Searching for Mew: the story of Pokémon's greatest mystery

A special, long-form extract from ON Games Volume 2, which we're featuring as part of our celebration of Pokémon's 30th anniversary.

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The story of Pokémon's greatest mystery, and the people who keep hunting for clues today

An extract from ON Games Vol. 2: how myths, mysteries and Mew made Pokémon gaming's greatest phenomenon - and how I rediscovered that same spirit today.

[A screenshot from Pokémon Red/Blue/Green showing the player standing on a small patch of land by the SS Anne and the infamous truck.]

Image credit: Nintendo / Game Freak, via DidYouKnow Gaming

Feature

by Chris Tapsell
Deputy Editorial Director

Published on Feb. 28, 2026

10 comments

*A special, long-form extract from ON Games Volume 2, which we're featuring as part of our celebration of Pokémon's 30th anniversary.*

You've probably heard about the Mew that was hiding under a truck.

A secret, 151st Pokémon planted in Pokémon Red, Blue and Green, finding it required a brief, yet impetuous journey outside of regular bounds. Head south from Vermilion City, then surf just to the east of the short jetty which usually leads to a cruise ship, the SS Anne, soon bound for another undefined voyage around the world. There, beyond the ship, lies a small, apparently innocent patch of land. To reach that little bank, you'd need to blag your way past a ticket inspector - through glitch or other crafty workaround - and borrow a friend's Pokémon; one that can use Surf before it's properly allowed. Make the short hop across the harbour waters then and on the bank, parked conveniently just out of view from any legitimately reachable part of the world, you'll find a single, abandoned truck. The only model of a truck, curiously, that's been placed anywhere in the game. And under that mysterious truck, if you push it to one side with a Pokémon that knows the move Strength, you'll find a Poké Ball. And inside that Poké Ball will be Mew.

There was, of course, no Mew hiding under that truck. But like so many great stories, the hard facts mean little next to a tale well told. Mew's absence did little to stop the truck story from billowing outwards, engulfing the school yards of Japan, then North America and the rest of the world, eventually becoming the most widely spread playground legend of the modern age. If you were a kid in the 90s, your feet firmly planted at the epicentre of Pokémania, you knew about the Mew and that truck.

Like millions of other people now reckoning with their early-to-mid 30s - this story is more universal than it'll ever be personal - a vastly outsized chunk of my childhood was defined by this one rumour. Armed with my dad's original Game Boy (on which he had hitherto stoically chipped away at Tetris, and only Tetris), my copies of both Red and Blue, a Link Cable, and nary a friend with whom to actually trade, reader, I was obsessed. I tried everything to reach that cursed patch of land.

Unfortunately for seven-year-old Chris, I wasn't much of a whizz at discovering glitches - and crucially, nobody in my particular playground actually knew the ticket inspector workaround. "Trying everything," in my case, mostly boiled down to repeatedly talking to the same, stubborn NPC, bumping into the same few fencing tiles blocking the path, or just wistfully looking out towards the same passing rolls of the sea beyond, where my truck remained unmoved, my Mew forever undiscovered.

Instead, the mystery itself had to be sufficient. And it was, just as it was for those millions of other seven-year-olds at the time. Mew, even in its absence, was the beginning of a lifelong personal connection, one made to a series of games that always felt, for reasons I could never quite pin down, like it was somehow bigger, more real, than whatever it was showing in the few dozen 8bit pixels on screen.

"Sometimes the unsettled, unsolved mystery is more captivating than the one with an answer."

Or at least that's how most remember it. Mew's story is one of gaming's great fables, a blend of mystery and mythology, pure happenstance and genuine, ingenious intent. It's the perfect example, I always felt, of this series at its very best. Ephemeral and strange, a game played on-screen and off, along a map's edge, your feet astride real and virtual worlds, overlooking the unknown.

[A photo of the coffee table journal ON Games Vol 2 on a table showing the Pokémon cover, a turquoise green with a Pikachu, and a Poké Ball themed slip case]

The Pokémon edition of ON Games Vol. 2, from which this story is an extract. | Image credit: Hybrid Publications / Eurogamer

The original story of Mew, and Pokémon's subsequent viral explosion, goes something like this:

With just a short time to go before Pokémon Red and Green's initial Japanese launch, and their code locked after a desperate final round of debugging, Shigeki Morimoto, a programmer known for, among other things, a slightly mischievous spirit, took it upon himself to make one final, unauthorised addition. Removing the debugger freed up 300 bytes of space on the cartridge, he'd realised - just enough space for one more, very small, 151st Pokémon.

He decided it should be Mew - Game Freak had already referred to it in the game by name, if only in hushed and mysterious tones, but never intended to actually include it, so it made for a nice bit of fun for the team - then quickly whipped up a simple design and snuck it in, much to Nintendo's apparent ire on its discovery later on (that debugging phase, it was later revealed, was then Nintendo's most expensive of all time). Inevitably, introducing new code right after the debugging was finished also introduced, you guessed it, a new bug: a glitch that allowed players to find and capture a Mew that was never meant to be found.

That glitch actually happens in an entirely different part of the games, under circumstances far less enticing than the tall tales of mysterious trucks and dodging guards. But soon enough the rumours swirled, and an era's great snowball began to roll. "The monthly sales we'd had up to then began to be equalled by weekly sales," said Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara in the years after, "before increasing to become three, then four times larger". Eventually, the games topped Japanese sales charts - but not until over a year after their initial release.

The real story is a little more complicated. The runaway success caused by the inclusion of Mew was partially an accident - but it also wasn't really an accident at all. The decision to include Mew wasn't just Morimoto's, for instance. It was actually the decision of the whole Game Freak team, led in particular by Ken Sugimori, the series' legendary artist and designer, and Satoshi Tajiri, its fabled and now highly reclusive co-creator.

As a pair of teenagers in the mid 80s, Sugimori and Tajiri were arcade gaming fanatics, their obsession taking hold with one arcade game in particular, over which they originally met and bonded: Xevious. A game which achieved a kind of viral success of its own in the arcade scene, thanks to a strikingly familiar set of circumstances. A series of urban legends spread by fans about secret appearances of strange sprites, complex methods for finding Easter eggs, and characters and places that may or may not have been real. The credit for that nugget of development history, and indeed countless others, must go to a man called Kyle Tarpley, known to the internet as Dr Lava, and the loose network of fellow researchers, dataminers, translators and archivists with whom he works.

"My job is very, very tedious," he tells me, as we begin to lay out his methods. "I don't think there are very many people at all, especially YouTubers, who are willing to do that amount of tedium."

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