There was a time when the Internet was young, and we were young, and it was not certain that any particular video game would have comprehensive guides available online, such that the official game guides had more purpose than they do now, and could be extremely frustrating if they presented false information, as they sometimes did.

Or incomplete information, as was the case with Pokémon, for in the infancy of that game, before its player base and cultural status was large enough among English speakers to create extensive online discussion between players, there was, as I recall for myself, very little help with some of the more confusing aspects of the game, and no real help for those issues that the game guide failed to mention.

Such as Mew, the legendary, the mythical, indeed perhaps the most mythical Pokemon that Game Freak ever designed, for it spawned one falsehood after another about how to obtain the thing -- look under the truck, surf past the ship, do this, do that, my uncle works at Nintendo and he knows exactly how to find it.

Since that time Game Freak has called many of its post-endgame event-exclusive Pokemon "mythical", but there is only one that truly lives up to that name, because it is the only one whose myth lived in the real world. Nobody ever cared about Celebi near as much as we all were desperate to know how to get Mew.

And Game Freak gives the game away too much now. They advertise their post-endgame Pokemon too much for them to be mysterious. There is no Pokemon quite like Mew and perhaps there never will be again -- we know how to seek the truth about our video games now, much better than when we were small, young and easily fooled. Then, we had to accept what the game gave us. Now, we know how to uncover every secret a video game might hold. They mystery is gone and the magic is different now.

Mew was always most enticing when it was mysterious, as so many things are.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.