Gullible

Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986.  About a year later, a friend of mine told me he saw a trailer for the sequel.  It showed Megatron returning and challenging Galvatron for the leadership of the Decepticons.  How is this possible, since they're both the same character?  Did it involve parallel worlds?  Time travel?  Though a similar scene did eventually happen in the comic book in 1991, this was well before that.

...and of course, my friend was lying.  But I was gullible enough to believe it.  I believed it so much, that I told another friend about the trailer.  Then later I lied and told the first friend that I'd seen the trailer too, and he just went, "Interesting."  That was when I realized he'd made it up.

But I had a tendency to believe people when they told me these things.  I had friends to lied to me constantly about video game news.  One guy told me that if you beat Metroid thirty times, you would get to play as Ridley or Kraid.  I spent several weekends playing the game from start to finish, until I'd beaten it at least forty times, before I called him and told him it didn't work.  Then he started adding details, "Well, each time you beat it, you have to complete it in under an hour" or whatever.  Eventually I called the Nintendo Power hotline and was told it wasn't true.

That same friend told me a lot of details about Metroid 2.  I mean, there was eventually a Metroid 2 for Gameboy, but he was a couple of years early and specifically talking about the NES.  He also told me that you could fight Ganon in Zelda 2, by beating the game a certain number of times and then using a specific spell in a specific room to resurrect him.

The dumbest part of my gullibility is that nobody ever actually scooped me when it came to video game news.  When I was in school, I was the guy everyone else called for video game tips.  Sometimes students I didn't even know would call me and ask me if I had codes for certain games.  And I usually did.

I read every video game magazine, and had subscriptions to most of them.  EGM, Nintendo Power, GamePro... if it was on the shelves, I read it.  I knew level select codes for games I'd never played, because I studied these magazines the way I should have been studying my high school textbooks.

So if somebody told me a bit of video game trivia I didn't know, well, where exactly did I think they were getting that information?  We didn't have the internet yet, and there weren't any video game programs on TV. 

I wish I could say I was less gullible now.  Frequenting sites like Snopes has made me a lot more skeptical of memes and fake news, but when it's a friend telling me something, I usually still believe them.  After all, why would they lie?