Mew - The Pokemon That Started It All

Final Update: Mew freaking won! Wooh! Expect the Pokemon more starting now at Pokemon.com! To all who have read this post, THANK YOU!)

(Update, today's the last day of Pokemon Power Bracket. If you vote for Mew over Rayquaza at Pokemon.com, the feline Pokemon will take over the website for the whole week, plus lots of goodies dedicated only to Mew - Perhaps a Wi-Fi download? Anyone? Okay, enjoy my Mew article below:)

Have you seen the Pokemon Power Bracket that is happening all over Pokemon.com? Okaayyy, head over there now and vote...who else, but for MEW!

Done?! Then let's continue:

While the Pokemon Bracket is not designed to methodically ask the fans who is the most powerful Pokemon of them all, at least it is telling us who is the most popular. And 16 years later, it seems that the Pokemon that started it all is still really very popular.

The Pokemon that Started it All

To anyone reading this, you probably know what had happened. There were supposed to be just 150 Pokemon, ending with Mewtwo. However, Shigeki Morimoto secretly inserted another one in the original Fire and Green versions just before the development for the games ended. It happened when they were debugging the game and since there is a "little enough space" left, they inserted Mew. He never intended that the public know it. Instead, he wanted Mew to be a Pokemon that only Game Freak employees know. 

(This guy also appeared as an opponent in Pokemon Black and White. He's really tough though and since I battled him underpepared, he wiped out my entire team.)

Mew and The Pokemon Craze

Apparently Satoshi Tajiri knew about it and when reports came of players suddenly encountering the 151st Pokemon, he used CoroCoro to officially reveal Mew. GameFreak and Nintendo organized a contest wherein winners can get Mew when they send their cartridges to them. This, according to Satoru Iwata, is the true start of the Pokemon success and craze.

True that. Mew started a lot of things. It started what is know today as WiFi distribution of Pokemon, it started the Pokemon films (Oh boy,) it started the debate on who is the most powerful Pokemon of them all. What else? Oh, perhaps our love for glitches? Yes. If it weren't for Mew perhaps there is a very knowledgeable Internet community that attempts to gather hidden in-game data about Pokemon (EVs, IDs etc etc) which will make our Pokemon stronger when we have those information, perhaps it won't be alive today if it weren't for Mew. Of course we can attribute my entire points in other games as well, but for the Pokemon franchise, I doubt any other Pokemon started all these things but the Feline Pokemon who I first got with a Lonely Nature

The Power Bracket

So let's go back at the Pokemon Power Bracket happening over at Pokemon.com. It looks like it pits the legendary pokemon against each other to get a winner which will take over Pokemon.com for a week. One thing that I noticed is the lack of 5th generation legendary Pokemon. Of course, the Pokemon Company has a different Marketing campaign with them at this point in time that Black and White 2 are about to be released worldwide. I'm thinking that this is one of their attempt to renew interest with previous generation of Pokemon.

Huh? Renewed interest? You can say that we like previous generation of Pokemon better. I think nothing can top 1st and 2nd generation Pokemon in terms of popularity, but we are not adding into account one important target market - the kids.

The Target Market

The kids, perhaps most of them, (those who don't play competitively and only watch and play Pokemon for the heck and fun of it, let's add those who are really really young, say 5 - 11 years old) don't know the entire first 150 Pokemon. They only know Pikachu and Meowth. Of course that is a bold assumption but that's a safe assumption in my opinion. They never grew with it, in the same way that we did, and the same way that I think Diamond and Pearl are the weakest in the series and skipped it when it was released.

For Pokemon Power Bracket to succeed though, it must gather votes, not votes from us but votes from the market that it is trying to reach. Okay, perhaps the people who voted there, a lot of them, aren't their targets, but I can also say that it did reach us older players and I thank them for showing that they still have interest in older generation of Pokemon. And they should! Just as Walt Disney never forgets Mickey and Oswald, the Pokemon should never leave behind the characters they created that started everything. I'm not talking about Mew anymore, but all of them that started all this fun that we experience now.

Other Notes: Again, vote for Mew! I never realized actually that Rayquaza will be this far in the rankings. Maybe because he's the Pokemon of main antagonist Oda Nobunaga in Pokemon Conquest?

(All images I got from the Internet, I came to know about the Pokemon Power Bracket through Pokemon Dungeon)