The 10 Cruelest Video Game Pranks of All Time

All of the best video game industry pranks have been played by Electronic Gaming Monthly (RIP).

This is by far the meanest. Kind of.

Anybody who plays, owns or has even heard of Dead or Alive, as a franchise, wants to see these similar-looking cartoon character (with insanely awesome bodies) naked. This is a fact. Nobody WOULDN'T click on a link that said "naked Dead or Alive girls", if even just for curiosity's sake.

So when EGM announced that there was a nude code for the latest this epic c*cktease of a game franchise which features the characters dancing, lounging (with maximum jiggle factor) or even bending over and having "butt battles" together, everyone took to Google faster than Charlie Sheen to rock bottom.

If you have ANY DOUBT that this game exists SOLELY for the reason that porn does, please view the NSFW video of the red head lounging on a chair here. Dear lord. Personally, I'm a Hitomi fan, if only just because of how angry she always looks.

*Shakes head*

Anyway, the cheat required players to complete the entire game in juuuuuuust under the amount than is physically possible.

EGM were torturous, evil, brilliant monsters.

The "Chinese Democracy" of video games. Arguably one of the most highly anticipated (and at this point it's less of a hype-before-the-prequels-came-out anticipation and more of a long-line-at-a-ride-you-don't-even-like-at-Disneyland-in-blazing-hot-weather waiting game) games of all time, Duke Nukem forever is the follow-up to a game that took people's favorite movie one-liners, a badass that makes the main guy from Doom look like a wimp and killer monsters and made them into one of the first great first person shooters.

Ironically, the announcement of the sequel came in April of 1997, which really makes the release of this game (or the non-release) the most cruel joke in video game history.

After many stops and starts in the game's development cycle, between 1997 and 2008, news about the games "impending release" came out on a near-yearly basis. Each time disappointing gamers with the news that it, sadly, was not coming out.

Duke Nukem Forever is so appropriately named because that's how long it's taken it to come out. It's the dead-beat father of video games. It gave us some great times and keeps saying it's going to come around, but never fails to disappoint.

It was supposed to come out sometime in 2009, but didn't because one of the companies in development went through massive downsizing, then the case went to court. After that it was announced that after 13 years, it would be officially released in May of 2011... only to be delayed until mid June of 2011.

Needless to say, it's a frustrating fight, which is what makes this prank played by FilePlanet (a video game downloading site) that much more cruel.

The prank? A link to the demo with a promotional screenshot of the game. It's free! It even has a "Download" button!... but it doesn't work. The whole thing was probably one of the most disappointing experiences in a lot of internet browsers' lives.

Remember when the internet started getting popular and ubiquitous? When you would spend hours looking through ebaumsworld for videos you only used to be able to see on Max X late at night on a Sunday and one of the primary uses of the internet was to download music, look at .gif websites and playing pranks on little kids? We're a lot more sophisticated now, because now we have illiterate cats, free extremely-specific porn and the ability to see where our ex girlfriends are via GPS.

One of the early viral staples of the internet was the series of prank-games where you would be sent to a site that was either a "find the __" or a magic eye (just because we were transitioning out of the 90s at that point, still) or sometimes... it was a game that required a certain level of calm.

This was the most cruel kind of scream shock, by far. The player of the game (in this case a maze game) is forced into a sense of calm concentration, just to be shamefully startled like when a child runs across the foreground of the camera in a crappy horror movie remake.

This particular game is a puzzle that "tests your steady hand." You lose whenever you touch the borders and the point is to get to the end. And the payoff at the end is really the worst part. Even if you know it's coming, it scares you with a Linda Blair exorcist face.

Have fun sleeping.

Click here to play the game

BONUS: Here's a video of a father doing this to his kid with this game. Best. Parenting. Ever.