While it’s long been established that Herobrine is nothing more than an elaborate hoax, this virtual haunting has been so fully embraced by the community that he’s basically been memed into existence. In fact, patch notes regularly (and jokingly) claim that Herobrine has been removed from the game, and some fans were even hoping to see him make an appearance in the new Minecraft film.

2. Earthbound’s Giygas Boss Battle

Also known as Mother 2 in Japan, Earthbound remains a classic due to its clever reframing of classic RPG tropes in a more grounded context. However, this family-friendly title became the subject of numerous online rumors when players began to connect the dots surrounding the true nature of the game’s final boss, the extraterrestrial invader Giygas.

While the idea of children teaming up to defeat an all-consuming cosmic entity is already reminiscent of horror stories like Stephen King’s It, Giygas’ fleshy imagery and the sci-fi elements surrounding the fight led to speculation that the battle actually depicts the player characters travelling back in time to defeat the boss while it was still in the womb.

This grisly rumor may have been denied by the game’s developers, but it should be noted that Giygas is in fact inspired by an incident where series creator Shigesato Itoi accidentally viewed a disturbing scene from a J-Horror film when he was still a child.

1. The Berzerk Curse

Designed by Alan McNeil, Stern Electronics’ Berzerk was a hybrid shoot ‘em up/maze game that saw great success in the early ’80s arcade scene. While the innovative title tasked players with zapping androids as they attempted to escape each level while being pursued by an evil smiley face, it wasn’t the novel gameplay that earned Berzerk its notoriety. A year after the game was released, a story began to circulate about a young gamer who suffered a heart attack after achieving a sinister high-score of 16,660. Soon after that, another player allegedly went into cardiac arrest after reaching a similar score, leading some fans to claim that the game’s Evil Otto might be hunting players down in real life.

Strangely enough, this grisly legend is partially true, as one unfortunate gamer did actually die from heart failure after achieving a high-score in the title, though his untimely demise had more to do with pre-existing heart conditions than a cursed arcade game.

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