Professor Oak
Pokemon Professor
The Space World 97 Mew is currently the oldest event Pokemon we have the privilege of preserving and releasing to the Pokemon community.
This Mew was distributed at Nintendo Space World '97, which was held at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan from November 21st to 23rd 1997. While originally going to be run until November 23rd, the distribution was later extended to the non-exhibition day November 24th.
Click the thumbnail for a full size poster from this event:
To be eligible to receive a Mew, players had to submit an application postcard, only 100,000 people were able to receive this Mew.
At this distribution, players connected their game cartridge to a Mew machine. On-screen, a visual of a Mew traveling through a cable to the player's game would appear.
How did we come to be in position of a Space World 97 Mew?
Reddit user salinbreezy posted in /r/pokemon/ about a Mew obtained in a local thrift store. In this store salinbreezy had purchased an atomic purple Game Boy Color with Japanese Pokémon Blue, Green, TCG and Gold games.
The Japanese Pokémon Blue had a save game present, with this Space World 97 Mew on the cartridge. Posting to Reddit about his find this got noticed by @HaxAras who informed@suloku, who then contacted @Deoxyz with a view of getting this extremely rare Mew preserved.
Deoxys made contact with salinbreezy who agreed to post him the Japanese Pokemon Blue cartridge, so the save game could be backed up, before the battery in the cart died.
The process and tools outlined in the Digiex guide GameBoy / GameBoy Colour USB Save Game / Rom Backup was used to backup the save game and make a rom dump of the cartridge. As suspected the cartridge was simply a standard Japanese Pokemon Blue cartridge with the SHA1 of 0da501e3e5c51ab8fef55b092dcdd7e6b050e424
However, the Space World 97 Mew was now preserved indefinitely. It has since been checked for legitimacy and confirmed to be a genuine event, making this is the oldest known event Pokemon to be preserved.
For some perspective Pokemon Red and Blue, the first Pokemon games to be released outside of Japan we’re released in North America on September 28th 1998, Australia and New Zealand on October 23rd 1998 and finally in Europe on October 5th 1999.
So depending where about in the world you are from this event Pokemon could have been distributed almost two years before Pokemon was released in your region. Needless to say this is a very rare find, even more so that the battery in the Pokemon Blue cart had lasted 21 years, here I was thinking my European Pokemon Red cart was doing well at 19 years!
Screenshots:
Downloads:
You have the choice of downloading the Space World 97 Mew as a pk1 file, extracted from the dumped save game via Pkhex, or the original save game, as it was at the time when it was dumped.
Pokemon GEN1 JPN Space World 97 Mew .pk1 Download
Pokemon GEN1 JPN Space World 97 Mew Save Game Download
All credit for making this release possible goes to salinbreezy and @Deoxyz, thank you once again for this!
<3 Mew
