You know what I miss about the pre-internet gaming era? The mystery. The whispered secrets. The absolutely bonkers rumors that would spread through the playground like wildfire, each kid adding their own little embellishment until what started as “I found a cool secret” morphed into “my uncle works at Nintendo and says if you beat the game blindfolded while standing on your head, Shigeru Miyamoto personally calls your house.”
I believed so many of these ridiculous gaming myths. We all did. How could we not? There was no way to instantly fact-check, no YouTube tutorials, no Reddit threads debunking the latest playground talk. Just kid-to-kid verbal transmission, like some bizarre game of telephone where the prize was supposed insider knowledge about video games.
The most infamous one has to be Mew under the truck in Pokémon Red and Blue. Man, I spent HOURS trying to get that elusive 151st Pokémon. The story went that there was this truck near the S.S. Anne that you could only reach if you didn’t leave the ship, instead getting a friend to teach your Pokémon Cut, then coming back later with Strength. And under that truck? The mythical Mew, just waiting to be caught.
I still remember convincing my friend Tom to help me execute this elaborate plan. We spent an entire Saturday passing the Game Boy back and forth, carefully following every step we’d heard. When we finally reached the truck, I was practically vibrating with excitement. “This is it!” I told Tom, who looked equally invested despite initially claiming the whole thing sounded “pretty fake, dude.” We used Strength on that truck from every possible angle. Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.
“Maybe we did it wrong?” Tom suggested, not ready to admit defeat.
We tried again the next day. And the day after that. Eventually, we had to face facts—there was no Mew under that truck. Just crushing disappointment and a weird sense of betrayal toward Jason, the fifth-grader who’d sworn on his life that his cousin had done it successfully.
The Tomb Raider nude code was another playground staple. Some kid would always claim they knew the exact button combination to remove Lara Croft’s clothes. Of course, this mythical code was always incredibly complex—something like “press Start three times, then Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Circle, Square, Triangle while doing a handstand and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.” And somehow, despite countless attempts, no one at my school ever managed to pull it off. Weird, right?
I actually got grounded over that one. My mom walked in right as I was telling my brother, “I just need to try the nude code one more time,” and, well… trying to explain that I was just testing a cheat code didn’t exactly smooth things over. “It’s for research purposes, Mom!” is not a defense that works when you’re twelve.
Mortal Kombat was practically a rumor-generating machine. Beyond the actual secret characters, kids would swear up and down about fighters that simply didn’t exist. I distinctly remember a heated argument with this kid Marcus about a supposed character called “Torch” who was “basically Scorpion but with fire everywhere and he can turn invisible.” When I demanded proof, Marcus claimed his older brother had seen it at an arcade in another town. Convenient.
The thing is, Mortal Kombat actually DID have legitimate secrets, which only made the fake ones seem more plausible. When Reptile turned out to be real, suddenly every ridiculous claim had a shot at being true. “You have to get 100 flawless victories in a row while a cat walks across your keyboard” didn’t sound that far-fetched when you’d already discovered you could fight a secret green ninja by getting a double flawless victory with specific conditions on the Pit stage.
Luigi in Mario 64 might be the rumor that broke my heart the most. I wanted it to be true so badly. The story went that you could unlock Luigi as a playable character if you collected all 120 stars and then did some complicated procedure involving the endless staircase. Some versions claimed you needed to complete specific jumps around the castle, others said you had to type “L is real 2401” somewhere.
I got all 120 stars legitimately—no small feat when sharing the game with a brother who kept overwriting my save files “by accident.” I tried everything. I spent entire weekends experimenting with different combinations of actions. Nothing. When I finally got access to the internet years later, confirming once and for all that Luigi wasn’t in the game felt like learning Santa wasn’t real all over again.
The Triforce in Ocarina of Time was another wild goose chase. According to playground lore, you could actually collect the Triforce as an item, but the steps required were absolutely insane. Some kids claimed you had to beat the running man in a race (impossible). Others said you needed to push blocks in the Temple of Time in a certain order. I heard versions involving the Scarecrow’s Song, fishing in specific spots, and even one that claimed you had to stand in a precise location during a specific phase of the moon.
I’ll admit, I bought into this one hard. I mean, the Triforce was RIGHT THERE in the game’s menu screen! Why show it if you couldn’t get it? I spent countless hours testing every crackpot theory, growing increasingly frustrated. GamePro magazine didn’t help matters, occasionally publishing reader tips that hinted at Triforce secrets without outright debunking the myth. Those magazines were both wonderful and terrible—they’d verify some secrets while mysteriously staying silent on others, which we took as confirmation that those other secrets must be out there.
But you know what? For every ten bogus rumors, there’d be one legitimate secret that actually worked, and those moments were pure magic. Finding out that you really COULD catch Missingno in Pokémon by surfing up and down the east coast of Cinnabar Island after talking to the old man in Viridian City? Mind-blowing. Even better was bringing that knowledge back to the playground, seeing the skepticism on other kids’ faces, then watching their jaws drop when they tried it themselves.
I remember when my friend Chris told me about the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3. I laughed in his face. “Yeah right, and I bet you can also make Mario fly to the moon.” He came over after school that day and showed me. I sat there, completely dumbfounded, as he went behind the white block in World 1-3, crouched for several seconds, and dropped behind the scenery. Magic.
That’s what made this era special—the uncertainty. You never knew if what you were hearing was complete nonsense or a legitimate secret. Every game was a potential treasure trove of undiscovered content, and without easy verification, the possibilities felt endless. Today, games get data-mined before they even officially release. Every secret, every hidden character, every easter egg is documented in excruciating detail within hours of a game going live. It’s more efficient, sure, but a lot less magical.
I sometimes wonder about the kids who started these rumors. Were they just messing with us? Did they genuinely believe what they were saying? Or was it some combination—maybe they found something unusual in a game and then their imagination ran wild about what it might mean?
The “my uncle works at Nintendo” kid deserves special mention. Every school had one—that kid who claimed a direct line to gaming industry insiders that exclusively ran through their extended family. Ours was a boy named Derek, who insisted his uncle was “like, super high up at Nintendo” and would casually drop “information” about upcoming games that, in retrospect, was hilariously wrong. “Mario is going to use a gun in the next game,” he once announced with complete confidence. When Mario 64 came out featuring zero firearms, Derek was suspiciously absent from the playground for a week.
I called him out once, demanding proof of this famous uncle. Derek claimed he “wasn’t allowed to show pictures because of corporate espionage.” At twelve, I had no idea what corporate espionage was, but it sounded serious enough that I backed off. Looking back, I almost admire the creativity. Almost.
The internet eventually killed this ecosystem of rumors, of course. Around 1998, I got a dial-up connection at home, and suddenly we had access to sites that could authoritatively confirm or debunk these myths. The first time I read a comprehensive explanation of why Mew wasn’t under the truck, complete with game code analysis, was both satisfying and a little sad. Mystery gave way to certainty.
I’ve noticed my nephew doesn’t experience games the same way I did. When he gets stuck or curious about a secret, his first instinct is to grab his phone and look it up. Efficient? Absolutely. But he’ll never know the peculiar frustration and joy of spending weeks testing a far-fetched rumor passed down through playground whispers, or the camaraderie of huddling around a GamePro magazine with friends, debating which tips might actually work.
There was something special about that analog approach to gaming secrets—something that fostered imagination and community in a way that instant verification doesn’t. I don’t necessarily want to go back to the days of potentially wasting hours on nonexistent cheat codes, but I do sometimes miss when gaming felt like it contained genuine mysteries, whispered from player to player like modern folklore.
In the end, maybe the real treasure wasn’t Mew under the truck, but the friends we confused along the way.
