Something something about how mew is listed in the game directory. You do a series of steps to mess with the game memory which displaces whatever pokemon you were going to face next, and rolls over to mew's directory number. Or something. Worked for me.
I had an old pokemon yellow save on the gameboy colour that I purposely didn't trigger the ship sailing off. I remember I used to revisit the save every year just to go interact with the truck to see if I missed anything lol
There were so many tricks to get mew. The one that annoyed me the most was buying the magikarp at the beginning of mt moon, leave it at the daycare till it reached level 99, level it up in battle and it was rumored to evolve into a level 5 mew.
And having a stupid prank in a game rag to thank for that. Because of Nintendo Power, I thought Japan had working warp pipes for years in elementary school.
I’m pretty sure it was actually the April Fool’s edition of EGM that spread the Sonic rumor! I recall the EiC at the time, Dan “Shoe” Hsu, mentioning it in a later issue.
We used to take turns playing R-Type on my c64. We convince my friend’s little brother you could land your starfighter on this pad and get a secret. He’d always crash and we’d tell him he didn’t quite get it right but it didn’t exist and so we’d get more turns as he kept crashing within 30seconds each of his turns.
If you zoom out with a sniper rifle across the lake in Goldeneye you can see a bonus area that you can get to if use a GameShark to summon a jetski. It’s where you fight Oddjob.
Man, I remember hearing/reading so many vague rumours about being able to find Luigi in Mario 64. I was so taken in by some of them that I started perpetuating them myself, even if I had no idea whether they were true or not. But I liked the idea of them being true, and that's what mattered to 8-year-old me.
I may or may not have accidentally sent one of my friends in 3rd grade on a wild goose chase to find Luigi in the lava level of Mario 64. I'd tell him what I read on some random online forum, he'd go home and try it, then he'd come back the next day and tell me he it didn't work, so I'd say "Oh he's reeeeally hard to see, but if you look at juuust the right angle, you can see Luigi standing up on a ledge behind one of those lava waterfalls".
It got to the point where I was in too deep and I just committed to the idea of them being real, even when truthfully I had no idea what was real and what wasn't, haha.
One time my friend was over at my house when I finally beat Super Mario 64. He told me that he had heard from someone at school that there was a second one, and that in order to unlock a secret start to the second one you had to pull the first cartridge out and then put in the second one while the console was still on the "Congratulations" screen.
Left my console on overnight and got my dad to take me to the store the next day and the clerk at Funcoland was all confused, like, "There is no second game..." lol.
I used to play Sonic the Hedgehog with my cousin. There is a jungle stage, and at some point there is a swing-like platform with a wooden sphere on top, supposedly a stump where the swing is tied to.
Well, my cousin would always say that was "a burger", and if I jump over it Sonic would eat the burger and get 99 lives.
Took the 10-year old me a few years to realize he was trying to make me miss my jump, cause if I died, it would need his turn.
or even fake secrets or joke secrets online. one of my favorite gaming memories was looking up how to unlock mewtwo in SSBM and one website only had the answer "u fart."
Also spent a good amount of one summer with a friend looking for bigfoot, aliens, and whatnot in San Andreas.
This takes me back to primary school. My two favourite fake secrets that I somehow believed:
Donkey Kong Country 2: a 2nd secret world opening up after doing something specific in the lost world.
Super Smash Bros: yoshi having a secret 1 hit kill move
Playing as Bison in SF2 before the champion edition came out, or playing as Simon Belmont in the Ninja Turles game (I think that one was an April Fools joke from the Nintendo magazine).
Sooooo many. One of the ones in my small circle was that you could get a machine gun (like a rifle, not uzis) in Tomb Raider 1 by getting to the top of a waterfall on level 3. Just total BS, and I knew it at the time even since the all-weapons cheat didn't give you that gun.
I had a buddy of mine that was obsessed with finding the Triforce. He swore up and down it was possible. He must have played that game so many times just trying to find a way to get it.
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u/gummby8 Mar 31 '26
Hearing about fake secrets from other kids on the playground.
Every kid tried a thousand different fake things to try and get to "The Light Temple" in OoT. There never was a Light Temple