What a time to be a Pokemon fan.
Togepi and Ho-oh were always rumoured to be in Red and Blue, tucked away somewhere. Usually the same spot you could catch starters and Eevees, like beside Pallet Town or in Bill's Secret Garden. Missingno. and its kin compounded such stories. Not long after these developed into straight up fiction about PokeGods and other things you'd read about on the internet, along with ways on how to get Mew. The first real news that I remember hearing in the schoolyard was about Pikablu, which of course is Marill, and other kids talked about a Togechikko, who Togepi evolved into (look at Togetic's Japanese name, it's the kind of mispronunciation you'd expect of ten year olds). Remember, this was the early internet - Google was still new and there weren't a lot of reliable connections for this type of thing with Japan yet. You might have the odd lucky fan who posted legitimate news but pictures were a lot smaller, and lower quality. Anyways, I digress.
Before Pokemon: TFM there was still a lot of unconfirmed hearsay about what the next generation of Pokemon would be like. I remember being in a friend's basement reading with him and his sister about how Pokemon would have genders (and funny enough the site said the genders would look different, which wasn't the case until Gen IV), there was going to be a skateboard, and some other stuff. Then there was nothing until the movie came out, and Pikablu was now Marill. We saw Donphan and Snubbull too. It was around this time that I received a Japanese starter deck featuring Slowking and a bunch of other Neo Genesis cards and the world of Pokemon expanded big league for me. Pokemon 2000 was later announced, and Gen II Pokemon started popping up all over the place: there was a cereal with Hoothoot and Ledyba on the box even. After that I found out about Gold and Silver through a Japanese ROM a guy who owned a comic book store hooked my parents up with, but they didn't include an emulator and so they tried opening it in Notepad. It was a garbled mess.