It was the ultimate playground currency. In the late nineties, if you claimed you knew how to get Pokémon Red and Blue Mew without a GameShark, you were either a god or a liar. Usually a liar. Back then, we didn't have robust wikis or high-speed data in our pockets to debunk the nonsense. We just had the school bus and that one kid who swore his uncle worked at Nintendo.
Honestly, the sheer chaos surrounding the 151st Pokémon is probably the most significant event in handheld gaming history. It wasn't just a hidden character; it was a ghost in the machine that Nintendo didn't even plan to reveal initially.
The Truck, The SS Anne, and the Lies We Believed
Everyone remembers the truck. You know the one. Near the SS Anne, there’s a small patch of land you can only reach by surfing. There sits a lonely, non-functional decorative truck sprite.
The rumor was simple: Use Strength on the truck, and Mew is underneath.
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I spent hours trying to find a way to get Strength to that dock before the ship sailed away. Thousands of other kids did too. We tried everything. We tried losing a battle to get kicked back to the Pokémon Center so the ship wouldn't leave. We tried every button combination imaginable. But the truck was just a truck. It was a bit of environmental dressing that meant absolutely nothing, yet it became the altar where we sacrificed our weekend hours.
Mew wasn't there. It was never there.
The reality of how Mew ended up in the code is actually much more "indie dev" than you’d expect from a giant like Nintendo. Shigeki Morimoto, a programmer at Game Freak, literally snuck Mew into the game's ROM at the very last second. This happened after the debugging tools were removed, creating just enough space—a tiny 300 bytes—to cram one more creature in. He did this without telling the higher-ups at Nintendo. It was a prank, basically. A "just in case" addition that was never meant to be accessible to players.
Then the glitches started happening.
How the Pokémon Red and Blue Mew Glitch Actually Works
For years, we thought the only way to get a "legit" Mew was through official Nintendo Power distributions or physical mall tours. You’d stand in line for three hours, hand over your cartridge, and a staffer would trade it to you. But the game’s code was fundamentally broken in a way that made Mew accessible to anyone with a little patience and a specific sequence of actions.
This is often called the "Long-Range Trainer Glitch" or the "Trainer-Fly Glitch."
It works because the game’s memory is surprisingly fragile. When you encounter a trainer who can see you from the edge of the screen, and you press Start at the exact moment you enter their line of sight, you can Fly or Teleport away before the battle triggers. This puts the game in a "half-battle" state. The game engine thinks you are in a fight, so it disables your B-button and Start menu.
To fix itself, the game needs a battle to conclude. If you go to a specific route—usually Route 25 to fight a specific Youngster with a Slowpoke—and win, the game stores the "Special" stat of the last Pokémon you fought.
Mew’s index number in the game's code is 21. If the last Pokémon you faced had a Special stat of 21, the game "remembers" that value. When you return to the original route where you pulled the disappearing act, the game forces a wild encounter to resolve the memory conflict. Because it's pulling from that Special stat, it generates a Level 7 Mew.
It feels like magic. It’s actually just a very clever way of tricking a 1996 processor into reading the wrong part of its own script.
Why Mew Was a Marketing Genius Accident
Nintendo didn't plan for the "Mew Phenomenon" to save the franchise, but it did. Sales for Pokémon Red and Green (in Japan) were starting to stagnate. Then, rumors of a secret 151st Pokémon began to leak.
CoroCoro Comic announced a "Legendary Pokémon Offer" where they would distribute Mew to just 20 winners. Over 78,000 people entered. Suddenly, the game wasn't just about catching the 150 monsters on the back of the box. It was about the mystery. It turned the game into a living legend.
The mystery of Pokémon Red and Blue Mew created the template for every "secret" character in gaming for the next decade. Without Mew, we probably don't get the Luigi in Mario 64 rumors or the "Sheng Long" hoax in Street Fighter.
Fact-Checking the Myths
Let's clear some things up because there is still a lot of bad info out there.
- Can Mew evolve into Mewtwo? No. Never. They are related in the lore, but in the Gen 1 games, they are completely separate entities with no evolutionary link.
- Does the "Mew Three" exist? No. This was usually just a misidentification of various "MissingNo" glitch forms or just pure playground fiction.
- Is the glitch safe? Mostly. Unlike MissingNo, which can famously scramble your Hall of Fame data or mess with your item bag (Infinite Master Balls, anyone?), the Mew glitch is relatively stable. It won't delete your save file if you do it correctly.
- Can you transfer a Glitch Mew to modern games? This is tricky. If you are playing the Virtual Console versions on 3DS, the "Poke Transporter" has a built-in check. It looks for a specific Trainer ID and Name that matches the official 1990s distributions. A glitch Mew caught in the wild usually won't pass the check unless you use even more advanced glitches to change your Trainer ID to 22770.
The Technical Brilliance of a 300-Byte Secret
Think about the limitations of the Game Boy for a second. We are talking about a system with 8KB of RAM. Every single byte was a battle.
When Morimoto added Mew, he wasn't just adding a sprite. He was adding base stats, a move pool, and an entry in the Pokédex that would crash the game if the player didn't have the right data pointers. The fact that Mew has a balanced moveset—it can learn every single TM and HM in the game—was a stroke of genius. It made Mew the "ancestor" of all Pokémon, a lore point that remains canon to this day.
It's also why Mew is so weirdly powerful in the original games. It's a Psychic-type, and in Gen 1, Psychic-types had no real weaknesses. Bug-type moves were weak, and Ghost-type moves were actually programmed incorrectly to have no effect on Psychic Pokémon (even though the guidebooks said otherwise).
If you had a Mew, you were invincible.
Finding Mew Today
If you still have an old Game Boy and a dusty copy of Red or Blue, you can still perform the glitch. You don't need a link cable. You don't need a second Game Boy.
Step-by-Step for the Skeptical
- Start a new game or find a save where you haven't fought the "Gambler" on Route 8 or the "Youngster" on Route 25.
- Have a Pokémon with Fly (you'll need the Thunder Badge and the HM).
- Stand north of the Underground Path entrance on Route 8.
- Save your game. This is the "point of no return."
- Walk down. The moment the Gambler appears on screen, hit Start.
- Fly to Cerulean City. The Gambler will have an exclamation point over his head, but you'll fly away.
- Go to Route 25 and fight the Youngster with the Slowpoke. You must let him walk to you; do not walk right up to him, or the game will soft-lock.
- After winning, Fly back to Lavender Town.
- Walk west toward Route 8.
- Your menu will pop up on its own. Close it.
- A battle starts. It’s a Level 7 Mew.
Catch it with a Great Ball. Don't waste a Master Ball; its catch rate isn't actually that bad compared to the legendary birds.
What This Means for Your Collection
If you're looking for actionable steps to preserve or find a Mew in the modern era, you've got a few choices.
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Check your save battery. Most original Pokémon Red and Blue cartridges use a CR2025 or CR2032 internal battery to keep the save file alive. If your cartridge hasn't been touched in twenty years, that battery is likely dead, and your childhood Mew is gone. You can replace these with a soldering iron and a $2 battery, but the old save is unrecoverable once the power drops.
Use the 3DS Virtual Console (while you can). If you already have the games downloaded on your 3DS, the Mew glitch works perfectly there. However, since the eShop is closed, you can't buy them anymore. If they are on your system, they are gold.
Verify "Legit" Mews. If you're buying a used cartridge and someone claims it has a "real" Mew, check the OT (Original Trainer). Official Mews usually have OTs like "GF," "Nintendo," or "HRB." If the OT is "ASH" and it’s caught at Level 7, it’s the glitch version.
Look at the 2026 distribution cycle. Pokémon often does "Mystery Gift" distributions for anniversaries. While these aren't the original 8-bit sprites, they are the only way to get a Mew into the newest Switch titles like Scarlet and Violet without transferring from older hardware.
Ultimately, Mew represents the last era of gaming where mystery felt real. Before the internet could data-mine a game's entire codebase within three hours of its release, we had Mew. We had the truck. We had the rumors. And for a few years, we actually believed that anything was possible if we just pushed the right buttons at the right time.