10 Unbelievable Video Game Rumors That Turned Out To Be True

Michael Jackon’s Sonic 3 Footprint [Sonic 3]

It has everything to do with the music. Rumors swirled in the 90s that music icon Michael Jackson wanted to contribute to the Sonic 3 soundtrack. It seems unbelievable — the king of pop played video games? No way. We were a lot more naive back then. But the fact has since been (mostly ) confirmed to be totally true — the music doesn’t just have familiar riffs, but three of the six composers are confirmed to be frequent Michael Jackson collaborators.

Sega still denies that Michael Jackson had any involvement in the soundtrack. To their knowledge, that might even be true — all of the contributions might be completely unofficial, and Sega just wants to watch their butts legally speaking. Nobody wants to pay out royalties when they don’t have to, right? It’s a complicated situation, but the conspiracy theory is pretty plausible nowadays.

The Garbage Dump Mystery [E.T.]

E.T. for Atari is one of the games that perfectly exemplifies the video game crash of 1983. It’s an infamously terrible game that was over-produced, and rumors swirled all about a mysterious dump site where all the extra unsold cartridges were buried. We’d all heard the rumors, but we weren’t sure whether to believe.

Someone just had to find out. In the Atari: Game Over documentary, the rumored burial site of the E.T. cartridges is unearthed — and it turns out the story was true, but with a little more nuance. It wasn’t all the E.T. cartridges, and the dump site was filled with lots of other unsold products. Still, it’s speculated that 700,000 carts were buried in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 130,000 were pulled out of the ground!

That’s an insane amount of junk, and confirmation that the stories we tell each other on the playground have a tiny kernel of truth somewhere.

Those are some of our favorite video game rumors. Let us know which rumors we missed, and we might write up a second list full of secrets that shocked us.