What do Michael Jackson, E.T. and Super Mario Bros. 3 have in common, besides being big in the 80s?
They're all the subject of video game myths that turned out to be true, and confirming these myths to be true made gamers hungry to expose more hidden truths about the video games they really dig.
Gamers definitely did not dig the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game released back in 1982 for the Atari 2600, so Atari decided to bury thousands of copies in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The whole thing sounded like a crazy conspiracy cooked up by gamers who wanted to make Atari look bad for selling them such a crappy game, but the 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over confirmed the myth to be true.
Another myth that sounded half baked but was totally true involves Michael Jackson creating some of the soundtrack music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3- the King of Pop was uncredited until recently:
Due to a number of complications, Sega remained tight-lipped about the whole thing for a long time, but it was eventually confirmed that Jackson did have an involvement with the game. However, apparently a lot of the work he did for the soundtrack was heavily altered following the allegations of sex abuse made against him in 1993. Nevertheless, prominent Sonic 3 developers have claimed that Jackson actually completed the full soundtrack, but he was unhappy with the sound capabilities of the Genesis and so he decided to remain uncredited.
And lastly we have Super Mario Bros. 3, the strange sequel that starts with a curtain rising and ends with the characters exiting stage right.
Gamers have long suspected the game's whole story was nothing but a stage performance, which was recently confirmed by creator Shigeru Miyamoto:
...it seemed more likely that people were just over-analyzing the game rather than it being something that Shigeru Miyamoto and company actually had in mind when they designed Super Mario Bros. 3. But last year, on Nintendo’s UK Twitter, Miyamoto addressed a handful of Mario myths, including the question, “Was Super Mario Bros. 3 all just a performance?” His response: “YES.”
See 10 Astonishing Video Game Myths That Turned Out To Be True here