1. There Are Millions of Atari Cartridges Buried in the New Mexico Desert

Sometimes what sounds like a myth is actually the truth -- sort of. This is the case with the longstanding rumor that there are millions of Atari game cartridges buried in the New Mexico desert.

In September 1983, 14 trucks containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million unwanted -- hated, even -- Atari game cartridges showed up at the Alamogordo landfill [Snopes]. They dumped their cargo there and went along their way, leaving behind evidence of the birth of one of the earliest video game rumors.

The reason for the mass dumping is a matter of public record; Atari's fourth-quarter earnings report for 1982, to be precise. The company had a year that was far worse than expected, largely because it had staked so much on two pivotal releases: its home console version of Pac-Man and a game based on the blockbuster film, "E.T." Both titles hit so far below company and public expectations that around 5 million copies of each were returned to the company. Stuck with millions of the games, Atari opted to bury them.

Unfortunately, nostalgic video game hunters who visit the landfill in search of a souvenir will be sorely disappointed. The company had the landfill owners crush the cartridges with a steamroller and the whole pile was paved over with concrete.

2. Pong Was the First Video Game

History was made in Sunnyvale, Calif.'s Andy Capp's Tavern on Nov. 29, 1972 [source: Barton and Loguidice]. Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell -- two computer programmers who had just founded Atari -- had set up and unveiled a new arcade game by the name of Pong that night. Pong's debut represented the birth of the video game industry, which would reach global revenue of $38 billion just 34 years later [source: ABI Research].

The world's first video game was born. Except it wasn't. Pong was born that day, sure, but it already had a few older siblings. The common conception that Pong was the world's first video game is actually a myth.

Actually, another arcade game had been released a full year prior to Pong's debut at Andy Capp's Tavern. Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that the relatively little-known "Computer Space" holds the title of world's first arcade video game [source: Barton and Loguidice]. It was based on a computer game called "Spacewar!" that was a bit too difficult for gamers since, at that time, every gamer was a novice. Pong was slightly more everyone's speed; its popularity blew the doors off of Computer Space and led to the myth that it was the first video game.

3. You Can Use Chips from a PlayStation 2 to Form a Guided Missile System

In late 2000, reports emerged along both the grapevine and mainstream media that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was stockpiling PlayStation 2 systems, which had debuted that autumn. More than 4,000 consoles had made their way to Iraq in just a couple of months, having circumvented the arms embargo on Iraq imposed by the United Nations more than a decade earlier.

The game consoles were, after all, kids' toys at their essence, so what was the harm? Further down in the reports of the PS2 stockpile (and often in the headlines) was a more alarming idea -- that Hussein valued the consoles for their chips. Fears grew that the leader had found a loophole in the embargo and was planning to string together 10 to 20 of the consoles to create a supercomputer powerful enough to guide missile systems [source: ZDNet].

Reality would undermine this concern almost as quickly as it emerged. Technically, one could connect a series of PlayStation 2 consoles and use their 128-bit processors in conjunction, but it would require unique software that Iraq would have needed years to develop after the PS2 debuted. In other words, the rumor was pure myth.

4. Girls Don't Play Video Games

When the home video game console first became widely available in the early 1980s, games were generally asexual -- or at least unisex. Titles like Frogger, Dig-Dug and Q-Bert lacked any sort of gender bias and gaming wasn't relegated to boys or girls. As gaming became more sophisticated, however, titles began to skew more toward young males than females.

Public perception of video games as an almost-strictly boys' pastime still remains; the relative lack of popularity of even the most obvious effeminate titles supports this notion. But does the fact that "Metal Gear Solid" vastly outsells Barbie titles on PlayStation mean that girls just don't play video games? Absolutely not.

In fact, from January to August 2008, females ages 18 to 45 came in second only to males of the same age group as the biggest spenders in video game industry (37 percent vs. 38 percent).

5. Video Games Lead to Violence

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the two teenagers who carried out the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., were fervent "Doom" players. German 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer killed 15 people a decade later with moves he stole from the game "Counter Strike." When youths engage in violent behavior, the brutal video games they played before they committed their crimes are generally cited as reasons for their tendencies. Logic simply follows: Violent video games make kids violent.

This idea remains conventional wisdom, although some studies of kids and aggressive video games have turned up evidence to the contrary. One 2005 study of people ages 14 to 68 who were asked to play 56 hours of the massively multi-player role playing game (MMRPG) "Asheron's Call 2" in one month found no noticeable change in aggressive behavior among players after the game. Nor did the researchers turn up an increase in aggression among gamers when compared to the control group who didn't play [source:PhysOrg].

Other studies have come to different conclusions, though some psychologists believe that many studies connecting real-world violence to video games are biased [source: Kierkegaard]. As it turns out, nothing does more to undermine the notion that video games increase violence in real life than crime statistics. While video games continue to sell -- sales rose from $5.5 billion to $9.5 billion from 1999 to 2007 -- violent crime among youth actually declined. In 1999, 1,763 people under age 18 were arrested for homicides in the U.S.; in 2007, that age group accounted for 1,063 murders there [source: Safe Youth, FBI].