Verdict: Confirmed False · 1990s
The rumor that Mew, the rarest Pokémon, could be found hiding under the truck near the S.S. Anne in Pokémon Red and Blue spread across playgrounds worldwide despite being entirely false — though Mew is genuinely obtainable through an actual glitch.
A truck sits near the dock in the S.S. Anne section of Pokémon Red and Blue, partially submerged and accessible only through the Surf ability, which players typically acquire after the S.S. Anne has departed and the area is no longer accessible. Players speculated that using Cut or Strength on the truck, or surfing to it at a specific moment, would reveal Mew beneath it. No such mechanic exists. Mew was originally intended to be a developer-only Pokémon distributed at special events rather than a game-catchable species, and its event distribution was Nintendo's primary planned method of obtaining it. Ironically, Mew is obtainable through a genuine programming glitch — the "Mew Glitch" — that exploits the game's encounter system in a way superficially similar to the MissingNo glitch. The truck rumor was entirely false, but the underlying desire for a secret Mew was eventually satisfied by a real exploit that has since been extensively documented.
The Mew under the truck rumor succeeded because it perfectly targeted Pokémon's core desire loop: the compulsion to collect all available Pokémon. Mew's dex number (151) and its status as a legendary species made it uniquely desirable, and its event-only distribution made it genuinely inaccessible to most players. The truck rumor offered hope — a way to obtain Mew through skill and discovery rather than luck of geographic proximity to a Nintendo event.
The truck's visual design contributed to the rumor's plausibility. It sits in an apparently inaccessible location, visible but unreachable under normal game conditions, which is exactly the visual language Pokémon uses for legitimately hidden content. The game had trained players to look for hidden items in apparently inaccessible locations, and the truck fit that pattern perfectly.
Mew is genuinely obtainable in Pokémon Red and Blue through a programming exploit discovered years after the games' release. The Mew Glitch works by manipulating the game's encounter system through a specific sequence: the player must flee from a trainer battle in a particular way that corrupts a memory register used to generate wild encounters, and subsequent encounters in specific areas will produce Mew.
The existence of the real Mew Glitch alongside the false truck rumor is a useful illustration of how genuine gaming secrets and fabricated ones coexist in the same cultural space. The truck story was wrong in every detail but captured something real about Pokémon's design — there was indeed a hidden way to catch Mew, just not through the mechanism the rumor described. The false rumor and the true glitch both emerged from the same accurate intuition that Mew was in the game somewhere, accessible through the right combination of knowledge and action.