We want to trust our friends and family, but sometimes they lie to us. Sometimes, they troll us. What follows are the funny (and tragic) stories people shared with me about gaming gone awry. No one will be surprised to learn many happen to involve a big brother being a jerk.
This all started when I was scrolling through the Dark Souls subreddit and found this gem:
Immediately after sharing this story on Twitter, a follower shared a similar story of deception:
In Metal Gear Solid, smoking cigarettes slowly depletes your health over time. Poor guy!
The game was afoot. I put out the call for more of these stories and was rewarded by learning some of my followers are total monsters and others may need to look into therapy sessions.
I frequently stream horror games on the Internet, and one of my biggest fears is my wife will burst into the room and scare the crap out of me. So far, this hasn’t happened, but she keeps the threat alive. One day, it will happen. One day, the Internet will watch me cry on a livestream.
This one’s so cruel because it’s so damn believable. In Eternal Darkness, players expected the game to mess with them. In fact, one of the sanity effects is where the TV appears to turn off!
Justin, you have bad friends, but I have to respect their commitment to the joke, especially since there’s an implication this happened multiple times, and you went on hours of pointless quests.
You, sir, are one of history’s greatest monsters. Thank you for doing what you do. That said, I’m surprised people had the dedication to head back to shore. Don’t you have to tap a button to swim at full-speed, too? Does that mean people were tapping a button for eight minutes? Dude!
Truly a classic. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I fell for that during Counter-Strike one time.
I believe I’ve saved the best for last, though it comes with a caveat. There are spoilers for Earthbound. If you haven’t played one of the greatest JRPGs ever played, you might want to skip this one. Then again, it’s so damn funny, I’d recommend you just keep on reading anyway.
Last warning! Spoilers for Earthbound are coming! Alert! Alert! I’m no longer at fault!
OK, here we go.
So, you know how the final battle requires you to finally use the “pray” option? It’s a mostly useless battle tool for healing a few HP, but you quickly forget it even exists. Thing is, it’s the key to finishing Earthbound, and part of why the ending’s so touching. Please keep this in mind…
Please continue, Donald.
This is all I can think about while reading this tweet.
Step up, Kotaku! How have you been trolled? Or, more likely, how have you trolled others?
Comments
24 responses to “‘Pants Were Shat’: Stories Of Real-Life Video Game Trolling”
When I first got my Master System I had to share Sonic with my little brother.
We’d play life to life and because I was impatient, I told him the spikes in Green Hill Zone were needles full of medicine.
Banjo Kazooie, after 5 minutes, no joke, after 5 minutes of convincing her that the hole ahead contained an extra life, she finally jumped in. She was down to one bar of health at the time and argued with me the whole time saying she didn’t believe me. She ended up jumping into the great abyss and died, never believing a single thing I have ever said since. 10/10 Worth it.
Every one makes zombie noises while their friends play horror games; I happen to be quite good at the clickers from last of us.
Back in the day playing casual CS Source my mates convinced me that a blue container at T spawn on de_port caused you to die if you hit it. They’d stand back and run at it. Sure enough as soon as they hit their body would crumple to the ground. They had me going for a full 20mins before admitting they had ‘kill’ bound to a key so that as soon as they hit the container they’d cark it. We managed to keep it going for the whole night and roping more and more people into it with various objects on different maps 😛
I remember playing Double Dragon on the NES, and my older brother told me that there was a warp on the first stage before you go in to fight Abobo. All you had to do is walk down to the bottom right of the screen and keep walking in that direction. I would die, and they would just tell me I did it wrong.
Another great troll was the NES game Karnov, if you took the second controller and it left and A I think it would kill the player on screen. I figured that out and trolled my brother with it for a while till he figured it out. not sure if this was the cause or retaliation for the Double Dragon trolling, but they all seem connected in my memory.
Not a game, but a system – when we were young I told my brother there was going to be a console called, like, “Omega” or something, and it was going to be able to play Nintendo AND Sega games in it – cartridges and discs – and it would be so good.
He told so many of his friends about this miraculous thing that was coming. Poor bastard was too young to question where on Earth I would have even heard about such a thing.
I wish it had been real.
lol and not now have the retron…..
I used to convince my little brother that the remote mines in TS2 were ‘hats’ and that he should show the enemy the ‘hat’ that I had given him. He didn’t know why he kept blowing up though.
Vanilla WoW in undercity
Campfire placed
me says: “found a new emote lol! /camp”
/e sets up camp with you (giving the equivalent of an orange text emote)
random player in the area tries it out, vanishes from game. (we chuckle)
he comes back online and we receive a slew of abusive messages about how we are hackers and so on.
I too used the ‘kill’ command to convince players in Counter Strike surf maps that my ‘spraypaint’ was a teleporter.
I would write “check out this startgate”, run at my tag, jump, then kill myself with a key bound to ‘kill’.
For the rest of the round players could be seen jumping at my tag wondering wtf was going on.
Also Path of Frost after twins in ToC, killing raids full of people as they would crater on the water down by anub’arak when LK shatters the floor.
Also in vanilla WoW. If you were under the effect of a priest mind control and were killed by a player you would die as a faction pet and be unable to resurrect at your corpse or at friendly graveyards (even though the game would put you at the closest one). Used to mess around with this a great deal when you could get up on top of orgrimmar.
I remember playing Doom 3 in the dark when my gf had entered the room quietly planning to scare me. At that same moment I turned around in the game to find one of the zombie soldiers right in front of me. I jumped just as my gf was about to put her hand on my shoulder, my reaction freaked her out and made her scream, and my reaction in turn to feeling her hand on my shoulder caused me to cry out. I took a good few minutes for us to calm down and my heart to stop palpitating (I swear I came close to a heart attack).
I have not played Doom 3 since.
oh and about the smokes in MGS, I did actually use them to beat Psycho Mantis. I never knew about the second controller thing because the cigs did something so I was able to kill him. I don’t know of any one else who ever did this, but I didn’t find out about the second controller till years after.
Oh cool I’ve never heard of this. I only recently found out (maybe in twin snakes only?) if you keep refusing to use the second controller big boss will call you and tell you to destroy some columns in the room to defeat him somehow, I’m assuming they are non-destructable prior to this point.
Not so much while playing games, but when I was about 10 I entered a competition to win a SNES console with Super International Cricket (seem to recall it being a Weetbix promotion). A week or so later there’s a phonecall congratulating me for winning, and to expect it in the mail soon.I was just a little excited.
Weeks go by and no SNES and then my brother confesses it was him who made the call. And the whole family knew about and were geeing me up over the course of those weeks about how awesome it’s going to be having a SNES.
Yay for being the youngest in the family!!
No game of Super International Cricket was complete without relentless spamming of the appeal button. HOWZATT!?HOWZATT!?HOWZATT!?HOWZATT!?HOWZATT!?HOWZATT!?……after EVERY delivery.
In ’89, we got a NES and Super Mario Bros. I was 8, my brothers 6 and 4. I used to get them to pause their games to get me a drink (I was the bully big sister), then when they were out of the room I’d unpause their go, run Luigi up to the edge of a chasm, jump, and pause halfway over. Then I’d sit back and wait for the glorious discovery.
Damnit, wrong window open. *Sigh*
I can sympathise with that. A bunch of us get together to watch a bunch of The Walking Dead at once, so ordered pizza, and I went to plug my laptop into the TV via HDMI cable and get the show rolling. Except for some reason this time it just wasn’t working.
After spending half an hour fiddling with settings, I called a friend and we spent another 15 minutes trying to work out why it wasn’t working. Meanwhile the others are munching on pizza watching while I flail around.
Eventually I give up, go to put the HDMI cable back into the Playstation…and found the whole time the cable was plugged into the Playstation, not the TV, hence why nothing was showing up.The others had a good laugh while I grumbled into my now cold pizza.
On the Sega Mega drive we had Jurassic park.
When the game was loading it had a T-Rex animation where it roared.
I hooked it up to my dads massive ass stereo. . .
next to my older brothers room. . .
cranked the volume to full. . .
loaded the game. . .
at 6 am. . .
Bricks were shat.
My head was punched repeatedly.
Totally worth it!
Transformice, the online game. The ol ‘alt + w’ gives you higher jump ability trick. I used to type that into chat and watch people randomly disappear from the game.
I got my friend to fall for updog.
playing the master system california games with my mum doing the skateboard bit and telling her that if she would move the controller in her hands like the skatboard was moving on the screen it would go faster. to this day she still thinks this.
I hate trolls so much. It completely goes against my nature of being helpful to others that ask for it in video games. I guess I’m an Anti-Troll. Or UnTroll.
I honestly don’t see why annoying or wasting someone else’s time is fun. It just sounds like being a dick. Which I don’t see the point of. I have to deal with dicks all day out there in the real world. Damn it now I’m sad there are so many dicks.