Reptile’s Secret Battle [Mortal Kombat]
Mortal Kombat was the ultimate rumor game, and the developers knew it. Rumors about stage fatalities turned out to be totally real, and later features like the Animalities or Friendships only made our imaginations run even wilder.
The greatst of all the rumored secrets was Reptile, a palette swap ninja that series creator Ed Boon reported dreamed up while driving back to work after lunch. In the SNES version of the game, Reptile could only be fought after acheiving a Double Flawless Victory. In other versions, you’d need to earn a Double Flawless Victory, never block, and perform a fatality. Persistent rumors swirled around this weird green version of Scorpion / Sub-Zero, and he’s been a reoccurring playable character ever since.
Scorpion still appears in secret sometimes, too! There’s a hidden cutscene and lost statues of the missing character in MK11, and Ermac the red pallette swap ninja followed a similar path from rumor to playable character.
Master Hand The Playable Character [Super Smash Bros. Melee]
All Smash fans twitch in fear whenever Master Hand is brought up in conversation. The challenging disembodied foe appears across the series — it’s a tough final boss, so when friends whispered that we could actually play him in Smash Bros. Melee, nobody believed it. The instructions sound like something out of a sugar-addled deranged mind, but it is totally real. You can play as the final boss, but it ain’t easy.
It’s too difficult to describe here — but you’ll need to plug a controller into Slot 3 on the Gamecube, which comes with four slots standard. Then, it’s all about placing the cursor at the exact right spot, pressing buttons at the same time, holding buttons down at specific moments, and pressing more unnatural combos of buttons. You can learn about the entire process on the Smash Bros. wiki, but this has to be one of the most unbelievable secrets in any game. It just sounds made-up!
Discover more wild gaming rumors (that are totally true) on the next page.