Aww - thanks anyway, though! Made the pronoun change yesterday and I gave it an extra read today to make sure I didn't miss any, but let me know if you spot anything.
Thank you so much again for commenting - I really hoped you would one day get to read my little tribute to what an important and fascinating little part you played in Pokémon fandom history, and I'm so glad to know you did. It absolutely made my week. Hope you're having a good Easter!
Aww - thanks anyway, though! Made the pronoun change yesterday and I gave it an extra read today to make sure I didn't miss any, but let me know if you spot anything.
Thank you so much again for commenting - I really hoped you would one day get to read my little tribute to what an important and fascinating little part you played in Pokémon fandom history, and I'm so glad to know you did. It absolutely made my week. Hope you're having a good Easter!
I can't remember if I came up with the alternate route… I'd started teaching myself to program around then so I was definitely coming at it from a debugging/experimenting angle, so it's plausible I found the Lavender town way? Sorry I can't remember! I couldn't find the thread on wayback and they revamped the forum in 2009 so it doesn't go back before that.
And yes that'd be nice, thank you! (I've also submitted a minor update to my FAQ to use an email I didn't lose the password to, and a feminine pseudonym)
@TheScythe: Ahaha, amazing! I'm so thrilled this managed to reach you and you took the time to comment - I made an attempt to e-mail the address in your GameFAQs guide while researching this and everything, but figured it was a long shot and had accepted you'd probably have just moved on by now. I'm impressed you were only twelve at the time; I was vaguely figuring your 2003 self for a teenager. I don't suppose you recall at all whether the version you saw on the forum suggested going through Lavender Town or if you came up with trying that? And would the forum and that thread still be up and/or accessible on the Wayback Machine, by any chance?
I will go update your pronouns in the article right away (unless you'd prefer otherwise - just let me know if so)!
Love the write up, what a blast from the past! And omg cracking up at Happy's equivalent exchange comment, I never knew the trick disappeared stuff too!
I don't really use the username any more, but TheScythe is me – I was only 12 at the time, and still just gullible (and curious?) enough to try another fake sounding glitch that someone linked to on the forum for TPPC (an online Pokemon game I played way too much of). I think the forum required a login so I couldn't link to the thread, so I linked to their source. I don't remember much other than I knew I had to share it more widely.
Also I came out as trans a few years ago, I use she/her now :D
Awesome article. My experience with this trick is that that already in 2003 a translated version of WhiteCat's guide was available on Czech Pokémon fansites. I've also been long curious about the history. I truly hope we can one day learn more details about who actually discovered it or at least posted it on the internet first. One thing I can say is that the Japanese probably didn't care much for this glitch, as they have had their own, simpler Mew trick utilizing the infamous select glitch. It was posted on USENET in 1996: https://groups.google.com/g/fj.rec.games.video.home/c/PYO6IL0UiH8/m/FZxqSWXoSA0J
Uhh… I didn't want to comment on this page (even though it's on a website where everything is at least 4.5/5), but what's the chance of getting a Shiny Arkoos as a spam verification Pokémon?
It's amazing how lucky we got that the real Mew trick didn't just get deleted by a moderator for being "obviously fake", which I can't help but feel is what would have happened were it discovered today instead of back then. The early internet sure was a different time, huh?
I love absolutely everything about this. Awesome article as always!
Maybe a bit unrelated, but this reminds me of a story of an easter egg in Etrian Odyssey Nexus, a secret item and skills that were disguised in the code as an unused, incomplete class.
The methods of obtaining it are very likely inspired by the rumors of old, with requirements like seeing the credits, having 100+ hours of play time, and scanning 100 QR codes of other people's party members. The steps you need to follow afterwards are similarly finicky, with speaking to a specific NPC and then going to a very precise location.
The discovery went quite similarly to that of the Mew Trick, with a GameFAQs poster swearing that it worked but being disbelieved. Dataminers had found the portraits and skills for the Vampire class, but the incomplete data made it seem like just a scrapped idea.
Eventually, enough people managed to make it work that the method became documented, the requirements became widespread, and despite the game releasing in Japan years before the west, this secret was discovered by a few determined people who initially attempted to debunk yet another rumor. All smack in the middle of the age of datamining.
I just wanted to share this story because I figured anyone reading this article might find it interesting. Stuff like the Mew Trick doesn't happen often any more, but it definitely still does
WAIT, JOLT?! AS IN JOLT JOLT?! OHMYGOSH I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS WHAT THE HECK
This is so incredibly fascinating to me and I loved reading through it. The fact that this seemingly-fake glitch was very real is so freaking cool to me in ways I never really knew how to describe but this post puts into words exactly. The fact that you might have seen it before it got any traction is just an extra layer of cool.
Also really loved the explanation of how the glitch the works, cool to see a breakdown of that!
@SadisticMystic: Ahaha, delightful! Turns out I was looking in the wrong forum. Thanks for sharing, love to see little pieces of history like that!
I had the URL saved, so it was easy to find, and was in fact a new thread of its own: https://web.archive.org/web/20150906223916/https://www.math.miami.edu/~jam/azure/forum/tuff/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=004126
@SadisticMystic: Oh wow! I had seen you still existed on the internet as of a few years ago, but it's an honor to have you actually read and comment on my article! Thank you for elaborating with the backstory behind why you in particular would take a chance on someone proposing something that sounded absurd but just might be true - that's a lovely story and makes a lot of sense.
The Azure Heights forums are actually really well preserved by the Internet Archive - I've yet to run into any page of any thread that I couldn't view - so if you wanted to go find your first post, you probably could! I made an attempt, but I'm guessing it was a post in somebody else's longer-lived thread, because I didn't find it digging through the mid-2001 threads :P
How in Giratina's hell did five people comment on this page in a single day? Also, offtopic, who created Mew in the Pokémon universe? Was it Arkoos?
Jolt135 was me, and I can provide a bit of extra context.
When I first signed up at Azure Heights in mid-2001, my first post was one asking what happened if you had a Ditto transform into Smeargle and sketch other moves for it to potentially keep after battle. Their forums were taken down a few years ago, but until they were, that post had the honor of being my oldest surviving post *anywhere* online. Anyway, the initial response was from Meowth346, one of the leading names in research of the time, who dismissed it as not working, and everyone just left it at that.
Of course, in November 2002, somebody else put forth the exact same scenario, only they actually managed to test it, and found that it worked. Once I saw it, I was reminded of that first post–sure, the community response thereafter was to disqualify those from being legal movepool additions (especially since they could also be accessed through Mimic or Metronome, allowing the collateral damage to extend far beyond Ditto and Mew), but if I had concocted the proper test at the time, we could have done to find out about it over a year sooner than we did.
That whole episode was still fresh in mind five months later, when the ultimately successful Mew post went up. Back then I was still rationed to one hous or online time per day, so I didn't see the post until the 20th (which happened to be Easter that year). Upon seeing the steps, it did read like a plausible way for things to happen, if only could be tested…but this time I was in a position to test it. So it was worth a shot…and once it worked, and everyone came around on it, it was as though Mew had finally risen from the dead.
I remember describing it to my best friend and her brother around 2004 when I first learned about it and having him confidently tell me it was fake, probably for the same reasons everyone else dismissed it. Later they came to believe it but I don't remember how.
Butterfree, I LOVE that you always dig so deep into everything I can still learn something new about a thing that has been pored through for decades now! And that it is that this whole time the trick also quietly performs One (1) evaporation is SENDING me
THE LAW OF EQUIVALENT EXCHANGE… [a ten year old pokemon trainer conducts an otherworldly ritual so they can own a super cool legendary pokemon. the monkey's paw curls & some other guy screams as he is sucked into the shadow realm(distortion world)]
that was an incredible article!! thank you for writing!
As someone who was born a couple of years after R/B came out, it’s fascinating learning about the history of how people discovered this iconic glitch.
First performed it myself on emulator around 2010 or so - in fact I used Mew (and Missingno.) in my first playthrough of R/B.
I remember also finding and performing that trick on the internet (definitely quite later than 2002), and being amazed about it actually working. I figured it was coincidentally creating some encounter data that just happened to be Mew in that case, but never really got to understand how it works. Thanks for the writeup and capturing that magical feeling. I wonder what whoever discovered it is doing now, and if they realize what their accidental discovery led to.
