the mewtwo’s birthday thing made me think about something…it’s genuinely wild to me how many people there are on this site now who weren’t even born at the height of the pokemon fad. honestly i’ve never experienced anything quite like it
Back In The Day, like around 1998-2000, it was everywhere. it was inescapable. poptarts, cereal, nearly every food you could imagine marketing to children, toys fucking everywhere, multiple sets of collectible cards….it was a full on 90s fad. and, you know, at the time there were basically two ways for anyone to talk about it. if you were in elementary school and weren’t homeschooled there was a good chance the majority of your classmates were at least lowkey into it, too, and although the internet was way primitive compared to what we have now, there were a shitton of fansites for it. like, geocities, angelfire, the works.
this, uh, created a unique atmosphere for how information spread.
so, mew. mew was a Secret Pokemon coded into the gen 1 games. within the games themselves, there, uh…really wasn’t a whole lot of information about it. we knew that mewtwo was a clone of mew (technically mew “gave birth” to it in the game’s lore), but….that was kinda about it, until the first movie came along.
so kids were hyped for mew. this was a Secret Pokemon that you could not get - if you’ve ever played a pokemon game, you know every generation has at least one new pokemon like that, but this was the first time any of us had encountered it, and, like, there was no wi-fi back then. everything was analog as fuck, so while mew was coded into the game and technically obtainable, if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of the few areas where it was distributed, you were basically shit out of luck.
apart from, you know, gameshark. anyway.
the thing was, though, us kids weren’t about to accept that as our only answer. we weren’t going to allow a little thing like “the way the games are coded” to get in our way, bc frankly we knew jack shit about that. besides, we’d already done the impossible.
the first generation pokemon games were glitchy and broken as fuck. like, let’s be real here. and in our little ten your old brains, that meant anything, technically, could be possible. bc again, we knew jack shit about coding. and so rumors started to spread from person to person on the playgrounds, originally found on some geocities page, after getting copied from someone else’s angelfire page and spreading to like three other pages. each rumor more wildly implausible than the last.
the most widely circulated one was about the s.s. anne, probably bc it seemed the most credible. in order to beat the game, under normal circumstances you’d need to get on the boat and help its captain in order to get the cut HM prior to taking on the vermilion city gym. once you did so, the boat would leave and the pier would become inaccessible. however, if you managed to go there once you had surf - usually by obtaining a pokemon that had cut via trade rather than getting the HM yourself - you could find a mysterious truck there. this much was, surprisingly enough, accurate
rumor had it,however, that if you could move the truck somehow (completely impossible), you would find a pokeball containing mew. disproven easily enough by trying to use strength on the truck since it didn’t work, but, you know, it was an obscure enough series of actions + impossible for most people without starting over their game and completely erasing their progress that at the time a lot of us just accepted it. games worked in weird ways, and if you could make a glitch pokemon show up by fucking talking to an npc, flying to a specific place, and using surf AND multiply the 6th item in your inventory in the process, anything seemed possible, honestly.
things, uh, got a little out of hand quickly, though. bc you see, toward the end of gen 1, the anime started introducing more and more new pokemon to set up for gen 2. this was kind of an established thing from the beginning, tbh, given the shot of ho-oh in the first episode of the anime; a lot of the pokemon from gen 2 had actually been created before the gen 1 games came out and may have even been coded into the game at one point. if they were, though, they had long since been removed and replaced with placeholders (you know, our good old buddy missingno.)
honestly, i have no fucking clue where the “these new pokemon are actually already coded into the game” rumors came from, or at least where they started. it didn’t seem totally impossible, though; mew was in the game and so is missingno, so who’s to say what’s in there that we don’t know about??
(the coding. that’s who.)
so all these rumors arose about how to find the new pokemon in the game, usually with, uh, blatantly made up names for everything but togepi, whose name we already knew. the weirdest and most widespread rumor in that regard was marill = pikablu, which started bc, uh…it looked kind of like a blue pikachu, apparently. and there was this one line in the game that was kind of a mistranslation and kind of a straight up error
obviously, raichu can’t evolve. what we didn’t really know at this point in time is that in japan, pokemon red and green were the first versions released and blue was an improved rerelease with bugfixes and better sprites, etc. the red and blue versions released worldwide were kind of a mix of both, with the improvements from jp blue but the pokemon from red and green. in jp blue, this was a trade of two pokemon with trade evos. so there’s a perfectly logical explanation, but…we didn’t know about that at the time. and as soon as we saw something that looked even vaguely like the pikachu line, people jumped on that.
eventually, we ended up with this huge clusterfuck of a rumor mill, filled with an increasingly convoluted list of rumored secret pokemon “pokegods” that you could supposedly access with increasingly convoluted methods. catch all 150 pokemon 60 times and beat the elite four 999 times and you can unlock bill’s garden
where you can capture mew, mewthree (!!!), anime-based fusions of the starter evos, togepi, whatever the rumored name was for snubbull, five million different blatantly made up pokemon, AND you can find mist stones that you can use to evolve your raichu and your starters past their official evolution lines
we were ten years old and stupid.
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
dededos
areudirty
vaporwave
