5 Weird Changes Slipped Into Video Games

5 Pyramid Head Used To Skip Butt Day, Not Anymore 

Silent Hill 2 introduced Pyramid Head, one of the most iconic characters in both the history of gaming and the history of geometry. Pyramid Head is the best horror game monster not because of his looks, but because of how surprisingly deep his connection to the main character ends up running. And, well, his looks too.

Fans of the series have been starved of anything Silent Hill-related that's not just a dumb slot machine, so you can't really blame them for getting excited for Pyramid Head's entrance to the roster of Dead By Daylight—even though that game's entire shtick is featuring monsters from popular franchises for their aesthetics alone. Dead By Daylight failed the character thematically by making him a regular monster, and not just a personal foil to a specific character, and they also failed pretty hard in the looks department too. See, they didn't make him nearly as sexy as they should have. 

Pyramid Head was originally going to come to Dead By Daylight with what could only be scientifically described as a thicc-ass butt, but that was nowhere to be seen at the time of release.

Fans desperately begged the company to patch that big ol' butt back in. And the devs obliged. The marvelous patch notes pertaining to the butt's buff state that they'd fixed an issue that “caused The Executioners rear to be too flat ”

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4 You Can No Longer Orally Pleasure Your Friends In Fortnite 

You're probably reading this thinking, "Wait, you could perform oral sex in Fortnite?" Well, the game never intended you to. But you kind of could, via the "Bear Hug" emote, whose name itself is already more than enough paint for more imaginative readers to create a colorful work of art. This innocuous animation allowed players to hug it out—as long as they both player avatars were standing. Crouch right after triggering the emote animation, however, and you'd see something a bit more suggestive.

Naturally, players leaped upon this oversight. They overused it to the point of compromising the game's very competitive aspect! Or, uh, maybe they just caught the attention of a single prude shareholder, who instantly order its demise. There's no way to tell which.

Dustin Bailey, who first broke the news for PCgamesN, has his own theory. He says the change was so DC Comics would allow Batman and Catwoman's skins on Fortnite, since DC is very keen on trying to get us to believe those two characters aren't constantly going down on one another.

3 Renaming Mcree As A Smoke Screen For Messed-Up Reasons 

This year, people learned that Activision Blizzard had been heroically trying to contain a sexual harassment pandemic in the hopes of preventing it from spreading to the press. Some of these people turned their fury toward McCree, the cool gunslinger from Overwatch based on Clint Eastwood but named after Jesse McCree—an ex-Blizzard bigwig who was into, well, all sorts of unacceptable stuff.

Blizzard managed to shrug it off for a while, but the company got under so much fire that they announced they'd finally rename the character. That seems like a decent enough move, right? Well, the name change announcement just so happened to coincide with the company getting accused of shredding documents that we probably have enough grounds to presume are rather important.

What was in those docs? Let's put it this way: At the time, we knew Blizzard had a special sex room named after Bill Cosby, and we've since had multiple more Blizzard scandals, each worse than the last. But at least they changed the label on one of the characters in their gambling game. Blizzard: Making a difference!

2 Why The Hell Are Bananas Illegal In Final Fantasy? 

Over the course of its 30-year history, the Final Fantasy series has told us the story of various fantasy worlds, all of which have one aspect in common: no indication that bananas can be used in the creation of some sort of world-ending spell. And yet in Final Fantasy Legend 2 for the Gameboy, there are pirates who specialize in smuggling dangerous bananas. 

Here's the reason: In the early days of the twentieth century in Japan, bananas were really valuable due to scarcity during various wars. Cool, cool. Except, Japanese players, the only ones you'd expect to understand the reference, never saw the line at all. It was added just for the Western version of the game. 

In the original version of the game, the pirates were actually smuggling opium, something that, as it turns out, can be world-ending if not taken care of. We guess that America just wasn't ready for anything as horrifying as an offhand reference to drugs. Either that, or this was some conspiracy to make us all forget that England used to get as many people as they could addicted to opium in that neck of the woods, to make them completely dependent on the British Empire.

1 Mario Is No Longer Forcing Bowser To Be Gay

For the longest time, Super Mario 64 had players suspecting that, upon throwing Bowser out of the play area and to his likely death, Mario uttered the words "so long, gay Bowser." Clearly, Mario's bigotry indoctrinated the kids of the early '90s, kickstarting Italy's later embrace of far-right ideology. 

Okay, let's put that rumor to rest. Mario's famous line is merely the result of mishearing. Blame Nintendo 64's weird sound compression sabotaging the work of Chris Martinet, the one and only Super Mario voice actor. The actual line is a surprisingly very crown-respectful "So long, King Bowser."

They didn't patch the game at the time to fix the audio, because at the time, game patches didn't even exist. So it took 20 years for the line to change. In the 2020 Super Mario 3d All-Stars Collection, Mario now just says “buh-bye.”

Now, we just need to sit back and wait for Chris Pratt's version, in which he instead quips, "Well, that just happened."

Top image: Epic