The Glitchhouse · Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow

Mew under the truck

Everyone knew someone whose cousin did it. Move the truck by the S.S. Anne, and a Mew is waiting. It is the most famous secret in gaming, and it is not real. Here is what is actually there.

Decoded from a Pokemon Red ROM · part of The Glitchhouse

There really is a truck. It sits on the dock next to the S.S. Anne in Vermilion City, drawn once and never mentioned by anyone in the game, which is exactly the kind of loose thread a rumor loves. Reach it, push it with Strength, and the game does the only thing it was ever going to do: nothing. There is no Mew under the truck. But the truck is real, the rumor was real, and the way to actually catch a Mew is realer still, so this page is about all three.

Pick a version of the rumor

Part of what made this myth unkillable is that no two kids told it the same way. Every playground had its own recipe, each one more specific than the last, and specific always sounds true. Here are the ones that actually spread. Try any of them.

NO MEW
Five recipes, one outcome. The truck really can be pushed with Strength, and every version lands on the same thing: it slides a little, and there is nothing underneath. That they all promise different steps to the same non-event is the tell.

Can you even get there

Here is the quiet joke at the center of the myth: reaching the truck at all is a whole quest. The ship you arrive on leaves and never comes back, and what is left sits across open water. Step through what the game actually requires.

Cut comes from the S.S. Anne captain, Surf from the Safari Zone, Strength from the Warden in Fuchsia, all confirmed in the game's own scripts. By the time you own all three and can actually push the truck, you are most of the way to the Elite Four.

So push it

You made it. You have Strength. Here is the truck, on the dock, exactly as the game draws it. Push it as many times as you like and look underneath.

Press Strength to push the truck.
The tiles under the truck are the same dock floor as everywhere else on the pier, read straight from the map. No stairs, no cave, no Mew. The truck is the one thing here that was only ever decoration.

What is actually on the dock

A game does not hide a Pokemon in the scenery. Every person, item and event on a map is a numbered entry in that map's data. Here is the entire object list for the Vermilion dock, straight from the game. Open each drawer and count what is really there.

Two warps, no background events, and zero object events: the dock holds nothing that can be interacted with, appear, or be caught. The truck is not on this list at all, because it is drawn from the tileset like the water and the planks. There is simply no slot for a Mew to live in.

Why the myth won

If it was never real, why did everyone believe it, for decades? Because every condition that lets a rumor thrive was in place at once. Walk the timeline.

None of this required anyone to lie. An unexplained object, a game with a genuinely hidden Mew, and no way to check: the story almost wrote itself, and the community kept it alive with real affection. Crediting that lore is part of telling the truth about it.

The good news: Mew is real

Here is the twist that makes the myth almost forgivable. You really can catch a wild Mew in Red and Blue, with no cheat device and no truck. It just takes a different leftover, a number instead of a vehicle. Flip between the story you were told and the one that actually works.

The trainer-fly glitch leaves a number sitting in memory where the next wild species is read, and that number is 21, which is Mew. No truck required, and unlike the truck, this one is real and decoded byte by byte on its own page.

Bust the rest of them

The truck was not the only legend. A whole shelf of secret-Pokemon rumors grew up alongside it, and the fun part is that they are not all false. Tap each one to see the verdict, checked against the cartridge.

Some of these were pure schoolyard fiction, and some were real glitches wearing a rumor's clothes. Knowing which is which is the whole point of the Glitchhouse.

Does the truck do anything, anywhere

Maybe a different version, a different console, some later patch quietly added the Mew. It is a fair thing to hope. So here is the truck on every way you can play, and what it does on each.

The truck is real, and it never does anything, which is the most Pokemon thing about it. It is scenery that outlived every rumor, and the later remakes kept it on purpose as a wink to the legend it started.

From the ROM: it is furniture

One last proof, the cleanest one. The truck is not a Pokemon, a sprite, or an event. It is a single map block, sixteen little tiles from the Vermilion port set, arranged once and placed on the dock. Reveal the tiles and you can count them.

The truck, decoded from the Vermilion port tileset.
Block 3 of the ship-port blockset, drawn from real 8x8 tiles like the water and the planks around it. No 152nd slot hiding inside, no hidden warp, nothing to catch. It was always just furniture.

Where to go next

The truck was a door to nothing. Here are three that open onto something real.

The real MewCatch it for realThe trainer-fly glitch that puts a genuine Lv 7 Mew in front of you, decoded byte by byte. MissingNo.The real coast secretThe glitch that actually is waiting near Cinnabar, and the item duplication it enables. The GlitchhouseEvery specimenThe whole collection of real glitches, each one decoded and made playable.

Go deeper: the real Mew glitch | MissingNo. | browse the Glitchhouse.