People love a good pullquote. A nice eye-catching set of words that sum up a scene, a character, or even a whole game. For decades, game’s have teetered between meaningful dialogue as enriching the whole, and being a set of vapid words that do nothing but hype up the single moment they’re in. The latter, of course, is much more susceptible to misquotes.
Or sometimes a phrase will get abridged. Or directly mistranslated. There are a lot of reasons for it. Truth can at times be relative, but sometimes the words you remember are, in fact, just plain wrong. And these are some of the most prominent quotes from gaming history that were never real in the first place.
Portal is know for a lot of things. The trippy portal mechanics that basically no one has matched, the rip-roaring humour that, once again, few have managed to match. It is timeless, like Portal as a whole. ANd one of the most long-standing pieces of history for the game is the quote “The cake is a lie”. Well, turns out there are some lies in that, too.
Now, the line itself is real. It’s scrawled across the game in various forms to warn you that the cake is, in fact, a lie. Glados also mentions cake, and even baking you into one. But never does she mention that thet cake is, was, or ever will be a lie. In fact, no one ever says. It is only ever written, despite what many may feel otherwise.
Through Final Fantasy you can generally track the general reception to Japanese games and the quality of their translations. From the initial trio of games not even releasing in the west, to Final Fantasy 16 being voiced first in English, it’s been a long history. And while many of the games have their own translation mishaps, the original Final Fantasy 7 has some of the worst.
There are many, from the tonally-off ‘Let’s mosey’ to slurs Tifa absolutely should not say, it’s Aerith’s that stands out the most. ‘This guy are sick’. Such a simple mistake, a line that shouldn’t even be there. And in all later versions, it was either altered entirely, or lightly touched-up to a more correct ‘This guy is sick’. So while the quote is real, it was never meant to be.
4All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Zero Wing
You may not have heard of Zero Wing, though you definitely know of its legacy. It’s a nice game itself. Originally released in arcades andlater brought to the Sega Mega Drive, it had quite strong graphics for the period, and it was its smooth side-scrolling gameplay that helped it stand out. But that’s not its real legacy.
What Zero Wing is really know for is this quote for its opening. “All your base are belong to us”. That is absolutely what is written, it’s just incredibly inaccurate to what it is meant to convey. In reality, it should have read more closely to “With the help of Federation government forces, CATS has taken all of your bases”. That is not what we got, however. And so we are left with a poor translation that ironically helped the game become even more popular.
This is a fun one because so many people know the line, but not what it’s actually from. Rather than attributing it to any specific game or origin, it seems to just exist in the ether. Until right now. Back in 2006, Sony held its E3 conference, with a gameplay demo of Genji 2 being played live. And it was rough. But it sure came with some great quotes.
“Attack its weak point for massive damage” the presenter said as he slowly knocked over a giant crab after previously saying the game was very historically accurate. As you might expect, this line does not appear in the released game at all, relegated exclusively to the E3 demo. The final game was also called Genji: Days of the blade, further distancing it from the original quote.
An archaic line that took many years afterwards before it even came to people’s attention, Super Mario 64 has what sounds like a very bizarre combination of words. The line is purported to say “So long Gay Bowser” as Mario finally defeats his rival at the end of the game. As you might expect, Nintendo did not actually have Mario say this,even if it sounded like it.
It didn’t help that the line was not present in the All-Stars collection, but that’s a result of it being based on the Japanese version that removed that line to align with Bowser’s Japanese name of King Koopa. What does the line actually say though? Apparently, it’s meant to be more along the lines of “So long-a, Bowser”, though whatever way it appeared in the game definitely makes that line harder to hear.
1Just About Everything
Final Fantasy Tactics
When it comes to false quotes, it is actually quite rare. Misattributed, mistranslated, written instead of spoken, and so on. But usually, the line itself is still there, in some form or another. That is not the case with Final Fantasy Tactics. It is a game that is known to be politically-charged, and the quotes people so often share seem to reflect that. Except for the fact they’re all fake.
Poverty is man-made, fines are only a further tax upon the poor, and plenty more. These align with the game’s own message, but it is never so blatant. It allows its themes to simmer and for characters to come to their conclusions in time. These quotes are nice, and even accurate to what the game represents. But they just aren’t true, and unintentionally discredit the quality of the game’s official translation.
