There have been lots of rumors about The Legend of Zelda games over the years, but nothing has ever topped the plethora of theories about how to get the Triforce in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. For many players, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the first fully-3D open world environment they were ever able to explore in a video game, and the amount of content Nintendo decided to hide behind obtuse mechanics and complicated secrets meant many players missed out on the game's more hidden aspects the first time through.
Because of the massive amount of features the game was already hiding, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time players became convinced that there was always something more to find. This excitement was exacerbated because the internet had not yet become readily available for everyone to use yet, and many families did not have access to things like forums, message boards, and the other methods players have grown accustomed to using in order to share information online. Unfortunately, of the Ocarina of Time players who did have access to the internet, many of them decided to create fictional rumors and secrets, instead of sharing real ones.
Before everyone knew not to trust strangers on the internet, and before the concept of Photoshop was as ingrained in people's minds as it is today, there were a group of The Legend of Zelda players who took it upon themselves to send the internet on a wild goose chase. Bolstered by the fact that the Triforce's logo on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Start Menu never filled in, unlike all the other symbols on display, players began creating fake screenshots and posting long, complex rumors to The Legend of Zelda fan sites and message boards.
Why Zelda's Ocarina of Time Triforce Rumors Were So Believable
Many of the most popular (and most ridiculous) rumors about finding the Triforce in The Legend of Zelda centered around a supposedly-hidden final temple, which, depending on which theory the player decided to believe, was either the Temple of The Sages, the Temple of Light, or The Sky Temple. There were a number of things players were instructed to do in order to access this temple, from lengthy lists of impossible tasks (such as beating Hyrule's famous Running Man in a race) to simple (yet still difficult) instructions like throwing a bomb in the very center of Ganon's lava pit. Unfortunately, no matter what players did or however many inane sequences of steps they followed, they always came up empty.
The problem was that multiple screenshots had appeared on the internet showing Link and the Triforce interacting in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and because of this many players felt like it must be possible somehow. Unfortunately, these images were either doctored and manipulated by an external tool, or they were from a version of the game's earlier build. Images of a location which have since been dubbed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Unicorn Fountain, along with early in-game screenshots of Link swinging a sword that utilizes the same beam projectile seen the the franchise's previous entries, only served to confuse matters further, as these were official in-game screenshots which had been released by a Japanese magazine and were later mistaken for (or purposefully re-framed as) hidden areas.
Only the people who make up rumors and lies know exactly what benefits they get out of such actions, but going on so many disappointing quests for the Triforce was surely something The Legend of Zelda secret hunters could have done without. Thankfully, the internet's subsequent rise in popularity has meant that there are more people willing to disbelieve and disprove such theories before they become so widely spread, but unfortunately that also reduces a little bit of the mystery too. The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time has since been data-mined to oblivion and it's been definitively proven no Triforce exists in the game... at least, not unless players are counting the ones on Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf's hands.