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The Original Mew Glitch

On November 6th 2021, Did You Know Gaming uploaded a video about the origins of Mew. This video made me aware of an Iwata Asks interview with GameFreak published after the release of HeartGold and SoulSilver. They began by talking about how the Pokémon series became popular. Ishihara said that Mew played an extremely significant role in the first pair of games' rise to fame. Morimoto then stated:

due to an unforeseen bug, Mew ended up appearing in some players’ games. It looked like we planned all of this, but that wasn’t the case. So although it caused all sorts of problems to many concerned, fortunately enough it ended up having a positive effect.

Apparently, this bug that caused Mew to appear in games was discovered before the first official distribution of Mew from CoroCoro Comic.

This came as somewhat of a shock to me, because many English sources confidently state that the first glitch to catch Mew was discovered in 2003, after Ruby and Sapphire's release! To me, it seemed that there was a glitch that occured only in Red and Green that was completely undocumented on English Pokémon sources. Fortunately, Bulbapedia links to other Pokémon wikis in foreign languages, so I checked to see if there were unfamiliar Mew glitches. ポケモンWiki's list of gen 1 glitches listed a Mew glitch different from the long-range trainer method; below is my attempt at translating the instructions.

Catching Mew

Items Needed:

Instructions:

  1. Place the master ball, the key item, and the key item in that order (the order of items after that doesn't matter)
  2. Enter the long grass to the right of Celadon (タマムシ)
  3. Navigate to the 14th item in the bag, press "select", then press B twice to exit.
  4. Enter a battle, open the Pokémon menu, and press A on the highlighted Pokémon. The game will glitch. Run from the battle.
  5. Go to the second floor of Celadon Department store
  6. The moment you arrive at the second floor, go left three tiles and down one tile, then view your trainer card
  7. Talk to the clerk and select "うりに きた" (sell). Your item list should appear with these items in this order: master ball, key item, key item, glitch item.
  8. Scroll through the list until the 4th item, the glitch item, is on the top of the screen, then sell the glitch item. The music should stop.
  9. The game will automatically try to sell the key items, but they cannot be sold, so it returns to the clerk's dialogue options.
  10. Select "べつに いいです" (exits the dialogue with the clerk).
  11. The gym leader battle music should start playing, and Mew will be fished up.
  12. When you open the items menu, the master ball will automatically be thrown and Mew will be caught.

After going to the effort of translating all this, I realized I made a grave mistake: I forget to check the "exclusive to Japanese Red, Green, and Blue" section of Bulbapedia's list of gen 1 glitches! The reason I hadn't found it there earlier is because its title didn't contain the word "Mew", instead it was called the select glitch, because the act of using the select button to swap Pokémon then pressing B has the potential to cause a lot of memory corruption! A lot of different effects can be achieved by using this glitch, just one of which is catching Mew. Though I was wrong in thinking that this glitch was undocumented, I hope you enjoyed learning about the method the first Pokémon players may have used to catch Mew! 🙋 Goodbye!

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