Few know the dark history of the gaming industry — linked to terrorism, cursing gamers with bad hardware and athletes with bad knees, only to be buried deep in the New Mexico desert. These are button-mashing tales to chill the HP in your veins. Happy Halloween!

Saddam Hussein’s PS2-powered missiles

The holiday season in 2000 brought severe shortages of newly released Playstation 2. Some would say criminally severe.

According to a World Net Daily story later picked up by IGN, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein purchased 4,000 PS2 consoles to use their powerful graphics processors to guide missiles. Hussein chose the console in order to get around UN sanctions prohibiting the sale of computers to Iraq.

‘Applications for this system are potentially frightening,’ said an intelligence source. ‘One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV — a pilotless aircraft.’

Fearful western critics were quick to decry this warning as false. PS2s cannot be linked and used together without very complex programming, and UK intelligence dismissed World Net Daily’s claims.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there really are 4,000 Playstation 2s stockpiled in the Iraqi wastes alongside all those missing weapons of mass destruction. Slowly their hive consciousness gains self-awareness and waits for the cold day of robot judgment.

Cursed gamer suffers 11 red rings of death

One gamer’s problems with the problem-plagued Xbox 360 clearly go above and beyond the norm, into the realm of the supernatural. Justin Lowe was on his twelth console when 1Up wrote a story about him last June in the heat of Microsoft’s technical dilemma.

“The list of problems is almost comically large,” reports 1Up’s Philip Kollar. “Three red lights of death, two with disc read errors, two dead on arrival, several with random audio and video-related issues and one that actually exploded.”

As the extent of Justin’s technical problems became clear, along with those of many Xbox 360 early adopters, Microsoft consumer relations grew less and less helpful.

“To the various internet commentators and those manning Microsoft’s customer service phone lines, it seems an unbelievable joke,” writes Kollar. “But, to Justin, each one of those numbers represents another little headache and two or three weeks without his console.”

Yet like Job, Justin remains a loyal user of Microsoft’s system. “I’m no fanboy,” he told 1Up. “It’s just the 360 is where the games are at right now.”

E.T. the Sub-Terrestrial

There are plenty of bad games out there this holiday season, but one company can boast to have produced actual garbage.

In the early 1980s, Atari’s dominance of the industry yielded lethargic developers who churned out awful games like the infamous adaptation E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The industry soon caught up with them as gamers and retailers returned millions of bad games, which rotted in Atari’s El Paso warehouse.

With no market and no alternative, Atari took their 10 million worthless cartridges and buried them in a New Mexico landfill. No grass grew over the unhappy pit, and no birds flew over it. At night some say they hear the howl’s of some otherworldly creature trying to get home from under three feet of poured concrete.

The Madden Curse

The Madden series’ monopoly of NFL rosters hurts competitive football games, but is it bad for the players as well? The annually updated game gets a star player to donate his face for the cover every year, and every featured player seems to suffer from some record-shattering injury or failure.

The first player to take the spotlight, 49ers’ Garrison Hearst on Madden 99, broke his ankle in the playoffs that year. Barry Sanders appeared in the background of Madden 2000 and retired that season.

Eddie George’s fumble lost his team a playoff game (Madden 2001), and Daunte Pepper suffered from back injuries (Madden 2002). Michael Vick broke a leg in a pre-season game after appearing on Madden 2004 and was recently indicted for running an illegal dog-fighting ring.

Ray Lewis, Donovan McNabb, and Shaun Alexander appeared after Vick and all suffered from injuries during those seasons. Madden 2008 star Vince Young ruined his perfect attendance record by missing a game during the 2007 season.

A feature at Kotaku, dismisses the superstition, pointing out that most of the Madden cover stars had great seasons right after they were featured. Only half suffered serious injuries during those seasons, and that the number of injuries does not exceed league norms. Madden publisher Electronic Arts agrees.

“Every year, we get 100 guys calling us, begging to appear on the cover. It’s a big deal” said EA Sports’ Marketing Director Chris Erb in an interview with Kotaku. “Shaun Alexander told us, after he got hurt, that he’d rather be on the cover and injured than not be on the cover and stay healthy all year.”

Whether because of high demand or unwilling players, Electronic Arts might auctioning off the Madden 2009 cover spot, Bloomberg reported yesterday. All proceeds from the sale would go to NFL charity partner United Way, which just might provide enough good karma to offset the bad juju.