7 Misconceptions about Video Games

Video games have been around for many decades—so it’s no surprise a number of myths and rumors have cropped up surrounding them. Below, we debunk seven of the biggest misconceptions about the popular games.

Misconception: Pong was the first video game.
Misconception: The video game crash of 1983 was a global phenomenon caused by the E.T. game.
Misconception: If your Nintendo Entertainment System game didn’t load, you were supposed to blow on it.
Misconception: Donkey Kong is a mistranslation of “Monkey Kong.”
Misconception: There was a cheat code that made Lara Croft appear naked.
Misconception: You can find Bigfoot in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Misconception: Tumbleweed Mansion in Red Dead Redemption is haunted.
Misconception: Psychology experts agree that games cause violence.

Misconception: Pong was the first video game.

When you think of the first video game, what do you picture? Maybe you thought of Pong for Atari. Released in June 1972 as an arcade game, the simple ping pong-like game with short vertical lines for paddles became an immediate success. The first one was installed in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a bar in Sunnyvale, California; a few days later, the machine broke because so many people wanted to play that it got jammed with quarters.

But Pong did have some predecessors. In the early days of computers—when they were the size of an entire room—programmers created games like tic-tac-toe. There was even a predecessor Tennis for Two game, created by William Higinbotham in 1958. And Nolan Bushnell, who went on to co-found Atari, played a computer game called Spacewar during his University of Utah days. In this game, created by Steve Russell and some fellow MIT students, you fired torpedoes at another player. A year before Pong was released, Bushnell worked with Nutting Associates to release a coin-operated game inspired by Spacewar, called Computer Space.

And that’s not even to mention Atari’s competitor, Magnavox, which released the Odyssey in 1972. It was a home video game system that had its own Table Tennis game. In fact, there had been a demonstration of that product in May that Nolan Bushnell attended before directing an employee to create something similar. When Atari released its home version of Pong in 1975, Magnavox sued for patent rights infringement, and the companies settled out of court, with Bushnell agreeing to pay a licensing fee to Magnavox.

Atari ended up selling 150,000 copies of Pong that year. The Magnavox Odyssey, on the other hand, sold fewer than 200,000 units in three years. So, regardless of who got there first, it’s no wonder that the sensation that is Pong is what sticks out in our minds as the grandfather of video games.

Misconception: The video game crash of 1983 was a global phenomenon caused by the E.T. game.

This historic crash in the video game market was not solely caused by the E.T. game. One of the first signs of an impending crash was actually Atari’s Pac-Man game, released in 1982. The company made the bold—and probably ill-advised—choice to create 12 million copies of the game, even though only about 10 million people even owned the Atari that it could be played on.

It also just wasn’t very good. After Atari was bought by Warner Communications in 1976, many of the best programmers left the company because they weren’t happy with the new management. With that came lower-quality games, including Pac-Man, which had stilted movements, irritating sound design, and ghosts that just disappeared. The company did sell 7.7 million copies, but that meant millions went unsold, while the quality damaged Atari’s reputation.

Between the loss of good workers, the Pac-Man issues, and the fact that newer, better systems were coming on the scene, the writing was on the wall. And then, enter E.T. In 1982, Atari higher-ups directed programmers to create an E.T. game in five weeks so that it could be on shelves by the Christmas season. Of course, that didn’t go well. The game was boring, and E.T. itself had an annoying habit of falling into holes. Five million copies were made; only 1.5 million were sold. That December, Warner saw its stock freefall. In 1983, Atari reported $536 million in losses. The following year, Warner sold Atari.

In the U.S., people started buying fewer video games, which contributed to this crash. But, Atari continued to do well in Europe, Japan, and Canada throughout this uncertain time in the States. International consumers also bought up Mattel and Vectrex video game products.

And the rumors that Atari dumped a bunch of unpurchased game cartridges in a landfill in the New Mexico desert are indeed true.

Misconception: If your Nintendo Entertainment System game didn’t load, you were supposed to blow on it.

A Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was a popular game console we were obsessed with in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And with the U.S. version of the console, players inserted their games into a slot, just like they would a tape into a VCR. But sometimes, the game wouldn’t boot up, or it would look all weird. So players would take the game out, blow on it, and try again.

When players put a game into an NES, pins in the game cartridge were supposed to line up with pins inside the console. But plenty of things can go wrong in a system like this. For example, time and use can cause wear and tear, making the pin connection process less smooth. So, by removing the game, blowing on it, and inserting it again, players were really just providing another opportunity for a smooth connection.

For the record, Nintendo didn’t want people blowing on their games. Their statement on the habit was this: “Do not blow into your Game Paks or systems. The moisture in your breath can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors.”

Misconception: Donkey Kong is a mistranslation of “Monkey Kong.”

Released in 1981 as an arcade game, the original Donkey Kong is the story of the carpenter Jumpman, who we now know as Mario, trying to save his girlfriend, Pauline, from a giant ape. This requires jumping, climbing, and avoiding barrels thrown by Donkey Kong.

But, where does the “Donkey” come from? You may have heard the rumor that this was the result of a mistranslation. The story goes that it was supposed to be “Monkey Kong,” but accidentally got mistranslated from Japanese to English; other versions blame a blurry fax or a bad phone connection.

For the true story, we can turn to the creator of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto. According to him, he intentionally chose the word donkey because he wanted that word to represent the character’s stubbornness.

Misconception: There was a cheat code that made Lara Croft appear naked.

One fun facet of the gaming world is rumors of hidden features and secrets you can discover in games. These tidbits spread on playgrounds, across friend groups, and of course all over the internet. Sometimes they’re real, like Minus World in Super Mario Bros. But other times, they’re nothing more than pure rumors.

The alleged “Tomb Raider nude code” was one such rumor that was commonly discussed on the playground and internet message boards in the ‘90s: People were pretty enamored with the appearance of Lara Croft in the 1996 game Tomb Raider, which spawned many false rumors that if you pushed the right buttons, or found the right item in the game, you’d see her sans clothes.

The rumor actually annoyed the creators of the game. Paul Douglas later said, “Even during development someone in management, perhaps half-jokingly, asked us for something similar and we told them to bog off. There certainly wasn’t anything in the game that did that but there was a fan made patch for the PC sometime after release. What was a little surprising is how long the publisher leaned into it. Alas, those were the days when all publicity was seen as good regardless how it depicted the character.”

Douglas and his co-creator Gavin Rummery ended up cheekily responding to these rumors within the game’s sequel, Tomb Raider 2. Toward the end, there’s a scene of Lara about to enter a shower. When she catches the player trying to sneak a glimpse, she asks, “Don’t you think you’ve seen enough?” and fires her gun into the camera.

Misconception: You can find Bigfoot in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

In 2004, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PlayStation 2. That year, players started claiming they were having Bigfoot sightings in the remote forest in the Back o Beyond area. As Kaleb Krimmel later told the New Yorker, “I was in Back o Beyond, walking up a hill. It was foggy out, but behind some plants I clearly saw a giant black figure. I aimed my camera to take a picture, but by the time I steadied the viewfinder it was gone.”

The New Yorker covered this phenomenon in 2013—that means that online communities were still debating the existence of Bigfoot almost a decade after the game came out. People continued to upload YouTube videos, images of footprints, and other evidence to try to prove that Bigfoot was in GTA. And that’s despite the fact that Rockstar denied Bigfoot’s existence in a magazine soon after the game’s release. As former CEO of Rockstar, Terry Donovan, once put it, “There is no Bigfoot, just like in real life.”

But like Tomb Raider, these rumors were addressed within the world of the games. Rockstar put Bigfoot in Grand Theft Auto 5; you can see him through a thermal scope in a mission called “Predator.” There’s also a man dressed as Sasquatch in “The Last One” sidequest. And, if you have a lot of time on your hands and you’ve already finished GTA 5, you can collect all 27 Peyote Plants hidden around the game, then find the Golden Peyote. And with that, you’ll have the ability to turn into Bigfoot, which makes you stronger.

Misconception: Tumbleweed Mansion in Red Dead Redemption is haunted.

It is also not true that Tumbleweed Mansion in Red Dead Redemption is haunted. The original game, released in 2010, introduces the player to the ghost town of Tumbleweed, which also appears in the sequel. It’s believed that Tumbleweed—a former mining town with a tyrannical sheriff—was inspired by the real life ghost town of Tombstone, Arizona where the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place.

The game definitely wants you to question whether Tumbleweed is haunted. You can find a newspaper clipping in the town that reads, “Following recent reports of ghost sightings in the abandoned town of Tumbleweed, visitors are continuing to tell of unnatural happenings and strange feelings. Some visitors claim to have seen spirits of the dead.”

But some players started spending hours in Tumbleweed, convinced they were seeing evidence of ghosts, which were not supposed to be part of the game. In 2018, Daren Bader, a former senior art director at Rockstar, told Variety, “I have seen some online videos of footprints in the basement of the mansion mysteriously appearing. It’s either a bug that was never fixed, or it’s a ghost in the machine. Regardless, that wasn’t intentional. Although it’s certainly the best place for that mistake to live.”

Misconception: Psychology experts agree that games cause violence.

Video games have been accused of causing violent tendencies in players for many years. This claim got much louder during the ‘90s with the popularization of first-person shooting (FPS) games, like Doom. In the U.S., after there’s a high-profile school shooting, FPS games inevitably become part of the conversation.

To determine whether there’s a causal link between video games and violence, a good place to look is meta-analyses of research. And we have a few. For example, in 2023, the Stanford Brainstorm Lab published their findings after reviewing 82 medical research articles about video games and violent behavior. They found that there was no evidence of a causal link between the two. A 2020 meta-analysis of 28 studies, with a total of 21,000 subjects, came to the same conclusion.

The U.S. judicial branch seems to concur. In 2015, the Supreme Court struck down a California law that banned selling violent video games to minors. In their decision, they wrote, “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively. Any demonstrated effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media.”

The American Psychological Association agrees. Their “Resolution on Violent Video Games” reads: “Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.” Though they do encourage further research on the subject.

Another place to look for evidence is other countries where gaming is popular. For instance, in both Japan and South Korea, consumers spend more per capita on video games than in the United States—yet both of those countries have some of the lowest rates of violent crime.