> 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.
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.
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.
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.