THE MEGATON
First Reported by: V-Jump Magazine
Date Started: October 1, 2002
Status: False
The Megaton is perhaps the most widely known and hate rumor in videogame history. What started as an innocent joke by the editors of the popular Japanese magazine V-Jump, ended as the biggest disappointment ever for Nintendo fans.
The Megaton was started sometime in October 2002, when V-Jump published a story that stated Nintendo was going to announce something huge in December that would "make GameCubes fly off the shelves."
Speculation immediately went out of control. The following image appeared on the Internet toward the end of November that supposedly revealed what the Megaton was. The three figures were quickly identified as Sonic, Megaman, and Mario, which fueled the already enormous flames that Nintendo was going to purchase Capcom and Sega.
If this wasn't bad enough, Capcom's presentation of the "Capcom 5" (Resident Evil 4, Viewtiful Joe, P.N.03, Killer 7, and Dead Phoenix) on November 13, 2003 didn't help matters at all. Many people saw this as the pretext to the even bigger announcement of a total buy-out by Nintendo.
Further speculation pointed to a Pokemon RPG for the GameCube being developed by Genius Sonority, a developer comprised of many ex-Dragon Quest team members that was being funded by Nintendo's Q-Fund. Even more preposterous, were the theories that Nintendo was going to announce their new hardware that would replace the GBA and GCN!
It wasn't until December 20th, that Nintendo finally commented on the Megaton. Nintendo of Europe's head of Public Relations, Shelly Friend, branded the whole Megaton rumor as "absolute rubbish", and was apparently very amused by the amount of speculation surrounding it. Unfortunately, this only caused more excitement among gamers, because many felt Nintendo was trying to cover-up the true magnitude of the Megaton.
The rumor was finally killed when V-Jump unveiled in January 2003 that the whole Megaton story was a cruel joke. Apparently, the announcement was referring to a Naruto game for GameCube, which is based on a comic that is popular among the V-Jump readers. So you see, this news was "Megaton" to people at V-Jump, but not to anyone else.
For a more complete look at the history of the Megaton, head over to "The Almighty Megaton" article by Brenden Petracek.
