5 Wild Backstories Of Gaming's Most Iconic Weapons

5

The gunblades from Final Fantasy VIII and XIII were an actual thing

The Weapon:

The Origin Story:

A lot of gaming fans clown on Final Fantasy VIII for featuring a main character who wields a Gunblade, a sword that also has a gun, meaning that it's basically a reverse-bayonet. It sounds complicated, and people mock it for being impractical, which it is:

But these characters live in a world where nothing is more important than looking edgy, so we totally get it. Really crazy would be, say, real-life people actually using that in real battles that they expected to win – something that totally happened.

That's a weapon similar to the one Alexander Davidson, a close friend of Admiral Nelson brought to fight Napoleon. Now, history doesn't tell us whether he wasn't just an absolute mad man or if he just didn't take Napoleon serious and randomly picked that from a trove of joke weapons, but we know they're the only people who ever beat the French emperor at sea. Now that's a nice final fantasy.
 

4

The Moonlight greatsword is From Software's family heirloom

The Weapon:

The Origin Story:

The Moonlight Greatsword exists in all of the Dark Souls games (sans Sekiro), and that's interesting because it never quite fits the world of any of these lore-obsessed games. Elden Ring has gone pretty wild in terms of weapon design, sure:

But before that game, looking at an inventory full of regular-ass medieval weaponry and finding the equivalent of a claymore made by a Jedi always felt a bit off. That, however, is actually a really nice tribute to the history of the company. Even though Dark Souls put From Soft on the map, it's far from the first game made by the company. Even though Hidetaka Miyazaki completely changed the company after Demon's Souls, he remained respectful of its history and kept the Moonlight Greatsword in. The weapon exists in all From Software games, from King's Field, where it's as important as the master Sword is in the Zelda games,

to Armored Core, 

3

The gravity gun was born out of a bad Jurassic Park game

The Weapon:

The Origin Story:

Atop the podium of Valve's most interesting weapons is the portal gun the crowbar the zero point energy field manipulator aka the gravity gun. It's the core of what makes Half-Life 2 shine on both the action front and on the puzzle side of things. It revolutionized the industry and it even had DOOM, the once king of shooters copy it for the DOOM 3 expansion. Few would imagine the concept of manipulating physics that's ever-present in Half-Life 2 would've come from Jurassic Park Trespasser, one of the most poorly received games of its time. The Trespasser devs correctly believed that there was a lot of fun to have with physics in games, but the execution was far from perfect.

2

The BFG 9000 from DOOM is two toy guns glued together

The Weapon:

The Origin Story:
 

The BFG 9000, short for Big F*cking Gun or Bio Force Gun gun if we're making the mistake of taking the DOOM movie seriously, is probably the first weapon of mass destruction in the history of video games. It works in a simple manner. We press a button, then we see a flash of green light and all enemies exploding into goo. Turns out that wasn't the original vision, but rather the least resource-consuming one. Originally, the BFG was basically a super plasma machine gun, but it shot so much stuff that it became a hassle for the computers of its time. Also, the devs thought its effects looked too Christmas-y.

Then there's the matter of the guns look. We'd think it came out of the minds of the ultra edgy lords of doom at id, but it actually came straight out of Toys'R'Us

Please don't rush to the comments just yet, we know that doesn't ring any bells as is, but if we mirror that image, we can end up creating something too bizarre to look like a gun that a normal person would use.

And that's exactly the kind of gun that Mr. Doom Guy would use.

1

The hated Spiny Shell from Super Mario Kart Is what makes the game work

The Weapon:

The Origin Story:

The legendary spiny shell from the Mario Kart series, usually known amongst gamers as the blue shell or “the friendship ender”, holds the top spot of the most hated (video game) weapon of all time because of how seemingly unfair it is, but it doesn't deserve all that hate. It first showed up in Mario Kart 64, and it was meant not to just piss everyone off, but to actually keep the game working properly. Yeah, the Nintendo 64 had some serious memory limitations, so the Spiny Shell prevented everyone from getting too far apart and thus from forcing the N64 to render more map than it could.

While most hate it because it will surely hurt the racer who's in the top position, the devs assure us it's the very thing keeping the series competitive until the end even on modern systems. They claim they've tried to introduce variations or to straight-up remove it from the beginning, but every single attempt at change resulted in a game where something was missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_shell

Top Image: Valve