[jcranmer]

At the time the game was released, the internet might be available in a modem that would go at the blazing fast speeds of a thousand bits per second. And of course, tie up your phone line in the process. The WWW hadn't been invented yet, let alone search engines.

Having been a kid during the formative years of the Internet, I can tell you that the notion of "you can find everything on the internet" doesn't really start coming into play until the early 2000s. In the late 90s, having to do research generally meant schlepping yourself to the library and finding encyclopedias or other research materials. Or, if you were lucky, maybe you had something like Microsoft Encarta, an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM!