Ah, rumors. The media love reporting them, the readers love reading them, and the forum trolls love prattling on about them endlessly to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately, by the time most of these rumors finally get confirmed as true or false, most journalists are busy chasing the next rumor, most readers have forgotten about the original report altogether and most forum trolls are still trying to sell the one about Apple buying Nintendo (it aint gonna happen! Move on!).

At its best, rumor reporting gives readers a valuable scoop on some important facts months before they're officially announced. At its worst, rumor reporting misleads readers with false visions, only to eventually dash their hopes upon the rocks like so many bottles of Heineken at a beach party.

Obviously, any sufficiently large sample of rumors will include plenty of examples of both types of reporting. But which type is more common? I decided to find out by looking at the granddaddy of all game rumor reporting columns—Electronic Gaming Monthly's Quartermann.

Started in 1988's short-lived Electronic Game Player magazine, the Quartermann column moved on to the pages of EGM starting with issue 1, where it still runs to this very day. Despite the seemingly eponymous column title, the Quartermann moniker has passed from writer to writer through the magazine's history, a semi-open secret finally confirmed in a 2004 blog post by former EGMer Chris Johnston. The venerable column has gone through some slight name changes through the years, including "Q-Mann" and the current "Rumor Mill by Quartermann," but the string of monthly rumor reporting remains unbroken.

The Process

For the purposes of this study, I decided to look at the rumors put forth by the Quartermann column in the Jan. through Dec. 2003 issues of EGM (#162 - 173). Why did I go so far back? Well, I wanted to make sure that enough time had passed for all the rumors to be definitively confirmable. Some of Quartermann's rumors were surprisingly forward-looking—for example, issue 173's report that the PS3 would play physical PSP games out of the box couldn't be confirmed as definitely false until E3 2006.

Other rumors are so open-ended that their status actually changes as time passes. For a short time it may have seemed like Microsoft had actually canceled platformer Tork, as was alleged in issue 167, but the game did eventually limp out in 2005 courtesy of Ubisoft—Microsoft dropped the rights to the game. Similarly, a PSP semi-sequel to Final Fantasy VII (Crisis Core) was finally announced at E3 2006, as predicted way back in issue 169.

Even with the waiting, some rumors remain unconfirmable because they have no theoretical end date. It seems highly likely that a Kingdom Hearts TV show and movie will come out some day, but almost three years after issue 164 hit the stands with the prediction, there are no concrete signs. Similarly, a sequel to 2003's Rygar, as predicted in issue 167, could still eventually come, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Figuring out what constituted a distinct rumor was sometimes a problem. The Q-mann's flowing writing style sometimes means conflicting predictions are often layered upon one another, sometimes within even a single sentence. A bit in issue 164 predicted that new NES and Game and Watch game cards would be coming out for the Game Boy Advance e-Reader. The NES cards came; the Game and Watch cards were nowhere to be found. Rather than parse every single sentence into individual, sometimes pointless factoids, I lumped everything that sat under one headline together as one distinct rumor.

There was also the problem of rumors that contained imprecise or subjective wording. In issue 167, Q-mann predicted a "big announcement" from Team Ninja at E3 2003. When the team announced Dead or Alive Online the definition of the word "big" became important. Similarly, when issue 169 predicted the U.S. release of Pokemon Box, one had to consider whether or not a limited release in New York City's Pokemon Center really counted as a confirmation.

To combat this problem, I used a rating scale from 'one' to 'five' for each rumor, 'one' being completely false, 'five' being completely true—this also provided a useful weighting method for when only part of a rumor turned out to be true. Of course, this introduces a bit of subjectivity into what should be a totally objective statistical analysis, but I've included my ratings and justifications in an Excel document so picky readers can make their own judgments

Some Quartermann column items weren't really rumors, but rather, previews or confirmed news bits that got shoehorned into the column. Additionally, other rumors were unconfirmable because they dealt exclusively with insider politics. Both of these were disregarded in the study (N/A in the ratings below). Further rumors may have been technically true, but were ranked as a 'one' because nothing concrete ever came of them. Square may have indeed been planning a non-Final Fantasy MMO at some point, as alleged in issue 163, but since the game still hasn't come out, this information is pretty useless to a reader.