Consumers are smarter today than they used to be, but that hasn’t stopped video game publishers from releasing what have become known as “bullshots,” doctored images that are meant to show what a video game looks like, but end up being so modified and fancified they’re often nothing of the sort.

The Year's Worst Bullshots, aka, Screenshots That Lied To You

Luke Plunkett

12/06/12 8:30am

325

It was back in 2005 that Penny Arcade first coined the term "bullshot", giving a definition to the practice of doctoring video game screenshots to make them look better than the game actually is.

1990s Bullshot Detector

Stephen Totilo

1/05/11 1:00pm

212

How to recognize a faked screenshot of a video game back in the 90s, as seen in NextGen magazine, via The Fort90 Photo Dump. Some of those impossibilities sure are possible now.

How A Fake Video Game Screenshot Is Made

The Year's Worst Bullshots, aka, Screenshots That Lied To You

1990s Bullshot Detector

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