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> nobody knew if beating the game was at all possible

A few people including myself knew. Eventually entropy would settle and once the initial hype was over, it was only a matter of time before the chat would finish the game. Saying that "nobody knew" seems like historical revisionism.

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If it were just up to randomness with an unmodified ROM, then (barring a glitch) they would have soft locked at the Safari Zone which costs some currency to enter and needs to be traversed to the Surf HM in a relatively tight number of moves. There's only a finite amount of money in the game, so they can only fail at most a few hundred times before the game becomes impossible to beat.

> There's only a finite amount of money in the game

Technically untrue, you can use Meowth's Pay Day to generate cash.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pay_Day_(move)#Gener...

Meowth was only available in Pokémon blue. Once you get to the top 4 and can beat them money is infinite, but in red you theoretically can fail at the safari zone.

As a part of it I think most people believed that it was possible. There were strategy docs and images constantly being linked constantly in chat and it was clear the incremental progress was being made.

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