When it came to having free time after classwork is done, or if you sat with other classmates during cafeteria lunch, it was always a good time for a specific kind of discussion whether it's about something on television, hearing about a book that's recently come out or pretty much any type of activity you've been doing, there's more than likely been a time when rumors spread about something popular. Some of the friends that I made in school were gamers as I was, so this time I'll be looking back at some rumored topics related to video games.

Player 2 can make Tails fly in Sonic 2?

As early as my third grade year, one classmate mentioned that there was a trick to actually getting Tails to fly manually in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. By plugging in a second controller, another player would have to press up, and both A and B at the same time. Obviously coming home to discover it wasn't real I was upset but chose to avoid argument with the classmate.

Hyper Knuckles and a new ability

Also related to Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles introduced the Super Emeralds, another set of emeralds to collect after getting the 7 Chaos Emeralds from Sonic 3 and upon collecting them gives Super Sonic and Super Knuckles a "hyper" form. One classmate that claimed to own the game said that Hyper Knuckles had this ability that could create a projection copy of himself that would be on the ceiling of a level and attack enemies. As awesome as it sounded, it was nonexistent and the only ability he would get was destroying enemies when latching to a wall.

Super Mario All-Stars on the Nintendo 64

Video game compilations were a mindblowing idea for the 16-bit era, and Super Mario All-Stars was one of the most popular for the Super Nintendo. So when I was in middle school and had heard other students discussing some kind of news floating around about a rerelease for the Nintendo 64 I was hyped. The only problem, would players want to revisit the games with the N64's weird layout of a controller? This is where speculation began to drop. Some thought a new and improved controller would be on the way, while others were catching on that the rerelease wasn't happening.

The standalone Sega 32X system

When the Sega 32X add-on was still new, there was already speculation going around that Sega would quickly ditch the add-on and make the 32X its own system. To our dismay it almost came true, with the codename Neptune but with Sega already releasing the Sega Saturn the concept got scrapped. For once it was surprising to know that one of these rumors became official however at the same time everyone pretty much knew the 32X was a flop compared to the stuff Nintendo was putting out (well, except the Virtual Boy of course).

The Sega Dreamcast, a portable?

Just before the Dreamcast's launch a classmate from my literature class showed a few students a shopping catalogue that featured some screenshots from a few of the games coming out at launch with the Virtual Memory Unit (the memory card) next to it shown as the same size as the console with these photo edits making it look like the games were playing on the tiny screen. This led to us thinking that we were going to be able to take the games with us anywhere (kind of like a precursor to the Nintendo Switch) which would have been a phenomenal idea. In some ways, some games had use with the VMU to take it with you, like Sonic Adventure having its virtual pet simulator having you take your Chao with you to level it up.

The real Sheng Long

This had to have been one of the most popular topics as far as rumors go, so many Street Fighter II players wondered about the mystery of that Sheng Long fellow that Ryu was referring to, some speculated that he was a hidden character unlocked by code, or by completing the game with certain conditions met. To take the speculation further, the Street Fighter Collection for the Playstation 1 also began with discussions saying that Capcom would release some previously unseen content in SF II, sadly getting debunked later when it released. To make matters worse, Street Fighter Collection was known to have buggy controller input among some other flaws, so nobody talked about it then.

What video game rumors did you hear about back in the day? Leave a comment and as always, see you next article!