In 1999 and 2000, I was able to obtain 14 Official Event Mews from the US Mall Tours for Pokémon Trading Card Game (1999) and Pokemon Stadium / Pokemon Movie (2000). I was contacted about helping to preserve information on these Event Mews – here are the results of my completed restoration project.

In 2016, a person named Suloku Mago emailed me out of the blue asking for information about my old website from 1999. I was horrified to hear that the site was still up and running. Written in Notepad, pokeball animated gifs, proudly designed for 800×600.. oh dear.

But among the terrible HTML, he had found some pictures of a mall event I attended in 1999, and the event Mews I had collected. These are all legitimate Mews from Pokemon Mall events that happened in 1999 for the launch of the Pokemon TCG, then in 2000 for the Pokemon First Movie and Pokemon Stadium launch. You would insert your Gen1 cartridge into a machine, while promo staff would fill out a paper "Certificate of Authenticity" for your personal Mew.

The Trainer names are LUIGE or LINKW. The Trainer ID is generated sequentially from the Mew distribution machine. The first Mew from a machine is 00001, the second 00002, 00003, so on. The LUIGE Mews came from a Pokemon TCG event in 1999, where I made friends with a Nintendo rep named Jeremy Hepworth. He traded these two, numbers 00012 and 00014 to us. The story as I remember it was that the machines were scheduled to go on tour but had technical difficulties. He had snagged these two (and the certificates of authenticity) during some testing runs.

The LINKW Mews came from a Summer 2000 Mall Event in Arlington, TX promoting Pokemon Stadium and the 2000 movie. They had four of the machines running simultanously for a huge line of people. Once the lines died off I went through the machines and got 12 of them.

Suloku wanted to know if I remembered anything about the Mews, like trainer ID or stats. He is documenting as much as he can about all of the different events and their Pokemon. Luckily, what I had for him is much, much better.

Back in the late 90's I worked as a "Pokemon Gym Leader" for KB ToyWorks. My weekend duties included playing Pokemon TCG with kids, and promoting Pokemon in all ways. Supported by Wizards of the Coast with tons of materials, it was a blast. During that gig, I ended up buying a save backup cart for my Game Boy, and started cloning these event Mews for the kids.

So when Suloko asked, I dug up all my Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow carts and the save backup carts, and started pulling the Mews together. I found six of them on a Blue save. I found another six sitting in Pokemon Stadium 1. And the last two were in a box on Stadium 2. I was able to shuffle all of the Mews to one Stadium Cart, and through much trickery, get them onto a fresh Pokemon Yellow save. Using a Retron 5, I copied the save from the Pokemon Yellow cart onto my SD card.

Now I gift these Mews to Suloku, and to all of you. I hope these Mews provide useful information, thank you for reading, and please let me know what kind of information or data you pull from the save!

Mew Restoration Project – Hardware involved

Hardware used

https://preview.redd.it/cjoyfh6iordg1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1170999dbdb253f8f56ffaf03c65c0018a000341

The Brainboy cartridges (bottom) hold saves dating back to 2002. These were used to restore old save files, and back up everything in case of corruption.

The Gen1 carts were used to restore saves, and to move Mew data between Gameboy Games/Stadium Carts

Mew data was transferred and shuffled using the Pokémon Stadium cartridges. Pokemon Stadium 2 (3 in Japan) has the best Gen1/2 Box management system. Pokemon Stadium 1 is ok but if you can get your hands on 2 it is worth it.

Finally, the Retron 5 was utilized to back up the final combined Mew save to a SD card for distribution to the net and backup purposes.

Gen1 Event Mews "Certificate of Authenticity"

Mew Certificate of Authenticity

https://preview.redd.it/l9d2rovnordg1.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=514aeba34239461f26cc8b45669113e62fccf502

These print outs were handed out by Nintendo promotion staff during the Mall Tours.

The Mew upload machine would stamp your Mew with a unique Trainer ID number, which was then copied to a "Certificate of Authenticity" for the recipient.

The Trainer ID is generated sequentially from the Mew distribution machine. The first Mew from a machine is 00001, the second 00002, 00003, so on.

I have found 12 of my 14 certificates, two of them are MIA. 🙁

Save files

The following link is for save files used on a Retron 5.
Retron5 Format Save File: https://goo.gl/f2XZhs

The link below is a standard 32kb Gameboy save file that can be used with emulators or other tools.
Converted Save File: https://goo.gl/tr06GS

Update on Save File Contents from Suloku Mago:

About the Mews in the save:
- Every single one of them has the same DVs (5)/10/1/5/12
- The first 6 Mews have been trained to level 15 (one to level 16)
- The next 6 Mews are untouched.
- The last 2 Mews are at level 100, max stat experience and custom moveset, but everything else is legit.

I'm glad to inform you that you did not change your original Mew's (#12 and #14) DVs, you only changed stat experience. Also, they are tenchnically not hacked, as they just have the stat experience maxed and level 100, which is something you can achieve in-game. These "test" mews have the very same DVs as all (or most) other mews, which makes sense taking into account they come from the distro machines for the tour. Most valuable information is that they were actually named LUIGE and not LUIGIE, because now I have proof about LUIGE and LUIGIE Mews, both with certificate, which is an interesting fact.

The first 6 mews have been trained to level 15 (and one to level 16).

As I already stated, what makes a Mew an official mew are OT, ID and DVs. They were all distributed at level 5 with pound as the only move. All these Mews can be reverted to their distribution state with no effort and, in my opinion, will still be legit. Some people won't accept this, but since your save has your original Mews, it's ok for everybody.

The other 6 LINKW Mews are untouched as you received them back in the day (I bet these were the ones stored in stadium 1?)

ps: I don't know if you know this, but I used this program to convert to a "standard" save file (32 kb) as I noticed it used some kind of compression format (it wasn't 32 kb, then I opened the file with an hex editor and found a "RTN5" header, so searched a tool to re-convert): <https://www.retro5.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=257>

You'll need the standard 32kb file for any emulator or other tools usage.