Cleretic posted:

That whole proto-internet, really. Before Wikipedia, Youtube, halfway-decent search engines. If you needed to find something out you had to loving look for it. And if you're like me and that thing was about a video game, you were about to learn some weird and interesting poo poo. Some of it was even true!

The way people learned about and shared info on video games in general was really neat, actually. These days people have really sophisticated tools to dissect and understand a game, and then you'll find out what they've found in a central location; people found out what changed in Undertale's latest patch in less than a day.

Back in the 90s? Good loving luck. You looked through the wilderness of message boards and fansites hoping to find some inkling of an answer to your question, and there's no guarantee that one actually existed. Sometimes that answer wasn't gonna become clear for years, sometimes there was never an answer, both times you'd get stuck sifting through a dozen people trying to bullshit each other with tales of their uncle who works at Nintendo. And then occasionally someone strikes gold and finds some actual, fantastic little morsel of information, either within the game's code or through some outlandish external source, but you'd need to strike gold just to find THEM striking gold.