#they didn't try even a little bit. surprised Glaceon didn't get named Snoweon

[sage-nebula]

By now, many people know that, back in the '90s, there were all kinds of rumors about how to get Mew in the first gen games that didn't require using Gameshark / Action Replay, or the glitch. The most famous one was "Mew is under the truck," with a variety of theories about how to interact with the truck by the S.S. Anne to get Mew to appear.

But what some people might not know is that we had tons of other bonkers rumors about the games back then, too, such as special locations you could unlock to catch the three starters. (In particular I remember that "Charmander field" was allegedly the out of bounds tall grass that's visible on the right side of Route 1.) But the one that I just remembered is --

OK.

So, as many know, the original series of the anime featured Gen 2 pokémon before the Gen 2 games were released. Most notable of these were Ho-Oh in the very first episode, and later on, Misty's Togepi. Misty's Togepi was found as an egg in an anime-only location known as the Grandfather Canyon, along with a host of fossil pokémon. The thing is, the fossil pokémon were all Gen 1 pokémon that we were familiar with; Togepi was brand new, and unlike Ho-Oh there was no room to speculate that it was one of the pokémon we'd already seen, just animated oddly.

(There was actually a kid in my grade who had a father who did business trips to Japan, and because we didn't have worldwide releases back then, by the time this conversation happened Gen 2 stuff was already out / being marketed in Japan. By "this conversation" I mean one where the kid told us that Ho-Oh's name was Ho-Oh, and none of us believed him, because even at the tender age of 8 or 9 "my dad went to Japan and he said so" sounded bogus. And then he ended up being proven correct like a year later. I hope he at least got to feel smug about it.)

But of course, this brought with it a whole new round of rumors, because Togepi was in the anime, but so far none of us had encountered it in the games. And the Gen 1 games were all we had at the time; Gen 2 hadn't even been announced in North America yet when that episode aired. (Again, apologies to the Ho-Oh truther.) So that led everyone on the playground to wonder: how do we get Togepi?

Well, the answer was partially obvious. Togepi's egg was found in the Grandfather Canyon. So obviously, if we go to the Grandfather Canyon in our games, we can get Togepi there. But then that spawned a new question, which was: how do we get to the Grandfather Canyon?

And thus a whole host of new rumors were born, legends of how you could go to this place and use this move with this pokémon in order to access the Grandfather Canyon and catch Togepi. All of which was, of course, completely bogus. But this was the '90s, our access to information was limited, and we didn't yet understand that the anime was completely separate from the games (with Yellow not helping things in that regard -- many rumors stated Grandfather Canyon and therefore Togepi could only be accessed in Yellow Version since it was adapted from the anime). So we speculated and theorized and spread baseless rumors on how to get to Grandfather Canyon and Togepi.

(Later on, building up to the release of the first movie and Pikachu's Vacation, it also became rumored that you could catch Pikablu in Grandfather Canyon -- or, sometimes, the Unknown Dungeon if you did special things. Once we all saw Pikachu's Vacation we learned Marill's actual name, but for awhile we did dub it "Pikablu" because of its pika-like features and blue color. I'd snark about our creativity, but Nintendo of America literally decided "Leafeon" was a good name when my brother and I came up with that when we were 7 and 8 respectively and were trying to figure out how to get a grass-type eeveelution with the Leaf Stone available in Celadon City's department store, so you know what, I'm giving us all a pass on that one.)

Anyway, the point I'm making here is: when we saw an anime-only special location like Grandfather Canyon back in the '90s, we all immediately started trying to figure out how to access it in our games. And I'm hoping that the kids today do the same thing with Rakua in ScarVio. I hope that the elementary aged students insist that you can get to Rakua in ScarVio by doing this or that, or going to this or that location with a special pokémon. It feels like it's unlikely given the internet, but what is the internet for if not the spreading of misinformation and rumors? I just hope that the youth get to have a similar experience. Let them have those memories.