In this issue, we remember the PokéGods, Pokémon rumours that circulated in playgrounds and online forums during the late 90s and early 2000
Speaking of R/B/Y-era rumours, @johtotimes just published a very fun issue going over some of the wild stuff that was getting spread around back then!
I'm particularly tickled by the Pikablu rumour screenshotted in the article:
It's similar to but not quite the same as the one that was on Mew's Hangout that I genuinely believed for a time (in that one, stated to be confirmed by Nintendo, you needed seventeen Pokémon at level 100, and I just never got there). It's very illustrative of the sort of thing that was going around, and the commonalities with the actual genuine Mew trick are uncanny:
There's a high barrier to entry: you probably can't just go try this right now. Maybe you've used a GameShark ever and then too bad, it's not going to work for you. Or you haven't completed your Pokédex. Or, while your team of six may be high-leveled, probably you don't have seventeen Pokémon that you've trained up. Similarly, for the Mew trick, you need to have not fought these two random trainers that you had no reason to avoid on your playthrough, and if you have - oops, too bad, you can't try it. So you can't prove it doesn't work, right?
You need to perform a secret arbitrary sequence of steps involving interacting with these particular random NPCs in very particular ways, ones that have no sensible connection to "Pikablu". They're just the key that unlocks it, for some reason. Similarly, the Mew trick, again, involves an encounter with Mew being unlocked by interacting in very particular ways with these two particular random trainers, for some reason.
You need to stand in this one very specific spot and then immediately use Fly to go to a specific place. In the Mew trick you also need to stand in a very specific spot, then move down and very quickly press Start to Fly to a specific place.
It describes some funky vaguely glitch-sounding behaviour, where you get this mystery item where trying to use it just acts like you selected Cancel, and when you talk to Oak it gives you recycled dialogue about a different item - juuust enough to sound kind of weird and spooky, but not like any kind of full-on memory corruption is happening. Similarly, the Mew trick involves little mildly weird spooky bits like that: an exclamation mark appearing above a trainer's head while you're flying away, your Start button not working for a bit, the Start menu popping up by itself. But there's no obvious apparent full-on corruption going on. All the visibly glitchy behaviour is subtle and temporary.
It was truly such a perfect coincidental storm of circumstances that happened to make it fall so neatly in line with all the rumours. In hindsight, there are of course also some noteworthy differences we can identify: most prominently, in the Pikablu rumour there's an NPC with supposed dialogue specific to this sequence, which would mean this would have to be an intentionally programmed easter egg with the prior random interactions as a very obtuse but presumably intentional trigger, whereas the Mew trick features no new NPC dialogue because it's simply a legitimate glitch that these NPC interactions happen to trigger. But not every rumour involved new dialogue, and legitimate glitches in games can also sometimes trigger unused dialogue; even with hindsight, nothing about the instructions themselves should have been a giveaway that the Mew trick was the genuine article in a sea of urban legends.
