One of the greatest things about the early years of the hobby was the infancy of the internet and the media networks covering video games.
This in combination this with the giant difficulty that was the earlier release schedule and the extreme difficulty of reliable information from Japan and you had the perfect storm for people to just make things up.
Things like the infamous Mew under the truck myth, Pikablu, and the pokegods are things many are already familiar with, but what is the craziest thing from your own childhood?
Not restricted to earlier gens, but Iâm sure thatâs where the most crazy stuff was said
Iâll start:
I truly believed that if you had a party of only zubat and a rattata you could join team rocket in Mount Moon.
I also was convinced that Haunter evolved into Gengar at level 100.
Both pretty stupid to believe, but not even the craziest things I would probably fight over at that age
I really believed that catching Missingno and leveling it specifically in rockets hideout to level 100 would unlock a gun for you to one shot Pokemon with
There was this webpage back in the day with a whole list of the most in depth and ridiculous ways to find and catch rare âpokemonâ in Red and Blue. I wish so badly I could go back and see it.
Among the list were ways to catch Goku, Luigi (which I remember involved giving a lickitung a rare candy and turning your Gameboy upside-down and shaking it LOL), ârainbow birdâ (because Ho-Oh didnât have a well known name yet), the guy selling master balls behind Billâs house, and level 100 wild pokemon outside of the tree stumps of pallet which you could destroy with the HM âBlast.â
The biggest myth from my childhood was about the TCG and it turned out to be true. I never believed the rumors of a Naked Misty card as a kid. Years later while in highschool I started to collect again and I saw the actual card. My mind was blown.
My neighbor confidently, in full faith, told me that Linoone could evolve into Zangoose. I argued with him that Serebii said otherwise but he swore that it happened to him. I owned Sapphire and he owned Ruby. To prove a point, I took a Linoone through the E4 with an EXP Share until it was level 100 to prove that it didnât evolve.
Also, thereâs a fake tutorial rom hack on YouTube that showed that if you kept checking the white rock at Mossdeep City, youâll eventually be able to go to space and catch yourself a Jirachi.
I actually had a Mistyâs Tears I pulled myself from a Japanese pack as a kid. I remember my mom taking it from me and putting it somewhere. She did the same thing with a volume of the Dragon Ball manga my dad bought me that had a couple pictures of Bulma showering in it. I never really thought much of it and honestly forgot she took it. Probably a year later I heard kids talking about the naked Misty card and I instantly remembered I pulled one and said, âI actully have one of those.â The one dude told me to prove it. I went home and asked my mom where it was and she just handed it right over to me. Not sure what changed her mind in that moment but hey. I went back and showed the kids who were talking about it and was a legend in that friend group from then on lol.
I remember the space rocks in mossdeep lol. Also just all the youtube videos of mewthree with 009 sound system dreamscape. I remember my friend told me at school that if you left your gameboy on for a full year, the SS Anne would come back lol
I checked back at the space center many days in ruby shappire to try and get a ride to space and catch deoxys. The only ride I eventually got was down memory lane..
There were a couple when i was younger: the first was that âAncient Mewâ was the rarest card in the world. A kid came in with one and we all couldnât believe it. I traded 9 base set âshiniesâ for it (as we used to call them) including Blastoise, Venusaur, Chansey and Alakazam, and felt like Warren Buffett.
Turns out his mom worked in a movie theatre and got the card the weekend before the movie opened. We all went to see it at the weekend, and by Monday morning we all had a copy!
Birthday Pikachu was the next ârarest card in the worldâ rumour.
In terms of the games, the main rumour was that catching MissingNo would brick your Gameboy. I caught it, my game started glitching, i got scared and deleted my whole save file!
This story reminds me of something I forgot long ago. I once drew in extreme (and well illustrated imho) detail a naked Rikku from final fantasy X cause i obviously thought she was hot (still is). My mom found it in my desk drawer and I was like what? Can you blame me? I can only imagine how hard my Dad chuckled if she showed it to him. That will always be a mystery.
This was when I was like 13.
Er.. wrong forum. Uhh⊠on topic, Fazool⊠uhh⊠oh yeah. We kids always thought of the darndest things when it came to doing ritual dances and odd finger button-pressing gestures when it came to thinking it would help stop the pokeball from shaking. Especially when it was a rare pokemon. Whether it be putting a metric ton of force on the B button â or maybe this time the A would work, or inputting left and B in tandem. No, tap A several times. I must have tried everything on Mewtwo. All for naught. All meaningless!
Yeah I definitely heard most of the classics like Mew under the truck, Pikablu, even the more obscure ones like levelling Haunter (or might have been another trade-evolution-only Pokemon) to 100 before it would evolve, Ancient Mew being the rarest card, etc. We basically all lived the same lives as kids.
Someone convinced me that Pokemon ended up physically âstuckâ inside the nobbly bit in Gameboy link cables when lost during a trade. (Those glitchy link cable trades when your GB would freeze mid-trade, and when you turned it back on the Pokemon was completely gone from both of your games).
There was a theory going around the school for a while that base set Charizard had a higher chance of being pulled from booster packs with Blastoise art so for the longest time weâd go to the card shop and only buy the Blastoise packs. I still remember the owner of the shop looking at us like we were nuts.
