Fake Leaks That Seriously Disappointed Fans

We in the video game industry do things a little differently than those in TV or movies. When a movie is being made, or a TV show is in production, fans sometimes know months or even years in advance. It's tough to keep those projects under wraps — at least, the more minute details of those projects — so most simply don't bother.

Video games, however, are big on secrecy. For better or worse, the studios and publishers behind some of your favorite games don't want you hearing about them until they're good and ready. They want to control every aspect of the narrative surrounding their games, whether it's to gain a competitive advantage or to hold back for a grand reveal.

But journalists love to dig. And this, boys and girls, is how leaks occur. And why fake leaks are so prevalent when it comes to video games.

When real information isn't there, it creates an environment where someone can simply come along and make things up. We've all been burned by leaks like this in the past, and below, we've gathered some of the biggest heartbreaking fakes in modern memory.

These are the fake leaks that seriously disappointed fans.

Fans of the Super Smash Bros. series get (quite understandably) pumped about new character reveals. You see, characters in Smash aren't just tossed in haphazardly. Nintendo crafts entire stages for the new fighters. It creates new remixes of songs that appear in that character's games. And the new fighter's move set screams the phrase "attention to detail."

And speaking of detail, a Smash Bros. leak that popped up in late 2018 had a lot of it. The leaker had a believable story, and there was enough evidence online to give the leaker credibility. But the leak is on this list, so you know where things are headed. It was all fake.

The leak received the name "Grinch leak" due to a Grinch graphic that appeared next a the faked Smash Bros. banner that supposedly revealed new fighters. The leaker behind it claimed the photo was taken at the offices of a promotional graphics company, and that same leaker went so far as to create LinkedIn profiles to make the entire thing seem legitimate. And the fighters themselves were entirely believable, too. Shadow the Hedgehog was one, for example. Ken from Street Fighter was another. All in all, the leak claimed eight new characters were coming.

Nintendo's final Smash Direct killed the leak dead. It did manage to get Ken right, to its credit, but only one other fighter joined the roster: Incineroar from Pokemon.

It may not shock you, knowing what you know now, but the Death Stranding fiasco was not Walmart Canada's first screw-up. In fact, it wasn't even Walmart Canada's first screw-up of the year 2018. That one came in May, nearly a month before one of the video game industry's largest events: E3. Walmart Canada listed a smorgasbord of unannounced games in its store, beating official reveals to the punch and leaving everyone scrambling to determine what was real and what wasn't.

To Walmart Canada's credit, a bunch of the games did end up getting announced. Rage 2, for instance, was one. Gears 5 was another. But Walmart Canada listed a Splinter Cell game, as well. And that was just flat-out wrong.

Fans of Sam Fisher have been dying for a new Splinter Cell game, and Ubisoft greased the wheels so to speak by including Fisher in some downloadable content for another one of its games, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The Walmart Canada leak seemed like the next logical step after that DLC: get Splinter Cell on everyone's radars again, and then announce a brand new title. But that wasn't the case, and it has yet to be. Splinter Cell fans are still hoping for a new entry, and seeing as Ubisoft has plenty of other titles lined up for 2019 and beyond, a new game in the franchise is looking less and less likely.

After a very sluggish start and the ultra-disappointing Curse of Osiris expansion, Destiny 2's Warmind expansion actually helped set the game back on the right track. Even then, Warmind was shallow on the story front and was lacking in the big moments department. But did you know that a leak originally described Destiny 2's second DLC as a far cooler experience? That's a thing that happened, and at the time, it seemed believable.

One day in early January 2018, a Reddit user posted an image that appeared to be captured from a PlayStation Store description for Destiny 2's second expansion. It called the DLC Gods of Mars, and the text within the description spoke in detail of a campaign that pitted Guardians against the warmind Rasputin, who was hell bent on destroying the Traveler (the being that gives Guardians their power). It sounded epic. But it was fake.

Interestingly enough, the faked store description managed to get some a few things right. The Warmind expansion did take place on Mars, and it did include interactions with Rasputin. But the big bad in that expansion wound up being an incredibly weak Hive worm god, and Rasputin instead became an ally.

If you ask Destiny 2 players, they'd probably take the fake story from Gods of Mars in a heartbeat.

It's been years since the world was blessed with Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. But here's a funny and true fact about that next Borderlands game, which everyone assumes is called Borderlands 3: we don't actually know what it is. That's what made this next leak, dropped in March 2018, so intriguing. It didn't just confirm the name — it confirmed the game.

And it was a total sham.

Reddit seems to be a pretty reliable repository for fake leaks, and the one for Borderlands 3 was no different. Someone posted a doctored image of a Borderlands 3 logo — made just blurry enough to seem like they captured it from a screen they weren't meant to see — and everyone gobbled it up. But other Reddit users quickly realized that the figure in the leaked image was actually art from Dark Souls 2, and as quickly as the leak garnered attention from Borderlands fans, it was quickly laid to rest.

We don't know for certain that the next Borderlands is Borderlands 3. We do know, though, that the people who create these leaks have a little too much time on their hands.

Most video game companies are silent about leaks that pop up online, giving those who inquire the usual line of, "We don't comment on rumors or speculation." So it's pretty uncommon when a studio, or someone from a studio, takes to the bullhorn to outright refute a leak immediately after it drops. But that doesn't mean it never occurs. We submit to you Frank O'Connor of 343 Industries: a man who is anything but common.

When Twitter user @BotBomBorello posted photos of promotional materials for a game called Halo: Gravemind, said Twitter user looked credible. The art didn't seem out of place for Halo, the user said he'd been hooked up with the materials by a friend who worked at GAME (a video game store in the UK), and he published them online just days before E3 2018.

Frank O'Connor, however, wasn't having it.

The famed Halo franchise director took to Twitter, immediately replying to @BotBomBorello to call the leak "FAKE NEWS!" Of course, the news of a new Halo game wasn't fake. We'd learn just a few days later that Microsoft is plugging away at a brand new game called Halo Infinite. But it seems the Gravemind name — and the game's focus on the graveminds of the Flood — were simply made up.

Back in August 2017, the internet caught fire when it leaked that Bethesda might be making a game based on the Game of Thrones license. And why wouldn't that be great to hear? Bethesda has a long lineage of developing huge, open-world RPGs that critics love. If you can imagine something like Skyrim, but built to recreate the Game of Thrones experience, then you can see why gamers would be ready to throw money at Bethesda to play that title. At least, they would have.

Wow, how times have changed.

The Bethesda Game of Thrones leak, which originated from Target, was debunked by the retailer itself. So the game definitely isn't happening. But we're now living in a world post-Fallout 76. It's at least an interesting thought exercise to wonder if fans would still be as open to seeing Bethesda make a Game of Thrones title today, now that the studio has roundly trashed its reputation with its latest Fallout game.

Whatever the case, we're still waiting for that awesome Game of Thrones RPG. It won't be made by Bethesda. But maybe that's for the best.