Always amazes me how consistent the rumors were for gen 1 and 2 before the internet really took off among the general population. By gen 3 it makes sense, everyone and their mom had a fan site on geocities or angelfire and they mostly circulated the same rumors amongst themselves with slight variations like the deoxys/jirachi space thing. But gen 1 has pretty much the same thing going on with mew under the truck, dragonite evolving to yoshi, Bill's garden full of something special like venustoise or mewthree, the pokegods, and secret 4th stages for the starters, all with requirements roughly consisting of some combination of complete the dex, beat the e4 100 times, and talk to Oak in his lab a ridiculout number of times with X pokemon in front of your party. And yet that seems to be about it, these threads are always full of the same things and every forum from way back has them and little else. It's like all the other more localized rumors that didn't have the internet to spread them from the start never got shared later. Hell, I remember being one of only two kids in my neighborhood with internet and all my friends telling me I was crazy for wondering why they didn't release pokemon green version here because "That's fake, it doesn't exist!" despite showing them the Japanese sites I found. Even the rumors that spread at my school were mostly of the evolve mewtwo into mewthree by reading the notes in the mansion with mewtwo at the front of your party to open the secret lab and use the machine on mewtwo variety. By gen 2 not only was pokemon banned at school but almost everyone I knew had moved on from the games so I didn't hear any rumors outside of the internet but it was mostly just unlocking things by making a party of unown to spell words.
