Your favorite fake cheats and secrets

When I was younger, I remember looking for cheats a lot online and occassionally I ran into some very elaborate, difficult cheats that were 99% of the time fake. As a kid I actually believed some of these cheats were real, but over the years I've come to realize most were some person's sick attempt to have people waste hours of their life in the pursuit of nothing lol.

Most noteworthy, I remember Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow having the most eleborate, complicated, and ridiculous cheats and secrets of all. My favorites were cheats that involved catching the ever elusive "Pikablu" which was later revealed to be Marrill in Gold and Silver. Before Marrill was announced and people realized how crappy he really was, people online would say how he was like 100-times more powerful than Mewtwo and could leanr any attack. At the time I believed Pikablu was real and that his powers were real. I found many cheats online claiming to get you a Pikablu, but none were more memorable and ridiculous than this one:

To get Pikablu you had to beat the entire game, get all badged, and have beat the pokemon league. In addition to this, you hade to have all 151 pokemon. AFter doing this you had to catch 151 wild pikachu. After doing this, you had to surf just on the outside of seafoam island and you'd run into a surfing pikachu who was at level 100. You had to battle and capture him, and supposedly he was immune to master balls and also was like 10-times more difficult to catch than Mewtwo. After doing this, you go back to Palet Town and there's a man standing next to Prof. Oak's lab who offers you a "msyterious pokemon" for the surfing pikachu. If you accept the trade he give you Pikablu and all of his powers.

Yes, I actually believed this cheat was real and admit to trying it out, however I only caught about 25 Pikachu before giving up. For whatever reason though, I look back at these fake pokemon cheats and secrets with a bit of nostalgia. I also remember seeing a lot of fake Zelda OoT and Final Fantasy cheats as well. What are some infamous, hilarious or otherwise ridiculous false cheats and secrets from video games back in the day?

• The Secret Cow Level, because Blizzard did the right thing and included this in the second game.
• The Aeris 'resurrection' process in FF7, because why the hell would you even want her back..?
• All of the old Pokemon ones are great, because gullible little kids wasted hours upon hours trying to get these and then lying to their friends saying they did.

The Diablo Secret Cow Level, mainly because it resulted in the creation of the real secret cow level in the sequel. :PAlchemist3001

There are people who swear they've seen a Bigfoot in the wilderness of San Andreas.

The existence of "Sheng Long" as a character you could fight in the original SF2. The prank was purpetrated by Electronic Gaming Magazine in their April issue and I think it was their first April Fools joke (I may even still have the issue laying around here). You had to do something ridiculous like double flawless every fight up to Bison at which point supposedly Sheng Long would appear and throw Bison off screen and you'd have to fight him instead.

That one was a fairly obvious photo edit, but they got me with a claim that you could play the NES version of TMNT as Simon Belmont. You had to enter some crazy complicated sequence of button presses in a few seconds as the title was loading. I must have tried that one 30 times before giving up. You'd think I would have learned.

When asked about the screenshots included, they responded that they were a gaming magazine and they could create whatever they wanted and provided a screenshot of Sonic running down the snowy hill from the Genesis version of Strider.

Side Note: Not all of them turned out to be false. I had heard it was possible to play as Ken and Ryu 2 player against a computer controller Bison in the arcade version of SF Alpha if you met certain criteria. That worked out the first time I tried it with a friend and we beat the crap out of Bison together.

-Byshop

Beating singleplayer on Very Hard with one life 50 times with Pikachu and Jigglypuff in Super Smash Bros would make them evolve.

I fell for it as a kid, and even though it was total bullsh*t, I got very good with Jigglypuff.

I remember trying all manner of ridiculous stuff to be able to play as Reptile in the original Mortal Kombat for Genesis. I think at some point I actually got through the game on the hardest difficulty going double flawless in every round (which I did by using ridiculous cheap tactics like jumpi kicking over and over again and spamming special moves). Hell of it is, even if it was real, I could only play as him until I turned the game off since it had no save data.

I loved when you could only know about cheats through gaming magazines.