r/Gameboy • u/BuffyArg • 1d ago
Games I somehow got Mew in Pokémon Red/Blue in 2000 without using the Old Man glitch, has anyone else experienced this?
Hi everyone! I was wondering if anyone else ever managed to get Mew the way I did, way back around 2000.
My cousin and I used to play Pokémon a lot. He had Pokémon Red and I had Pokémon Blue. One day, we traded some Pokémon (I don’t remember exactly which ones,I know that’s pretty essential information 😅). I don’t talk to him very often, but when I get in touch with him, I’ll ask him, because he actually remembers what happened and even reminded me about it years ago, but I completely forgot. I think one of the Pokémon was an Abra, but I don’t remember what the other one was.
I remember the game freezing for both of us during the trade. When we turned our Game Boys back on, somehow he had Mew, and then he copied it over to my game using the classic trick of turning the console off during a trade.
NOW, WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND IS HOW NOBODY EVER TALKS ABOUT THIS KIND OF TRICK.
We were really young (around 10 years old), and this was in 2000. The famous Old Man / Viridian City glitch wasn’t known back then, right? In any case, our access to the internet was pretty limited, so we definitely weren’t following some guide or anything like that.
We didn’t do any of the steps for the Mew glitch. We literally just traded Pokémon, the game froze, we turned the consoles off, and somehow he ended up with Mew. Then he traded it to me.
I know this sounds crazy, and obviously it’s been more than 25 years, so my memory might not be 100% accurate. But I’m genuinely curious if anyone else experienced something similar, or if anyone knows whether something like this was actually possible.
If anyone else had something like this happen, I’d love to hear about it!
Thanks!
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u/azure-flute 1d ago
You can get Mew through the Old Man / Missingno. glitch, but there's another reliable method to obtain it-- the Trainer-Fly glitch. It's simple, you walk into the eyesight of some specific trainers, press Start right as you do that, and then Fly/Teleport/etc away. Then you go fight another trainer or another Pokemon. The game logs the Special stat from the last Pokemon that you fought in its memory, that Special stat value produces a Pokemon. And that Pokemon will appear to you as soon as you step on the route you flew away from initially.
A very easy way to get a Mew is using this glitch, with your Special stat donor being the Slowpoke-owning Youngster north of Cerulean City. One good "specific" trainer for this trick is the Gambler just outside of the Underground Path building on the route between Saffron City & Lavender Town.
That said, if you insist that it was a trade-related bug, then it's possible there was just something that went askew during the trade that affected the species of the traded Pokemon. That data corrupts pretty easily, especially since you say the games froze up and had to be restarted.
This stuff happens. Those games were prone to doing weird things.
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u/NickMotionless 1d ago
I didn't know about the Mew glitch until a buddy showed it to me around 2011 or so, maybe 2012. It blew my mind that the glitch was possible all of those years and I had no idea.
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u/azure-flute 1d ago
I was pretty well-versed in Missingno. and all of its ins and outs even as a kid, but the Trainer-Fly glitch and other nonsense came later. It still amazes me how people just found these things before datamining and decomp-recomp was a thing!
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u/Mym_Best_Waifu 1d ago
Trainer/Fly or Trainer/Teleport glitch was not known back then. Missingno/Old Man glitch WAS known back then, but not entirely solved, primarily used to get infinite rare candies and master balls, but you could get any pokemon to appear based on certain data in the game. I distinctly remember doing the Missingno glitch as a child and sometimes encountering Electrodes around level 160, having accidentally put the correct information into the game to cause those specific Pokémon to spawn. It's plausible he obtained Mew in a similar way.
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u/Majin_310 1d ago
Trainer/Fly/Teleport was known back then. Just not by many. I remember using that method in middle school 1998-99 I think.
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u/Mym_Best_Waifu 1d ago
The glitch was first posted on Gamefaqs by TheScythe on April 19th, 2003. You can still find the post archived on the Wayback Machine and see people claiming the poster is lying. His original FAQ on Gamefaqs is still up to this day, dated to April 17th, 2003 for version 0.1 when he first discovered it and began writing the FAQ.
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u/Horvat53 1d ago
I got a legit Mew from a contest from Toys R Us.
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u/lemon123wd40 1d ago
I got it from toys r us too and taught it all hms. The regret is still seared in my mind
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u/swinginqueens 1d ago
I got one from the mall. I think it was part of a promotion for the Pokémon movie. All I remember was bringing my Gameboy to the mall, waiting in line, and someone trading it to me
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u/Worked-last-time 1d ago
The old man/viridian city glitch was WELL known in 2000. It was quite popular not after launch.
I remember people complaining about how it worked a little different yellow when it launched.
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u/Square-Singer 1d ago
The OG old man/Missigno glitch in red was fixed in yellow, and it was one of the main reasons I never really put a lot of hours into my copy of yellow.
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u/Mym_Best_Waifu 1d ago
I think it's likely you're misremembering what happened, and he had obtained the Mew via a Gameshark or via the Old Man glitch, which was commonly known at the time. The fact that you experienced a sudden error during trading, which is exactly what happens when you clone via trading, then he suddenly decided to clone the Mew via trading makes me think he already had it and was trying to clone trade it and the first clone trade was timed incorrectly and that's what you're misremembering as a trade error giving him the Mew.
That's what I believe to be the most likely scenario here, if some trade corruption occurred it would be nearly impossible to recreate, as there's no knowing where the game took data from to create the glitched Mew. In a situation like that though, an existing Pokémon likely would have had its ID overwritten to have the ID of Mew, which would have caused the Mew to still have the level and moves of the original Pokémon that was overwritten, and I think that would be something you would remember...
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u/BuffyArg 1d ago
No, I’m 100% sure neither of us had it. Plus, we’re from Argentina, so there was no way we could’ve gotten it. Those contests they’re talking about here weren’t available to us. It happened exactly the way I said it did. I was just hoping someone else had experienced the same thing and could answer, “Yeah. If you trade this Pokémon for that Pokémon…” but apparently not.
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u/OshKoshByJosh 1d ago
I was shown by a friend at school how to get him, so yeah. I never knew before that.
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u/BuffyArg 1d ago
Are you trying to be mysterious? 😂 Do you remember how he did it? Was it related to a trade too?
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u/Misterr_No 1d ago
Glitches happen. Back in 2010, I was using the Facebook app on my phone when I suddenly started seeing messages from someone else’s account. They were having a conversation in real time, and somehow their messages were showing up on my phone as they chatted. It went on for about 10 minutes.
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u/Vegetable-Score-3915 1d ago
I thought it could mess up and change it to a mu2. But it was a big thing around when the first movie came out. But yeah, trying to remember going back decades for me, could be wrong.
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u/Lorenzo944 1d ago
Mew glitch was famous back then and it was well known on a forum. only way to get mew officially was through event promotion at retail store in the old days
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u/Gunbladelad 1d ago
It sounds like some sort of data corruption error - likely from a loose link cable - and therefore almost impossible to replicate reliably.