Verdict: Partially True · 1990s
Every GoldenEye player knew someone who knew someone who had unlocked the old James Bonds for multiplayer. Nobody had — but the Bonds really were in the cartridge.
GoldenEye 007, released on the Nintendo 64 in August 1997, came with a long list of real unlockable cheats, earned by beating levels under time limits. That made it fertile ground for invented ones, and the most persistent was the claim that the earlier film Bonds could be unlocked as multiplayer characters. Like many of the best rumours, it was wrong about the method and right about the substance. During development, actors who had played Bond in previous films were playable, and Rare removed them because it could not get Sean Connery's permission to use his likeness. But the removal was incomplete: the player-select screen featuring the actors' likenesses was left inside the finished game, reachable only with cheat devices. There was no code, no time trial and no secret sequence that unlocked them in normal play. Players who owned a GameShark or similar device could reach the screen, which is part of why the rumour was so hard to kill — someone really had seen the classic Bonds on a real N64, and the story lost the detail about the cheat device as it travelled.
Most playground rumours survive because they cannot be disproved. This one survived because it could, sort of, be proved. The classic Bonds existed in the code, and anyone with a cheat cartridge could see them. The distortion was in the retelling: "my cousin put a GameShark in and found them" became "my cousin unlocked them", and the unlocking method was then reinvented to fill the gap.
It also sat on top of a game that genuinely rewarded persistence with secrets — the cheat menu filled up as players beat levels against target times — so a hidden character screen was entirely in keeping with how GoldenEye already behaved. The rumour was plausible because the game's own design made it so.