First: I want to be clear that this edition of Power Action! isn't looking at a game in which a Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti is a confirmed character. That’s too easy. After all, Obvious Bigfoots are found across genres: an unlockable skater in Tony Hawk's Underground 2; an adversary in The Simpsons arcade game; an easter egg hiding behind a tree in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007 (seen above); and a final boss in hunting games like Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2, just to name a few.
What we’re more interested in reflects the phenomenon real-life sightings of the beast and other cryptids: a claim that is in question, yet fervently defended.
There was a time in gaming, before folks could really look under the programming hood for sprites and other hidden items. Folks would just spread rumors, whether in forums or on the playground, about things that no one could really prove … yet.
The last truly fantastic claim, cryptozoologically, was in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Supposedly, you could find a Sasquatch roaming the hills of somewhere like Mount Chiliad. There were multiple rumored spots, and it being the largest open-world game created at the time added to the mystery of what could be lurking within its depths. The rumor started, really, right after the game’s release.
Then, the doctored footage and screenshots, like the above, started to show up. The name "Big Foot" was found in the "Thanks To" section of the credits and added fuel, but it was confirmed to just be the nickname of a Rockstar Games employee. Rockstar co-founder Terry Donovan then shot down the claims in 2005: “There is no Bigfoot, just like in real life,” he said. (That self-assuredness on the real Bigfoot made his denial dubious to fans.) As the game emerged during a new era of amateur video game modding, it became impossible to prove anything as real.
Redditors are still on the case, but thorough examinations of the game’s backend have turned up nothing Bigfooty.
What I love most about these theories is that folks on forums don’t really care if it’s real or not. They see the hours upon hours they spent searching in the mid-aughts as time well spent. It was all part of the mystery of this enormous new world to explore. And like many of us, they have both a sense of nostalgia for the game and the time of their life that allowed for such grand, extracurricular obsessions.
Like the real-life Bigfoot, I, for one, want to believe. Maybe the game’s creators are lying. Maybe the code hasn’t been found because, like BF himself, it’s just hiding somewhere no one has looked.