I grew up on video game magazines and remember their April Fool’s pranks pretty memorably one. However, I never really fell for them. When I was younger, I fell for the ‘revive Aeros’ rumors for a while. I was younger and desperate for the idea of golden endings.
My favorite urban legend, though, was an early creepypasta known as The Truth About The Secret of Evermore/Ed Kann/‘The Noise Coming From Inside Children’.
https://rainwoodworks.blogspot.com/2010/09/secret-of-evermore-was-one-of-my.html?m=1
For those who’ve never seen it, this pasta asserts that ‘The Secret of Evermore’ was originally meant to be a much darker game. It does this by using some examples from the game itself, as well as asserting that a man named Ed Kann, who has brief cult status for a disturbing horror story called ‘The Noises Coming From Inside Children’, was part of the scenario development team.
Why this pasta works is that it plays so well against normal tropes of the time: there’s no supernatural element and what conspiracy is there is low stakes - it just reads as trying to tell you that there’s something darker to this childhood game, and you can see that by looking a little deeper. It’s a fantastic creepypasta and, I’ll be ashamed to admit, for a while I thought it was possible it was real. And I was in undergrad at the time. Being a big horror fan I wanted this to be real to try and find this story.
Unfortunately, it is just a pasta. There is a follow up blog to this initial story called ‘Who Is Ed Kann?’ which features the author trying to find Ed, and the blog provides deeply conflicting information with the original story, along with trying too hard and revealing the hoax because of it. Still, I can’t help but have a soft spot for it all, if just for tricking me for a while.