An exclusive, extended excerpt from ON Games Volume 2, presented here as part of our tribute to Pokémon’s 30th anniversary.
You’ve probably come across the Mew rumor—supposedly hidden beneath a truck.
A stealthy, 151st Pokémon secreted into Pokémon Red, Blue, and Green required a quick, impulsive detour beyond the usual boundaries to track it down. Leave Vermilion City heading south, then paddle to the east of the small dock that normally takes you to the SS Anne, and you’ll quickly find yourself on yet another directionless trip around the world. After you pass the ship, you’ll spot a small patch of land that looks harmless enough. Getting to that little stretch of shore means getting past a ticket inspector—either by exploiting a glitch or using some other clever shortcut—and then borrowing a friend’s Pokémon, the kind that can use Surf before you’re officially allowed to. Make the brief hop over the harbor water, and when you reach the shore, you’ll find a lone, discarded truck parked out of view from any properly reachable part of the map. Strangely, it’s the only truck model in the entire game. If you manage to shove it aside with a Pokémon that knows Strength, a Poké Ball appears beneath it. Inside that Poké Ball is Mew.
Of course, there was never any Mew tucked under that truck. Still, as with many famous stories, the lack of hard proof matters less than the appeal of the tale itself. Mew’s supposed absence didn’t stop the truck legend—it spread widely, first soaking Japan’s schoolyards, then rolling into North America, and finally traveling around the globe until it became the most commonly repeated playground myth of modern times. If you were a kid in the 90s, fully swept up in Pokémania, you knew the Mew-and-truck story.
Like so many people now stepping into their early-to-mid 30s, this feels less like one person’s memory and more like a shared one. A big part of my childhood was shaped by this single rumor. I had my father’s original Game Boy (on which he had devoted himself stoically to Tetris—only Tetris), my copies of Red and Blue, a Link Cable, and—unfortunately—no friends who could actually trade. Dear reader, I was completely absorbed in it. I tried everything to reach that rumored patch of ground.
Sadly for seven-year-old Chris, I wasn’t great at finding glitches—and, more importantly, nobody in my particular playground knew the ticket inspector workaround. “Trying everything” mostly meant running the same stubborn NPC conversation over and over, running into the same handful of fencing tiles blocking the way, or just staring out toward the ocean beyond—where the truck stayed exactly where it was, and my Mew stayed forever out of reach.
In the end, the mystery had to carry the weight. And for me, as for millions of other seven-year-olds at the time, it did. Even without the payoff, Mew sparked a lifelong personal attachment to a series that, for reasons I could never neatly explain, always seemed bigger and more genuine than what those few dozen 8-bit pixels on the screen appeared to show.
“Sometimes the unresolved, unsolved mystery is more intriguing than the one with a clear answer.”
Here’s the hopeful twist, though: as my obsession grew, shifting from merely “living” the mystery toward something closer to understanding it, I learned that there wasn’t any Mew under the truck—yet there was a hidden 151st Pokémon somewhere in the game. And yes, it really was Mew. The mythical, never-found Pokémon that people only ever mentioned in whispers and scrawled notes, drifting through secret laboratories and battered research notebooks tucked into the game’s darker corners. The Pokémon many assumed must exist somewhere, simply because Mewtwo was real and catchable. The difference was that, rather than being an intentional hidden Easter egg planted by developer Game Freak, the “true” Mew wasn’t designed to be uncovered at all—its eventual appearance, along with the wave of rumors that turned Pokémon’s initially modest Japanese sales into a global mega-phenomenon, happened purely by accident.
Or at least, that’s how most people remember it. Mew’s story is one of the great legends of gaming: a blend of mystery and mythology, equal parts coincidence and real ingenuity. I’ve always believed it captures the series at its best. Fleeting and strange, a game you can experience both on-screen and off, along the edges of a map, with your feet straddling both the real world and the virtual one—gazing into the unknown.
It also reflects something I’ve increasingly come to notice as I’ve grown up—or, depending on who you ask, something that the games themselves have been made to simplify. The big, multi-level dungeons of the past, once gateways to their own mythical and legendary Pokémon, have been reduced into straighter routes. Mysterious mechanics have gradually been replaced by the straightforward, with their hidden depth stripped down, resolved, simplified, or made plain. A group of mischievous young developers, as expected, eventually became a corporation with global reach—guided by brand standards and profit targets—now overseeing the largest entertainment franchise in history. I figured I’d dig into the real origins behind these old myths and puzzles, maybe revisit a few memories, and offer a nod to the series’ distant, storied past. But just like Mew’s tale, I realized in the process that the old legends are only one layer of the story.
The first account of Mew, along with Pokémon’s rapid viral spread, goes something like this:
With only a short time left before Pokémon Red and Green’s original Japanese release, and their code locked down after a frantic final round of bug-fixing, Shigeki Morimoto—an engineer known, among other things, for a slightly mischievous streak—decided to sneak in one last, unauthorized change. By getting rid of the debugger, he discovered he had opened up 300 bytes on the cartridge, which was just enough room for one more, extremely small, 151st Pokémon.
He reasoned that it ought to be Mew: Game Freak had already brought it up in the game by name, though only in hushed, cryptic ways, and it hadn’t been meant to actually appear—making it a perfect little joke for the team. Then he quickly drafted a straightforward design and slipped it in, despite Nintendo’s clear irritation when it was later found out (that whole debugging stage, it was later revealed, ended up becoming Nintendo’s priciest one of all time). Inevitably, adding fresh code right after debugging wrapped also created, as you might expect, a new bug: a glitch that let players
…to uncover and seize a Mew that was never supposed to be found.
That glitch, in fact…
shows up in a completely different part of the games, in scenarios far less exciting than the stories about mysterious trucks and dodging guards. Still, not long afterward, word spread, and that particular moment in time started gathering real momentum. “The monthly sales we had achieved up until that point started to be matched by weekly sales,” Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara explained in later years, “before eventually growing to become three, then four times as large.” In the end, the games climbed to the very top of Japan’s sales charts—but only after more than a year had passed since their initial release.
The real story, however, is a bit more complicated. The huge momentum sparked by Mew’s inclusion was partly coincidental—though it also wasn’t entirely accidental. The decision to add Mew wasn’t solely Morimoto’s. It was, rather, a joint choice made by the full Game Freak team, with particular guidance from Ken Sugimori, the series’ well-known artist and designer, as well as Satoshi Tajiri, the legendary co-creator who’s now notoriously private.
Back in the mid-80s, Sugimori and Tajiri were teenagers who were deeply into arcade games. Their passion was sparked by one arcade title where they first crossed paths and connected: Xevious. That game became a major hit in arcades, fueled by a remarkably similar chain of circumstances. Fans passed around urban legends about secret appearances of strange sprites, complicated methods for uncovering Easter eggs, and characters and locations that may or may not have been real. Much of the credit for documenting that kind of development history—and many other efforts—goes to a man named Kyle Tarpley, who’s known online as Dr. Lava, along with the casual circle of other researchers, dataminers, translators, and archivists who work with him.
“My work is very, very laborious,” he tells me as we begin laying out his process. “I don’t think there are many people out there, especially YouTubers, who are willing to put up with that kind of dull repetition.”
What Tarpley is getting at—delivered with a gruff, wry streak—is the long stretch of searching for information, organizing it, translating it, polishing it, and assembling it into videos. That effort started as contributions to his channel, Dr. Lava’s Lost Pokémon, before he later landed a full-time role as a writer-researcher for a bigger team. “I honestly don’t even know why my boss pays me for this,” he says, half-laughing. “It would be way better to just churn out content. Luckily, he’s happy to cover the costs if I do it the meticulous way.”
“There are countless books and magazine interviews and everything else. There are just thousands and thousands of pages, still untranslated, only in Japanese…”
Now living in China with his family, Tarpley balances dry humor with a mild streak of skepticism, the way many Gen X voices do. He speaks with a restrained, but unmistakable Arkansan rhythm. It’s the tone of someone who might have spent their life on something arguably pointless—like tracking down runaway alligators or serving as sheriff in a small town plagued by a persistent drunk. Yet when he talks about smoking guns and epic quests, he’s really referring to old development stories and even the most ordinary bits of conversation, as he sifts through thousands of pages from Japanese magazine and book interviews in pursuit of untold Pokémon secrets.
On paper, his method looks simple—though in reality it’s neither quick nor easy. Through contacts in Japan or his own independent digging, he finds a conversation that took place somewhere with a designer involved in one of the earlier Pokémon games. Then he locates the original materials—say, an untranslated Japanese book about illustration design that includes an interview with Ken Sugimori (along with lots of other finds, like Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura)—and scans it straight through page by page. After that, he runs the pages through DeepL, which he considers more accurate than Google, and carefully works through the content to pull out leads. He logs relevant passages into files sorted by game. Once he spots something promising, he sends it for professional translation, then searches through his large archive of files for any related mentions, stitches everything into a coherent account when one emerges, and finally turns it into a video script.
Tarpley has tried this approach with a few other franchises—Mario and Zelda, for example—but he insists Pokémon is different. While those other topics might draw a few thousand views, a similar video centered on Pokémon could reach dramatically higher numbers, often landing in the hundreds of thousands or even beyond. He points to the series’ lasting popularity and the enormous revenue it has produced, but he also highlights its dedicated fanbase. “There’s something I just can’t quite put into words that gives it that special pull,” he says. That attracts a particular kind of follower and a specific age group—early 30s, lightly colored by nostalgia, the sort of audience we all recognize—that finds it hard to fully leave childhood behind.
“For people in my line of work,” he explains, “it’s the perfect franchise.” There’s a massive community, sure, but “they care about even the smallest details.” Add to that a “virtually endless reservoir” of unused material worth digging into, and Dr. Lava’s videos become irresistible for someone like me—an obsessive millennial who can’t help but look back. “There are countless books and magazine interviews and everything else. There are just thousands and thousands of pages, still untranslated, only in Japanese.” The result, as he describes it, is pure alchemy. You could translate just a handful of pages, he says, “and find gold, gold, gold, gold.”
One especially rich source—”so much gold”—is a book written by Tajiri himself, titled A Catcher in Pac-Land. It functions as a memoir of his teenage years spent across the wide variety of arcades in 1980s Japan. Inside is an eye-catching story, which Tarpley is kind enough to share.
A young Tajiri, hooked by the Xevious shooter legends that were already circulating, started spreading rumors of his own about hidden tricks in the game—until the game’s creator, Masanobu Endō, a figure Tajiri and his friends regarded as a true legend, showed up at the local arcade to refute them. Tajiri ended up getting mocked by his classmates. “In one swift motion, I went from being a missionary to a con artist,” he recalled. “I was criticized and pushed out. When I came into an arcade, even people who had been my friends were pointing at me.” That went on until Endō returned—almost like a friendly figure descending from above—to declare Tajiri was still a good kid, and after that, his fellow Xevious fans ultimately allowed him back into the fold.
Later, during a roundtable discussion that included Sugimori and Endō—one Tarpley points me toward again (and this is likely Tajiri’s final known public appearance, back in 2016)—Tajiri admitted he may have embellished things a little. For starters, he and Endō had a fairly steady correspondence. And Endō remembered that he genuinely enjoyed encouraging those playful rumors as well. From his perspective, it was all part of a plan. He had deliberately nurtured an air of mystery around Xevious, believing it was more fun that way, and he also saw it as a clever way to raise awareness.
Just as importantly, that interview offers another window into Tajiri and Sugimori’s clear intention: to recreate the kind of playground mythology that surrounded Xevious and its viral success by making a game full of secrets of their own. “I believe it was crucial that
Endō-san kept the mystery deliberately fuzzy. That’s why, even when people come to me with all sorts of questions about Pokémon, I try not to answer in a way that feels too definite,” Sugimori said. “Being able to appreciate it even more when it stays ambiguous is something I picked up from my…
experience with Xevious, and I hold it dear.
Tajiri, with a touch of pushback from the interviewer, put it even more directly: “Without Xevious, there would be no Pokémon!”
Tarpley and his group of researchers and historians—serious enthusiasts in their own right—pieced this together, blending the information they found with excerpts from interviews and memoirs, to form a clearer picture of Mew’s story. The Game Freak team, including the mischievous Morimoto, really did consider releasing Mew at one stage. That meant adding the special Pokémon into the game’s code created an easy path for something like a future release. In the end, it arrived via a competition giveaway, after the truck rumor, in CoroCoro magazine. More than 78,000 people in Japan competed for only 20 real, numbered Mews—each one distributed through a Link Cable, delivered by Morimoto himself. I keep thinking about it, trying not to dwell on how many of those 20 rare cartridges might have disappeared over time.
That same mysterious truck also has its own history. A dedicated datamining collective called Helix Chamber reportedly spotted a concealed area buried in some older prototype files, placed just southeast of Vermillion City—the exact spot where the truck was discovered. So what’s located in that half-finished little town? Two buildings: a Pokémon Center, plus a single truck. It looks as though it ended up in the game almost by accident. Or perhaps the developers believed that leaving it where it was—hidden from view and practically unreachable—would be “safe,” assuming nobody would ever find it.
For sharp-eyed Pokémon fans, the irony jumps out. With Xevious, a leftover asset helped fuel one of its most famous rumors: about a supposedly summonable hidden Vietnam-era F-4 Phantom fighter jet in the entirely futuristic sci-fi shooter. Then a different game, drawing on that same atmosphere of enigma and viral storytelling, ended up launching its own “playground” rumor—triggered by yet another stray item in the code. It may all have aligned purely by chance, but the context—the hastily written notes about a hard-to-pin-down legendary Pokémon, and the lasting conviction held by Tajiri and Sugimori that some questions are better left without answers—offers plenty of support for Tarpley. It was, to borrow his wording, a lucky break. One that was deliberately encouraged and allowed to grow.
“In the age of the Internet, is it even possible? Not the way it used to be.”
I can’t help wondering whether mysteries like these can still happen today. If Pokémon were ever able to recover that sense of wonder—if its mythology can keep evolving—especially now that datamining (in a way, almost fittingly, the method that powers a lot of this “archaeology”) is so widespread, and the fanbase so intense and alert, it’s basically impossible to keep secrets hidden in modern Pokémon games. Put simply, if Tarpley’s “near infinite” supply of material ever does get exhausted.
He pauses, then says, “I guess, no.” He explains: first, with the newest games, the ongoing rhythm of daily coverage makes it easier to pull every recent interview into the spotlight. “Every little detail that shows up will be posted on the Nintendo Life or Eurogamer homepage.” The second point is a bit of a half-truth: “There aren’t really magazines anymore.” Or, as he clarifies, not in the same form or volume as before. “There just aren’t thousands of pages of untranslated material that nobody else has, material I can bring to life.” At the same time, dataminers move faster and get more done—full game information, down to the smallest specifics like Pokémon locations, spawn rates, and even damage figures that once required access to the game’s code are now appearing on well-known sites like Serebii or Bulbapedia within hours after a new game launches.
All of that is intensified by yet another factor: Game Freak, which—since the franchise became a major phenomenon—has seen its devoted fans turn into a tougher, more demanding audience, while its developers have become increasingly wary of controversy. As a result, they tend to hold back more. That’s something I can personally confirm. Between 2016 and 2019, I conducted three interviews with series lead Junichi Masuda for Eurogamer. After that, there were no more. Tarpley sums it up this way: “There’s just no pile of treasure left waiting to be dug up.”
The classic games, along with the huge chapters of untold history around them, will continue to be a real treasure trove. But for Tarpley and the rest of the people chasing these leads, that’s largely where things stand. Pokémon’s stretch of myth and mystery seems to have reached the endpoint you’d expect. “In the age of the Internet, is it even achievable?” he muses. “Not like it was.”
One person—who uses only an online identity—disagrees. Tahk0 (“taco”) is a familiar name to anyone who spends time on the internet and hangs around Pokémon fan spaces. He’s a person from the U.S. West Coast, in his early to mid-30s, who often wears a varsity jacket and has a distinctive, floppy fringe styled after Fall Out Boy, echoing the emo-skater look that was common in the mid-2000s. By trade, he’s a professional pixel artist (an inspiration he traces back to 8bit Pokémon), though, just like his real name, he keeps the games he’s worked on private. His attention is especially drawn to Pikachu.
I watch him standing in front of a tastefully lit version of the classic content creator setup—a Kallax wall decorated with yolk-colored Pokémon memorabilia—and I see nearly 50 million millennials who got hooked on Pokémon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow starting in 1996 and continuing afterward. And I recognize pieces of myself in it. On the surface, he looks like the sort of person Tarpley describes when he talks about kids from the ’90s who wouldn’t let go of that part of their childhood. But beneath that, he’s pushing a quiet shift forward.
“I agree that, yes, that time period is behind us,” he says, talking about when Game Freak could still hide a secret Pokémon in the game’s code. “But when you look at that, you start to see how those things changed. I wouldn’t call it ruined—I think it’s just society evolving in a natural way.” For Tahk0, datamining, nonstop coverage, and the rapid global spread of information that the internet makes possible—
Pokémon’s developers have been forced to adjust. “ ‘Ruining it’ paints a bleak picture,” he says. “It was always bound to happen. Society was moving in that direction—you can’t force the genie back into the bottle, so why should we mourn it?”
Much like my earlier exchange with Dr. Lava, I started talking with Tahk0 after watching a YouTube clip. The difference this time is that Tahk0 isn’t a YouTuber, nor anything resembling a “content creator” in the usual sense. The video that drew me in is called “There’s more narrative in Pokémon Legends: Arceus than you might think,” and, as he puts it, he made it “because – I don’t know why – people only pay attention to you if it’s in video format.” He also has several messages he genuinely wants Pokémon fans to take in.
“At its core, Pokémon goes beyond Pokémon… that’s why Pokémon flourishes… it rises past the game itself. From the very beginning, it’s always been bigger than the game.”
Under the surface of the usual lore-focused crowd, Tahk0’s video reads like a sincere invitation to look at games differently. “Let’s meet games halfway,” he says at one point, before sending viewers to an adjacent project he calls the Lore Library.
(Quick confession: I’ve never found “lore”—especially in games—particularly sensible. A bunch of proper nouns collide, a universe is born, and so on. The good news is that this “lore” isn’t like that—if anything, calling it “lore” may even be a stretch.)
Tahk0 explains that his Lore Library is closer to a book club. Every Sunday, he gathers a few dozen people to watch a game walkthrough, a film, or an episode of television together. They often pause to jot down notes, capture screenshots, or swap observations, then talk about what they took away afterward. Instead of handing down official verdicts, they discuss their interpretations—what they think the material is saying. “What emotion should I be feeling right now?” Tahk0 asks, adding: “What message are they trying to get across?” Everyone is encouraged to start fresh.
About the group, Tahk0 notes, “The interesting thing is they’re eager to learn and they’re open to not knowing everything.” He adds, “I think that’s a key piece—being comfortable with not being the expert.” Overall, it strikes me as an unexpectedly literary way to understand games—it really feels like a close-reading circle, even like a weekly literature seminar. Tahk0 stresses that this matters when trying to reach Pokémon’s deeper core.
The Pokémon Legends: Arceus video starts with a simple comparison: the Pokémon games—especially the newer ones—feature obvious storytelling about saving the world, the kind of narrative you’d expect in Pokémon. But they also include a secondary layer of storytelling. He points to moments that feel less like conventional plot beats and more like a set of “puzzle pieces.” Here, he connects clues hidden in very small details—items you may never even notice tucked into corners; specific Pokédex entries and the tone behind them; and even NPC accents inferred only from pieces of dialogue you never hear fully, tied to particular locations and moments. He insists that Game Freak leaves these things intentionally for players to find and assemble themselves.
It’s important to underline that this isn’t a widely shared perspective among Pokémon fans. After posting his thoughts about the storytelling embedded in Pokémon since the Game Boy era, Tahk0 says he ran into major backlash across social media. “I had developers and well-known influencers—people I genuinely admired—making fun of me,” he recalls. “And I’m thinking, ‘I swear I’m not making this up!’”
For Tahk0, a common mistake Pokémon players make is treating the games as either too casual or too literal—almost in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe, everything is connected” way. “Maybe a decent example I’ve run into,” he says, “is that sometimes a social media algorithm throws a SpongeBob SquarePants superfan into your feed.” He mimics the type of post: “They’re like, ‘Here are SpongeBob’s superpowers. He can detach his arms and grow them back, and if you compare his strength to other characters…’” Tahk0 laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s the point. I think it was meant to be funny!’”
At the heart of everything Tahk0 does is a push for people to “not take Pokémon so literally,” and by doing that, move closer to what he believes the series truly means. “The only voices talking about Pokémon are the ones who take it the most literally—but it’s actually more like: what does it mean for me in my life? That’s the heart of Pokémon.” It’s certainly an unusual viewpoint, but as our conversation continues, I start to understand why. The clearest explanation, in fact, loops back to his answer to my original question.
I explained my own take: I think Pokémon’s success comes more from its many in-game myths and real-world urban legends than most people realize. Still, before I can get to the main issue—my worry that this era of mythmaking might be nearing an end—Tahk0 goes even further. “I think they’re completely intertwined,” he says. “I believe they’re basically the same thing.”
“Pokémon’s meaning exists beyond Pokémon, right?” I ask, doing my best to follow along. “That’s what I’m getting at when I say it’s inseparable. Whether it’s a playground story or something built into the game itself, you keep carrying on that conversation in a social setting. Either directly—or even if you’re reading about it in a magazine without saying a word. I honestly think that’s likely why Pokémon became successful: it’s bigger than the game. From the start, it goes beyond the game.”
“Pokémon is an idea that came out of the Game Boy’s technology,” Ken Sugimori said in a much older interview, translated by one of Kyle Tarpley’s colleagues—a private archivist known only as GlitterBerri. The designer describes a conversation with his longtime friend: “Tajiri said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we could use the Game Boy Link Cables, which were previously used only for player competition, to trade something?’”
Tahk0 recognizes the interview right away. He enthusiastically points to the mention of the Link Cables in Pokémon’s beginnings, then shifts to the idea of shiny Pokémon—extremely rare variants with different coloring that once sparked playground tales of their own—before moving on to the story behind Pikachu. It’s a fascinating one: the legend goes that a programmer loved the design so much that he hid it in Viridian Forest, giving players a tiny chance to find it, which helped create a feeling of scarcity and, as a result, a kind of prestige. The final outcome was arguably the most beloved and instantly recognizable creature design in modern history. One study suggested that roughly 50 percent more American millennials could identify a Pikachu image than a photograph of former U.S. president Joe Biden. And from there, the conversation lands at Pokémon Go—the unmistakable centerpiece of any discussion about Pokémon’s viral breakthrough.
“That’s not an accident,” Tahk0 insists—that Pokémon managed yet another wave of viral success, even…