Hacker News Reader

I think about this every once in a while. I've grown up playing those games and others like them. I remember how cool the world seemed in World of Warcraft when it first came out, but once I realized players had mapped out the entire game and knew where everything was it really took away from the mystery of it all. This is part of why procedurally generated content interests me. No one else has played through the exact same Minecraft seeds that I have (or at least I don't think so, I'm not 100% sure how it works).

You've got it basically right. It's unlikely to get the same Minecraft seed twice but it's still possible. If you want the same natural map as another person, you are free to copy their seed, provided that they give it out.

The internet has also made some of these myths into realities: https://hackaday.com/2017/03/17/theres-a-mew-underneath-the-...

There's plenty of mysteries in games today. Check out Boundary Break by shesez and perhaps especially videos by oddheader for a taste.

It is true, perhaps, that there is more organization or at least communication between people solving a particular mystery today.

> That couldn’t happen with the internet today.

It happens with more frequency and stronger beliefs today on the internet than it ever did before. Rumors spread faster and take hold for longer. The internet is huge fuel source for spreading rumors, not a dampener.

Easily verifiable facts are no match for the internet's rumor-spreading capabilities.

This but with the Mario games. I couldn’t believe it there were shortcuts in the first game. Someone told me and I didn’t believe them. Same with contra and how you could have more than 3 lives. The shortcuts spread through word of mouth and some you wouldn’t find out after years of gameplay.

There were rumors like that for the Final Fantasy games too, like how to get Leo in FF6 by doing something ridiculously complex (or just ridiculous) for hours on end. And then FWAKs, which satirized the whole phenomenon.

I was on the internet back then as a youngster. The Internet helped grow, inflame, and disseminate the rumors more than anything else. So many fake ways of getting a Mew, Togepi, or Pikablu...

If you think about it, how did you and your friends learn about the truck? I'd be willing to bet that at least indirectly somebody found it on the internet (or a friend told them, etc. etc.). It wasn't something you could see in the course of a normal playthrough, you had to use a glitch to see it at all.

The greater loss is that the genuine mysteries which remain are assumed to be explained away by someone, somewhere. The assumption that it is already solved leads most people away from exploring further.

I found out about the original Green Pokemon game in Japan on the Internet around 96/97 so there was chatter about them.

> Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because back then no one knew for sure if it was possible or not.

I found the myth that holding "B" would increase the catch rate the be worse since it would take a lot more work to figure out if it made any difference or not. Sadly, no lie is immune from being spread, internet or no internet. Very easily disproved lies like "It wasn't raining" or "This vaccine will transform you into an animal" are spread online and sadly believed by far too many people who have no problems ignoring reality whenever it's convenient for them.

Hell, there are plenty of sites online right now which will tell you that Spirit Orbs are real.

We have less mystery in the world, but we often have to wade through piles of lies to find the truth and a lot of people don't have the tools to tell what they can trust. It fills people with even more confidence about the lies they hold as truth. At least in the past most people were a bit uncertain and could only say they heard something from someone who heard it from something else. Now when we hear a rumor we use google, find something that confirms our view, and them claim the truth is the result of "research".