Christ, I miss the days when you couldn’t just whip out your phone and fact-check every mental gaming rumour that did the rounds at school. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, before the internet turned us all into cynical know-it-alls, playground gaming folklore was this brilliant ecosystem of complete bollocks mixed with the occasional genuine secret. And we believed it all, didn’t we? Had to really, because what else were you going to do – ring up Team17 and ask if there was actually a secret level in Cannon Fodder where all the soldiers survived?
I fell for so many ridiculous gaming myths it’s embarrassing. But that’s what made it magical, you know? Every game felt like it might be hiding something incredible, and without GameFAQs to spoil everything, your imagination could run absolutely wild. The mystery was half the fun, even when that mystery turned out to be your mate Gary making stuff up because he wanted to sound clever.
The absolute worst one that got me was this rumour about Speedball 2 on the Amiga. Some kid at school – think his name was Michael, proper know-it-all type – swore blind that if you scored exactly 149 points in a match and then typed “BITMAP BROTHERS” during the celebration screen, you’d unlock a secret team made up of the game’s developers. Mental stuff, but it sounded plausible enough because the Bitmap Brothers were legends, right? They were exactly the sort of developers who’d hide themselves in their own game.
So there I was, spending entire afternoons trying to score exactly 149 points. Do you know how stupidly difficult that is when you’re actually trying? Normally I’d smash the computer 200-50 or something, but suddenly I needed surgical precision. I’d get to 145 and then spend ten minutes trying to set up a 4-point shot, inevitably messing it up and scoring 6 instead. Drove me absolutely mental.
When I finally managed it – and I mean finally, took me weeks – I was practically shaking as I typed “BITMAP BROTHERS” during the celebration. Nothing happened. Obviously. Because it was complete rubbish. But did that stop me trying different variations? Course not. Maybe it was “THE BITMAP BROTHERS.” Maybe you had to type it during the match. Maybe Michael had been winding me up the entire time, which, let’s be honest, he probably was.
The Amiga scene was brilliant for these sorts of stories because the games felt so much more mysterious than console stuff. Take Shadow of the Beast – gorgeous game, atmospheric as anything, but completely baffling to actually play. Kids would claim there were secret rooms you could only reach by walking through specific walls, or that certain sound effects would play if you stood in the right spot during a thunderstorm. Half the time we couldn’t tell if these were genuine secrets or just the game being weird, because European developers in the late 80s weren’t exactly known for conventional game design.
I remember this elaborate story about Hired Guns where supposedly there was a fifth character you could unlock by completing the game with all four standard characters without any of them dying. The character was meant to be this overpowered cyborg with weapons that could kill anything in one shot. Sounded brilliant, except Hired Guns was hard as nails and keeping everyone alive through the entire thing was basically impossible. Didn’t stop me trying though, did it? Spent months on that, getting increasingly frustrated every time someone got killed by those bloody spider things.
My Mega Drive wasn’t immune to this nonsense either. Streets of Rage 2 had all sorts of mental rumours floating around. The big one was that you could play as the final boss, Mr. X, if you completed the game on the hardest difficulty without using any special attacks. Seemed legit because you could already unlock Axel and Blaze from the first game, so why not the bad guy too?
Course, completing Streets of Rage 2 on Mania difficulty without specials is basically torture. Those moves are there for a reason – the game’s balanced around using them. But I was determined, wasn’t I? Me and my younger brother took turns, getting our arses handed to us by motorcycle guys and fat blokes with pipes, all because we believed this ridiculous story about unlocking Mr. X. Never worked, obviously. Though we did get stupidly good at the regular combat, so I suppose it wasn’t entirely wasted effort.
The worst part about these playground rumours was how they’d evolve each time someone retold them. Start with something simple like “there’s a secret in Streets of Rage 2” and by the time it had gone through five kids it became “if you beat the game blindfolded while eating a cheese sandwich, you unlock a version where everyone’s naked and the music is played by Queen.” Each retelling added some mad new detail that made the whole thing even more unlikely, but somehow more appealing too.
Sensible Soccer had this persistent rumour about a hidden team made up of the Sensible Software staff. Unlike the Speedball 2 thing, this one actually sounded reasonable – Jon Hare and Chris Yates were proper characters, exactly the sort who’d stick themselves in their football game. The story went that you had to win every competition with a team whose name started with ‘S’, and then something would happen during the credits. Never managed to verify this one because winning every bloody competition in Sensi would take about six months, and I had other games to play.
But here’s the thing – occasionally these daft rumours turned out to be completely true, and those moments were pure magic. Finding out that you really could access the Chaos Engine’s level select by holding down specific keys during the loading screen? Mind-blowing. Even better was being the kid who brought that knowledge back to the playground, watching everyone else’s faces when you demonstrated something they’d written off as impossible.
I remember when my mate Dave told me about the secret areas in Rick Dangerous. I laughed at him. “Yeah right, and I bet Rick can fly too.” But Dave was insistent – there were walls you could walk through, invisible platforms, all sorts of hidden stuff. He came round the next day and showed me. I sat there, completely gobsmacked, as Rick walked through what looked like solid stone. Suddenly every wall in every game became potentially fake. The possibilities felt endless.
That’s what made this era special, you know? The uncertainty. Today, games get completely dissected before they’re even properly released. Every secret, every easter egg, every hidden character is documented in painful detail within hours. More efficient, sure, but a lot less magical. There’s no mystery left, no playground debates about whether something might be true. Just cold, hard facts available instantly.
Course, the internet eventually killed all this beautiful nonsense. Got my first proper web connection around 1999, and suddenly we had access to sites that could definitively confirm or debunk any gaming myth. The first time I read a proper explanation of why some rumour was impossible, complete with technical details about how the game’s code actually worked, was both satisfying and genuinely sad. Mystery gave way to certainty, and something important was lost.
My nephew doesn’t experience games the way I did. When he’s curious about something, he just googles it immediately. Practical? Absolutely. But he’ll never know that peculiar mix of frustration and excitement that came with testing a completely mental theory passed down through playground whispers, or the camaraderie of huddling around an Amiga Power magazine with your mates, arguing about which tips might actually work and which were obvious wind-ups.
The magazines made it worse, actually. They’d verify some secrets while staying mysteriously quiet about others, which we took as confirmation that those other secrets must be real, just really well hidden. CU Amiga would print letters from readers claiming they’d found incredible things, often with just enough detail to sound plausible but not quite enough to replicate. Brilliant journalism, that.
Every school had their “my uncle works at” kid too, didn’t they? Ours was called Jamie, claimed his dad’s brother was “high up at Ocean Software” and would casually drop completely wrong information about upcoming games. “Head Over Heels 2 is coming out next month and you can play as a robot,” he once announced with total confidence. When it never materialized, Jamie would just move on to the next fabrication. “My uncle says they cancelled it because it was too good and made other games look rubbish.”
Looking back, I almost admire the creativity of it all. These weren’t just lies – they were collaborative fiction, stories we told ourselves to make our favourite games feel bigger and more mysterious than they actually were. Every rumour was someone’s attempt to extend the magic, to imagine what else might be hiding in those pixels and sound channels we loved so much.
There was something properly special about that analog approach to gaming secrets, something that encouraged imagination and community in a way that instant verification just doesn’t. I wouldn’t want to go back to potentially wasting entire weekends on nonexistent cheat codes, but I do miss when gaming felt like it contained genuine mysteries, passed from player to player like modern folklore. These days, mystery lasts about five minutes before someone uploads a video explaining exactly how everything works.
Maybe the real secret was that we were creating our own gaming culture, one daft rumour at a time.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
